Back to Basics in Ensuring A Successful Product Launch
One way to make sure that you've covered all the bases for your product launch is to revisit the principles taught in Marketing ; namely the 5 "P's" of Marketing—Product, Price, Packaging, Place, and Promotion.
To a seasoned marketer, these concepts may have been pushed out of mind many other concepts, but here's the big secret—the 5 "P's" cover it all. Often approaches do change the tactics and gives things different names, but overall, effective marketing is still based on these principles.
Deliver a solid product—Ensure that the product is internally tested, market tested with your target, and can deliver on the promises you make about it. That goes for product reliability, safety, and especially post-sales service and support.
Do your homework on pricing—For retail products, it's pretty straightforward. Compare your product to the competition, do the costing to make sure you are meeting margin goals, and set the price according to perceived value. For less tangible products, such as customizable software products, one method we discovered for doing price comparisons is to find media reviews of competitors' products. .
Design packaging to suit customer preferences—Beyond the basic utilitarian reasons for packaging, consider how your end customer perceives the product—and your company's values—based on the packaging. For example, adding the right unique feature, like an easy-open container, or minimizing the packaging and providing documentation on CD-ROM for the environmentally-conscious crowd, makes it that much more likely that you'll get word-of-mouth advertising and repeat business.
Place your products where your customers are—In your distribution planning, focus on understanding your customers and the places they go when they need a new product or service. The virtual world of the web gives a whole new meaning to "place." It now means both where your