Growth Mobile:

Identifying Your Potential Customers

Objective: Develop customer profiles and estimate market potentials for new product concepts

Outcome: Detailed customer profile and potential estimates for number of customers, product volume, and sales revenue

Benefit: Significantly improved marketing efficiency by placing product where target customers are most likely to shop and the creation of highly relevant marketing communications

As a business owner, you know that things change; history shows that consumer tastes and preferences change over time. To remain competitive, you must be innovative and introduce new products to continue to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s customers.

• Increasing concern/focus on food safety
• “Permanent/sustained” shift towards frugality
• Greater emphasis on health and nutrition
• Increasing demand for natural/less processed foods

Given the confidence and passion you have (and must have!) for your product, you may feel you already know who your customers are, what they need, and that there will be plenty of them to buy your product. And with the time and financial pressures you face running your business, and the fact that it would take a lot of time and money for you to really figure out your prospective customers, you may be tempted to skip this stage of the process and just go with your own intuition. Besides, you probably have already received some positive feedback; you love your product, and your family and friends love it too!

But before you charge ahead, consider your potential customers’ motivations. They are not out there looking for your product! The customer’s goal is to satisfy their needs, not to buy yours or any other product. They will buy whatever product provides the benefits they believe can best satisfy their needs. So it’s not about you, your brand, or your product features; it’s about them and their needs! If they happen to be just like you; willing to purchase the same product for the same benefits to satisfy the same needs as you, and there happens to be enough of them to make your company successful, then you are in great shape. But have you tested these assumptions to make sure they are true? If not, are you willing to bet the farm they are true?

Stop and think about it a moment, and then ask yourself…

• Do I really know WHO my potential customers are?
• Do I know WHERE they are?
• Do I know HOW MANY there may be?
• Do I really know WHY they would buy my product?
• Am I thinking about the BENEFITS my product can provide, or am I only thinking about PRODUCT CHARACTERISTICS?

Even if you’re not really sure, you may be reluctant to spend time finding the answers, or you may not know where to go or how to get started.
That’s where we come in The Food Processing Center is here to help! Our Profitability Vehicle market assessment service is designed to help you create a better understanding of your customers quickly, and efficiently. With our knowledge of customer motivation, the research process, and available data resources, we can guide you through the process and do the heavy work along the way.

The Profitability Vehicle includes:

• Develop a basic profile of your existing and/or prospective customers
• Identify substitutes for your current and prospective products whose customers match your prospective customer profile
• Using existing data resources, expand your basic customer profiles to include demographics, lifestyle, and product use information to support future design, advertising, sales, pricing, and distribution decisions for your new product offerings
• Estimate the number of potential customers for your new (or existing) product and identify market areas with high concentrations of these kinds of people
• Estimate product usage rates per customer to develop potential unit volume and sales dollar potential estimates

Call today for a customized quote for your business.