Introducing a new product to the world can be a nervous time for even the biggest brands. No matter how long you’ve spent developing it and how much money has gone into manufacturing it, there is no way of guaranteeing whether a product is going to be a success or not until you start making it available to buy.
If customers aren’t happy with the product, or there’s a fault in the product you didn’t spot until you started selling it in large quantities, you could be forced to either issue a lot of refunds or have to repair or replace a lot of items.
This could cost businesses millions of dollars and cause massive damage to the brand’s reputation. With so much riding on a new product release, how can manufacturers be confident that their product won’t bomb when it goes on sale?
Here are some of the ways these companies can be more sure that their product will be a success when it goes to market.
Market research
One of the most important steps of developing a new product should occur before the team of developers draws a single sketch of the product. It’s important to conduct thorough market research to understand exactly what your customer wants from a new product.
Only then can businesses know which features they need to include in their new product to make sure it appeals to the biggest audience possible. This market research can take lots of different forms depending on what you’re developing. For example, if a company is developing a new medical product, it might be more effective to conduct more qualitative Medical device market research before developing a product.
These methods speak to potential customers in more detail, via things like interviews and focus groups, to find out exactly what features are most important to them. If it’s a product that has a much larger, wider audience, like a new games console, it may be effective to analyze more responses by methods like an online questionnaire.
Rigorous testing
Once a product has been made, it’s important that it undergoes rigorous testing before it’s put out on the market. If the product developers are behind schedule and struggling to meet their deadline, it might be tempting to either rush or completely miss out on that step.
This would be massively unwise, as just because you’ve designed a product to do certain things doesn’t mean that it’ll work in the real world. One of the best examples in recent times where this process was rushed was the release of the new console game Cyberpunk 2077.
When customers bought the versions to play on PS4 and Xbox One, they found the game was simply unplayable, and they were forced to refund customers and take the game off sale.
Good marketing
A great way of being more confident about a product before it is released is by marketing the product effectively. By releasing promotional material about products, you could even find you have a number of pre-orders before the product goes on sale. Ensure that you have a good marketing team that can create a lot of hype around any product before it goes on the market.
Also Read: How to Reach Your Offline Customers with the Best Online marketing strategy?
