In 2021 many businesses have had to “adapt” what they do to remain relevant to their customers or look at their business and see how they can “innovate” to drive new business growth.

Stand Still and Get Left Behind

One key aspect of marketing is to ensure that your target audience knows exactly what your product or your service can do for them. This may sound relatively easy to do and many businesses have already found some success in their current approach to market. However, the thing to remember about the business environment you operate in, is you need to be constantly “innovating and changing” – if you stand still, you can often get left behind. Just look at the recent examples of Debenhams, Topshop, Laura Ashley, all great brands, but they failed to keep their ranges fresh and adapt to the new buying behaviour of their consumers. By the time they realised they needed to change, it was too late.

Don’t Hesitate to Innovate

Henry Ford once said, “If we continue to do what we did, we will always get what we got” and the moto is even more relevant today. If you look at the truly inspirational brands that innovate and excite consumers like Apple, Dyson and Tesla, they put new product development at the very heart of what they do to drive their growth.

Where to Start

In previous blogs I have covered off the importance of Market and Consumer Research to ensure as a business you understand your competitor environment and identify your niche to help shape your future plans. Innovation ideas can come from a variety of sources; Competitor Patent Reviews, New Legislation, Competitor Range Audits or even running an Ideation Session within your business, all of these initiatives can really help kickstart your innovation plans. Simply picking a problem area for analysis and improvement and using business models like De Bono 6 hats  to view a problem from different angles or writing a SOSTAC to really hone in on a problem area, can help to tease out new ideas. Internal Range Review programmes are also essential to ensure your product offer is match fit.  Some of the best ideas can come from looking within your own business teams, the trick is how to encourage that engagement and keeping it simple. One of the most successful schemes I have run in the past was to introduce a companywide Innovation Hub via a WhatsApp group, where any new ideas proposed from employees that resulted in a new successful product, would win a company award. The best ideas come from those who are close to the company products and customers, but recognition and reward are key to driving continued staff engagement.

PMF Marketing can help assist your business with a new or improved Product Development Process, running an Ideation Workshop Programme or help launch a New Product Idea Generation Scheme to kickstart your business and drive future growth. If you would like to understand more how I can help your business, please call me today for a FREE 30-minute call and let’s get building your business back to growth together.

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Knowledge Is Power

The starting point when looking across your products to understand what is working and what isn’t, key statistics like sales numbers or customer reorder patterns across the various years provide a valuable insight into where your various products are in their lifecycle of introduction – growth – maturity – saturation or decline?

Analyse, Analyse and Analyse

A deep dive into the numbers will help form the framework of what action a business needs to take, are the various product categories in growth or decline? if its the latter why is that? is ? is it too expensive? are their modern day improvements that need to be made ? is the packaging not communicating what it does or does it simply lack some focus and communication out to the market. What is the distribution of the product like? are customer numbers falling ? why is that? Is the product margin too low due to cost increases or a change of supplier or excessively high because it has not been looked at in a while?

Time For Action 

Understanding where the product is in its lifecycle from an audit of its sales and distribution may raise further project work in terms of sourcing new suppliers for new or improved products, promotional plans may need to be drawn up, packaging or point of sale improvements may be required, additional field research to shape new ideas or sometimes even product obsolescence.

PMF Marketing has a number of marketing tools which can help businesses shape their future product development plans, from carrying out a basic range review to full feasibility documentation including research, supplier sourcing, product forecasting and the production of new product launch collateral.

If you would like to understand more how I can help your business, please call me today for a FREE 30 minute call and lets get building your business back to growth together.

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