New Product Development
Catching the next wave
New products that attract new customers and reinforce existing ones are essential for a growing business.
You can't stay with the same product line because with time the market becomes more commoditised, margins go down and you slide over the back of the wave.
You always need to be looking for the next wave - to replace your current offer - or, if you want to grow, to constantly add new products to you portfolio. It's much easier to sell new products to your existing customers rather than try and take your brain-children into new markets where no-one knows you. But three times as many UK companies try and do it the hard way. We can help you to be in the smart party.
Informal product research
As the Owner Manager you’re ideally placed to carry out some informal qualitative work. Don’t delegate this – you need to feel what’s going on. But it will be easy. If YOU ring up one of your established customers, tell them that you’re interested in what else you could develop to help them more and that you’d like to come in and see them – they are almost certain to say yes.
But you need to be prepared. What you want is to hold a structured conversation. So create a questionnaire – I’m not talking about multiple choice tick box stuff here – what I want you to do is brainstorm with your chief collaborators some open ended questions which will tell you what things the customer isn’t getting that they want and what new trends they see emerging that they will have to deal with.
Then just go and have a conversation with them – buy them lunch and ask them if they don’t mind if you tape the conversation. Tell them you’ll get your PA just to type up the transcript for your own use. Olympus and Sony do perfectly usable inexpensive digital Dictaphones and don’t worry about them saying yes – if you have a good reason which you have they’ll agree. I know – I do it all the time.
You need to spread your net wide rather than deep so I suggest you talk to 2 long established customers, 2 of your biggest customers, 2 new customers, 2 of your most adventurous customers and 2 current prospects. Aim to talk with them for about an hour. You might also talk to a couple of industry or business experts who you have reason to believe are reliable to get another perspective.
They’ll be happy to talk to you and you should then have a really clear idea of what’s current.
What we can offer
We can help you systematically develop and deliver the new products that the growth of your business demands.
We can do it for you or help you do it yourself. A key part of our offer is to help you research your market and get closer to your customers. We can help you develop a questionnaire or equip you to hold video interviews with customers or prospective collaborators in distant markets.
New Product Development is a four stage process. Talk to the customers. Find out what they want and need. Work out how to deliver it without going bust in the process and do it.
We can really help you with this. We know about talking to customers in depth singly or in focus groups, about running on-line surveys, about developing and testing prototypes and about eventual product launches.
Why we can help you
Unusually for a consultancy company we have a practical bias. We have 25 years experience of running growth businesses in IT, Business Training, Internet trading and horticulture. Currently we run a £0.5 Million internet trading company - Plants4Presents - and a 10 employee Organic Vegetable Business. These give us a real-life basis for our consultancy and training business that underpins our research into how companies actually use IT to promote themselves and improve performance as they grow.
During our business careers we have launched four businesses, developed and launched several computer programmes, numerous training products and a couple of engineering products. So we know a bit about how to find out what customers want and then deliver it.
Our founder, Dr Alan Rae is a chartered fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and an associate of the Market Research Society and an accredited workwise adviser. You can look at his Ecademy Profile and Testimonials or follow his ideas on the How to do Business Blog
Contact - To discuss how we can help with you develop and launch new products ring 0845 094 0407
