Why Pre-Launch Market Scan
Launching a new Product in competitive Market place? We understand your pain!
Launching is a new product is a logistical nightmare, and you have prepared well for it. However it is getting it right in terms of Marketing Mix that seems to be so crucial to success. With so little information to back your decisions, it seems like swimming in untested waters.
Indeed getting the Marketing Mix right requires field data to get it right the first time. This is where the challenges lie too! On the other hand, getting positioning, pricing or distribution wrong can be the difference between a successful launch vs failure.
It is for these reasons, successful Product Launches are backed with lots of pre-launch market survey and careful analysis before Marketing Mix is decided for new products.
Issues with Market Scan
Market Scan for new products before launch involves many issues including the following:
- Competing Products focus: Since the products are not yet in market, the primary focus of scan is often the competing brands in terms of prices, promotions, distribution chain etc. Any system must provide strong capabilities to scan competitor products.
- Audit Record & longevity: Many products display seasonal variations in demand, pricing and promotions. Hence a key issue for Market scan is to support scan over a longer period where the trends over different cycles can be scanned effectively.
- Coverage across brands: Market scan must support capabilities to scan multiple brands of competing products in a flexible manner.
- Support for different price types, margins: It is often crucial to understand the margins, different price types in different micro markets, hence system must support flexibility to define and track different price types and margins.
- Micro Market Intelligence: Often new launches are done to targeted micro markets and then gradually expanded to wider market. In this sense, identifying micro markets with best conditions to accept new product is often crucial. Hence any system must deliver not only the big picture but also ability to drill down to specific micro markets as well as enable comparison between different micro markets.
Our Solution
Our Solution all above issues via Outreach. Please see as follows:
Promotion and Price Scan at Micro market level:
- It is important to track promotion updates, ending and new launches to make effective decisions on optimal promotion spend. Outreach provides support for managing promotion start, end and updates for effective decision making on promotions.
- Don't lose out seeing the wood for the trees! Outreach automatically generates average prices, demand forecast views moving up in sales hierarchy of sales territory. Thus enabling decision making on broad analysis derived from detailed micro market level data, while retaining the ability to drill down at lowest micro market levels for issue analysis and remedial actions.
- Optimal price depends on various factors- Price elasticity, price volatility, Competitor demand, quality of distributors, and each Micro market has an ever varying Price elasticity (such as seasons, reach of competitors). With Outreach you can analyze a number of factors at micro market level, giving you ability to reach your goals on pricing for each micro market.
Price types and Margin Types scan:
- Outreach give an ability to maintain different price types and lets you maintain various margin definitions. Outreach automatically monitors margin movement across the various micro markets, thus bringing to your attention exceptional behavior at micro market level for arresting or leveraging trends in margin movement.
Distributor Level Scan
- Since Outreach enables analysis of relative price movement in different micro markets in comparison to competitor brands, it delivers unparalleled insight into distributor performance, for example, distributors who have closed gap with brand leader whereas others have not been able to maintain price levels in comparison to competitors