Yesterday’s post on the 4 p’s of marketing covered the first of four questions about your product. Today’s post will cover questions five through eight.

How intense is the desire for the product?

How much volume of product will it take to meet demands?

What is the time period that the desire will be expressed?

How much product needs to be in place at any time to meet the desire?

If you want to access my first post on the 4 P’s Of Marketing: Product 1, click on the link in this sentence. You can access the next post at 4 P’s Of Marketing: Packaging.

4 P’s Of Marketing: Product Question 5: How intense is the desire for the product?

A good indication of how well your product will sell relates to your target market members’ desire for the product. If competitive products have been too expensive for your target market, potential customers may have a pent-up desire for it: They’ve wanted it but couldn’t afford it.

They may also want a product feature that isn’t presently offered by competitive products. This too can create unmet desires.

It’s important to know that the desire is already there. It takes a long time and lots of education to create a desire for a completely new product.

For instance, I recently had one of my readers, J. Taiwo Popoola, email me for a suggestion of marketing a bookkeeping service to small business owners in Nigeria, where only large companies see the need to keep good financial records. He’ll have to educate his target market about the benefits of good bookkeeping because his target market presently doesn’t desire or even see the need for it. That makes marketing much harder.

I have to congratulate Taiwo for recognizing that, and asking for advice on how to create the desire. I made three suggestions that I believe will get him started. Taiwo is in much the same situation that I am, I’m also trying to educate small business owners to use techniques that presently are being used primarily by large companies and corporations.

Hopefully, in just a few years, it will seem as strange for USA small business owners not to using market segmentation and not to target a specific group of people, as it seems to us in the USA that small business owners in Nigeria don’t see the value of good bookkeeping. Their tax system is surely very different from that in the USA.

4 P’s Of Marketing: Product Question 6: How much volume of product will it take to meet demands?

This question relates to the question 5. You have to know how much your product is desired in order to know how much to produce or purchase.

Then you have to adjust your amount of inventory as product desire increases or decreases. You don’t want to be caught without enough product to meet demands. Neither do you want to store product that isn’t moving, but just sets in storage, tying up your resources.

To illustrate that and to show that knowing something doesn’t always mean we implement it, let me tell you about one of my blunders that has lots of my resources tied up.

I have a textbook, Strategic Publications: Designing for Target Publics. I knew the need for the textbook in public relations publications classes because I taught such a class and knew what I needed that wasn’t being provided by other publication design books. Before I wrote the first edition, I did loads of research and knew exactly what the market was, printed a 1,000 copies and sold them all in less than three years. Did another printing and sold them in two years.

So for the second edition, I decided to branch out to graphic design classes. I talked to some graphic design professors, lurked on some graphic design education sites, and felt confident that I could break into that market. So I had 5000 copies of the second edition printed.

But I haven’t been successful in that market because graphic designers approach publication design more from an aesthetic approach while public relations practitioners and marketers approach it from a purely practical approach. A publication is only good if it accomplishes its purpose. For us, aesthetics is strictly a byproduct and secondary to accomplishing the purpose.

To make a long story short, a year later I’m still storing more than 4000 copies of the book. Don’t make that same mistake. It’ll cost you.

4 P’s Of Marketing: Product Question 7. What is the time period that the desire will be expressed?

This question also relates to inventory. You need the right size inventory for the demand as it varies over time. For instance, in the introductory and decline stages of a product, you usually sell fewer products than in the growth and mature stages. Your inventory should reflect the product life cycle.

I’ve done a series of posts on the Marketing Product Life Cycle. You can access the article through the link above. It links to the first post and then the first links to the second.

4 P’s Of Marketing: Product Question 8. How much product needs to be in place at any time to meet the desire?

Your answers to questions 5 - 7 will help determine the answer to this question and will help you avoid inventory problems.

To get to my next post on the 4 P’s Of Marketing: Packaging, click the link in this sentence.

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Posted 6-10-08: 4 P’s Of Marketing:
Product 2

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 7:07 am and is filed under Marketing Mix, Product.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.