Week 04 - Product and service launch
Product and service launch (launching strategy)¶
4 Ps: Product, Promotion, Placement and Price. For this execise, we have to imagine we are a startup with a developed product.
Product: How will the product look like (shape, colour, size...). Explain how the product is solving the pain at the same time and how the decision of the shape colour size solve the pain (give a justification for everything). Describe all the component like look and feel, the packaging, the name. Descibe the after sale services ("expanded product" include after sale services, a website with tutorials or explaination, a community...).
Promotion: the goal of a promotion is to explain our product to the world. We have to builf a positioning in the consumer's brain (concept and perception) but also and mainly get the consumers to BUY. There are plenty of tools for promotion like fairs, congresses, B2B websites and magasines, LinkedIn... For each tool, it is important to define the target, the message, the frequency and the budget assigned.
Placement: how will the product arrive to the consumer? Logistics, delivery, what place, online or offline... What is the process of selling? Where do I get in contact with the consumer? What is the time of selling ? Does the consumer pay before or after buying? Delivery? Refunding policies? It is important to make a complete list of the intermediates.
Price: What is the pricing strategy? Do we want to have a similar, lower or higher price than our competitors? This is the only element generating income so it is very important to decide of it very well. It is important that the price should cover all the costs of the company: raw materials, slaries, energy etc.
Defining if the price is going to be higher or lower than the one of the competitors depends on what your key attribute is and how it is ranked in the consumers order of priorities. The chanel margin means you have to take into account that the people who are selling your product to the final consumer has a margin and if this is not taken into account, the final product price will probably exceed the consumer's tolerance.
Design thinking and Lean Start-up methodology¶
When designing, it is important to be aware of the market's opinion about the product to design it accordingly (agile methodology). The two main methods for agile methodology are design thinking and lean start-up methodology.
Protoype: is it possible to build the product? Minimum Viable Product: is our product solving the pain better? Is it more suitable than the copetitor's.
The lean start-up methodology has many advantages including it allows to understand quickly the customer’s pain, that it allows to reduce time to market, focusing on the real important things, to avoid to invest money and time in unnecessary things and to reduce the probability of failure.
Design thinking¶
The keywords are Empathize with the consumer, define accordingly what are the problems and ideate a solution. Then we can prototype the solution and test it before launching it.
Lean start-up¶
Lean start up consists in having an idea and to quickly prototype it then measure among a wide public to validate or not the hypothesis. All the data extracted from the measuring can then be used to learn and redesign the product.
The aim of lean start-up is to design very fast and have a feedback as soon as possible.
Final presentation: launch strategy to a potential investor¶
Présentation Marketing par Sangosanya Annah-Ololade