Your Product May Not Fit Your Target Market
How to design a product your audience is willing to pay for
Building a product is easy, but finding the market is harder.
The most important part of building a business isn’t just the product, it’s getting the product to the market. Marketing in our world means taking our product and bringing it to our customers.
But the businesses that will last are the ones that build products for their market.
When looking at it from this perspective, your marketing takes a whole new approach. Because you’re not just forcing a product to your market but you’re delivering to your market a product they need.
The Study Guide
When I was building my Startup back in college, I was working on software, a study guide, that helped students in my university understand the courses they were being taught.
Validating a product is always easy because you can easily conduct surveys, but the harder part is building a product the market will accept.
I was a student in the same college too so, I understood how students struggled with understanding their courses.
But then I had a problem, how much would I charge?
It was a dilemma for me because I didn’t want to charge something too high that students couldn’t afford to pay for and at the same time, I didn’t want to charge something too little that I’d be running at a loss.
So, I found a benchmark. I found something in college similar to what I was offering that they paid for. I studied the tutorial classes in campus and realized that students would happily pay a certain amount for those classes. I then used that as a benchmark.
Most times, it’s not the product in itself that makes the market reject it.
When trying to find the right market for your product you need to look at two major factors:
Price
The first factor to consider is the price. Beyond just building a product that solves a problem, the rate at which you sell that product can determine if you make sales or not.
You need to determine how much your target market is willing to pay for a solution to that problem. For example, we both feel some level of discomfort in deciding which outfits to wear.
But it doesn’t mean we’ll be willing to pay $80 per month for an app that automatically matches our outfits for us. In as much as it is a problem, it’s not just worth that amount.
A study by Research Gate shows that the price affects a buyer’s decision to purchase a product.
Two ways to determine the price to charge for your products:
- Alternative Products— Look across alternative products to see how much people pay for the solutions, it will give you an idea of how much your target audience is willing to pay for a solution.
- User demographics— You need to understand the age range of your market. A corporate body may afford a $1,000 monthly payment but a student may not be able to afford it.
Design
A study has it that product design affects the buying behavior of customers.w What kind of design does your audience prefer? If you’re building a product for, let’s say teenagers you need to design your product to suit their taste.
Teenagers like something that stands out so they can brag about it. If you’re building something for teenagers, your design would need to be something that easily stands out.
Your market may refuse to buy your product simply because they believe that the design doesn’t just fit their personality.
Conclusion
Building a product that solves a problem, isn’t a guarantee that the product will be a success. These are two of many factors that may influence a buyer’s decision despite having a perfect product.
Build a product within the price range your target market can afford to buy and a design that is aesthetically pleasing to them.
