The physical product is arguably one of the most important aspects of your business; and to those who offer a service instead of tangible objects, the basic principle remains the same.
If you find that your business is in a period where it could use some reinvention, turning your attention to your product and going back to the drawing board could be a move that holds a lot of potential. If done right, this might allow you to reinvent your brand and what it offers so that you’re also given the opportunity to effectively make a second debut.
This article will outline four important points to consider if you are thinking of making changes to the way your product is packaged, delivered and marketed.
1. How You Ship It
First of all, it’s important to understand that the experience of your product doesn’t necessarily end with the product itself. As far as your consumers are concerned, if the packaging is in need of improvement, or the poor-quality shipping prevents it from arriving at their door in one piece, that’s where the experience ends.
Addressing these issues can allow for your product to shine and can be an extension of the kind of customer service that you want your brand to be associated with—especially when you’re outsourcing this work to shipping companies whose competency you can be sure of. This doesn’t even have to be anything that sets you back too much, as you will discover if you start looking to get quotes on pallet shipping.
When it comes to the packaging, it’s a slightly more delicate matter due to the potential involvement of environmentally harmful materials that could be cheaper. In that case, you might be interested in seeing how far you can go with paper and card.
2. Its Design and Size
If you’re looking to land a big re-release of your product, you might feel as though a new design would go a long way. This might mean taking the color-scheme and reworking it into one that is more aesthetically pleasing or simple—or allowing your logo and branding to be apparent on it in a more subtle way.
The aesthetic isn’t the only aspect of the design that you should be focusing on, though, and looking at customer feedback and updated the engineering methods might help you to establish whether or not you can scale up or down the size to make it more practical and enjoyable for audiences to use (though this will naturally depend on what the product actually is).
3. Its Functionality
The obvious answer when you think about what you can do to improve your product is going to simply be “make it better,” which is about as unhelpful as advice goes, but it does give you an idea of what people might actually want. If you’ve been getting a generally positive reception in terms of what you produce so far, it can be difficult to know what actually needs improving. Of course, getting customer feedback can help with this, and might put you in a position where you’re much more informed about what people don’t like and which areas you can continue to bolster.
Still, even without this information, you and your team likely have a pretty good idea of what people actually want out of your product. As relevant technology grows and develops, you might find that you’re able to continuously tweak and refine what you’re offering so that it’s at the peak of what’s on the market, meaning you will stay one step ahead of the curve
4. Options for the Customer
If you take the product that you currently offer (or at least the primary version of it) what about it might not appeal to some of your audience members? It might be that some people feel as though it isn’t affordable enough, despite it being at a price that you don’t feel you can afford to lower.
If you did lower the price, you might be compelled to compromise on some other features of the product in order to make up for this, spending less to make it as a result. If you feel as though this end result might appeal to a certain potential audience, you don’t have to replace your current product with this, but offer it alongside an alternative. This is a practice that Microsoft has followed, with its Xbox Series S console accompanying the larger and more powerful Series X.
