Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

When starting a new business or creating a new product, few people seriously consider what the correct steps to doing so is. Many people assume that if you produce something and ship it to stores, it will sell. What they are forgetting is that in order to actually have a take on your product, they’d have to know that there was potential for sales. Without marketing your product to your final consumer, how will people know it exists? When you are first considering introducing a new product or service, you have to consider the 4 P’s.

P #1 – Product

When considering introducing the product to others, it’s good to have a prototype. Before you consider a prototype, you’d have to consider what your product is in great detail. For example, I decided I want to create picnic table kits, what would that entail? You can’t simply tell a bank that you need a loan to create picnic table kits!

When providing the Product information of my marketing mix, I would say I wanted to make Cedar picnic tables kits with precut wood and included hardware. I would want the kits to be available in 2 sizes, which are 6’ x 2’ and 4’ x 1.5’. The kits would include all the materials required to make the table, as well as printed instructions.

Without that detailed information, you’re leaving everyone in the dark about your ideas. People can’t read minds, and without the proper mental picture, most banks would likely pass on your loan application.

P #2 – Place

Now that you’ve decided exactly what you’re going to make, where are you planning on selling it? Are you considering mass shipments to a chain of hardware stores, or would you prefer to sell them from your backyard? This information shows people the size of your project, as well as the amount of resources are required to put the project in motion.

P #3 – Promotion

I’ve decided I want to sell my picnic table kits to the big hardware store chains, and that I’m going to mass produce them in Canada and ship them to the store’s distribution centres. Great! Now how are my potential customers going to know my product exists? Beyond advertising in the hardware store’s flyers, I need to get my company name out there. Other advertising though any media would be a great thing to consider at this point.

P #4 – Price

After I’ve determine all of my potential costs, I have to consider what my unit cost is for each kit. Considering an expected production rate, as well as my fixed costs (the cost of renting my factory, utilities, etc.) as well as my variable costs (materials, packaging, etc.) I can determine what each kit is going to cost me. From there, I would consider the amount that other picnic tables and kits are selling for in stores, and that will allow me to determine my Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price. From that, I can determine what would be my best starting price to charge my stores per unit, and what sort of discounts I can offer them when they purchase in volume.

Before considering any business plan, you need to brainstorm and determine the 4 P’s of your marketing mix. This will provide all the important people with the proper information about your product, as well as how you intend to sell and market it!

What do you think of when you hear the term “Customer Service”? The first things that come to my mind are retail jobs and call centres. But, if you think about it, pretty much everything that you do at work on a daily basis will involve some sort of customer service. (This, of course would not include people who work for the same company as you, companies that provide you with a service like telephones, or places you purchase from.) Any time you interact with someone who might purchase a service or product from you is a potential customer, and customer service is all about giving customers the feeling that what they’ve received has met or exceeded their expectations.

But why is customer service so important?

Have you ever had an unsatisfactory experience with a company? It can be quite damaging to that company. Say you purchase some raw material from a company that you need to use in your manufacturing plant. The material that you received isn’t quite what you expected, so you call the company up and see if things can be fixed. If the company you purchased from isn’t willing to work with you to fix what has happened, would you be as willing to purchase from them again knowing that if you have another problem they probably would act in the same way that they did this time? Probably not. On the other hand, if they help you fix the problem, you would be more likely to want to deal with that company again – it shows a willingness on their part to make sure that your expectations as a customer are met.

What are some things that can be done to make sure your customer service will guarantee your customers return to you if they aren’t happy with your product or service?

Firstly, make sure you actually listen to your customers. What did they expect from your product or service? How is this different from what they ended up getting? How would they like you to fix this?

Secondly, commit yourself to remedying what may be wrong with your product or service. Let your customers know that you are committed to doing this, and if there is any action on your part that needs to be done actually follow through and do it.

Thirdly, look at the customer complaints over a period of time. Are there things that customers are continuously unhappy about? Maybe you should focus some time on fixing that problem before the product or service goes out to the customers.

What do you do to make sure customers are happy with your products and services?

Today, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about the recent redesign of the Northbridge Consultants website and the importance of consistent branding.

A brand image is, in the most basic sense, everything that a person thinks about your company. So, if we were to take Tim Horton’s, for example, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind? For me, it’s fresh coffee. I also think of fast service, a (healthier) alternative to fast food, and (of course) hockey.

Brand identity is how you want a person to think about your brand. Brand image and brand identity are not always the same thing – usually the most challenging part of branding is making the brand identity and the brand image consistent.

So, now that we have a bit of background on branding, why did we redesign our website? The easiest answer is that we wanted to make it more consistent with the other marketing materials that we use, and to make the underlying messages across all marketing materials conform with each other. So the website had to reflect this too.

In order to do this, we made some changes to the design (the colour scheme, as well as streamlining the organization and appearance of the content being the biggest changes design-wise). But most of what we changed had to deal with the content itself – we’ve made it more readable. Each page was broken up into several smaller, more coherent pages. We’ve made the text less technical and easier to understand. And we’ve added content that we feel is important for those looking into SR&ED and other federal funding.

So, how would something along these lines help a company’s brand identity? In our case, we want people to think of us as an authority on SR&ED and federal funding. We want people to know that we are working with them to help them further their business. And we work towards putting those values in everything we do, whether it’s marketing materials, our seminars, or our face-to-face meetings with clients.

Because in the end, a company’s website is only one small piece of brand identity, and needs to work well with everything else your company puts out. As a whole, branding comes down to everything that is used to get in touch with your clients – newsletters and bulletins, customer service, the quality of your product and, of course, your service.