Once you've introduced a new product or service or developed significant improvements to existing ones, you'll naturally want to do some follow-up to measure the success of the project. Whether the introduction is ultimately successful or not, you need to be able to learn from the process to achieve more success down the line.

Packaging and pricing represent a very concrete way to communicate with your target market and express the positioning of your business.

Many companies, large and small, spend years successfully developing a new product with great market promise but do not adequately test their packaging, pricing, and advertising prior to introduction.

There are as many methods to screen new product ideas as there are consultants. Perhaps most, if not all of them, are valid. But small companies cannot afford to incur costly product development failures as part of "the normal course of big business." Even one product failure in a small company may threaten its survival if a large amount of time, scarce resources, and personnel are committed to it.

Brainstorming is a way of generating a lot of new ideas, quickly. Once you have a long list of possibilities to work from, you can begin to evaluate each idea from a more practical standpoint. The brainstorming techniques pioneered by Alex Osborn include:

Good ideas can come from anywhere! But can one consciously foster creativity and new ideas on demand? Certain successful companies and creative experts suggest that it is not as hard as most people think. Everyone can be more creative with technique, practice, and motivation. Perhaps "a leap of faith" is also required for the skeptical.

Sometimes the best, least expensive, fastest, and least risky way to introduce new products is to copy or improve upon a competitor's new product introduction.

How often do small companies go out and test their products against competitive products with users of the product? Every five years? Ten years? Never? Even when a direct competitor introduces a new product, most small companies react by introducing a similar or slightly improved version of the same product instead of considering the sales potential and strengths of their entire line.

New product development can be categorized into:

Small companies are often discouraged about product development because of the perceived difficulty, time, and expense ("...only really big companies can afford to do it!"). Sometimes it is as easy as:

A small company should consciously decide on its position within its category of products as a:

Once you've created your company mission statement (or have explicitly recognized the mission you've been pursuing), you can begin considering how to accomplish that mission by developing and refining your product or service offerings.

Today's accelerated rate of change and information growth means small companies will inevitably face increased competition in their market niches. Small companies need to embrace and seek out change, rather than avoid it or wait until change is forced upon them by competitors.

A company mission statement can be a powerful force to clearly define your company's purpose for existence. In the beginning, your company was formed to accomplish something that did not exist in the marketplace, or to do a better job than existing companies. What was that special purpose? Small companies seldom take the time to discuss or write out their company mission, but they should. It will pay measurable financial dividends over time.

As an example of how a company mission statement can serve as a focus for improvement in your business's performance, consider the case of Fred's Grocery, a small one-store business, which suffered sales declines when a large chain supermarket opened a store in the neighborhood.

New businesses are always in a rush to get new products to market. But how many new products or new businesses fail because the concept is never quite executed correctly for the intended target buyer? When a company doesn't take the time to do it right in the first place, it somehow always has to find the time to correct it later, often at great cost in unnecessary spending, lost time, lost sales, and lost market share.

If you're doing quantitative market research, in most cases, the sample size for the number of respondents you'll test is determined by your available budget and by the confidence levels that you desire or can accept.

When doing quantitative market research, there are two ways to select test respondents:

The design of a good quantitative questionnaire depends upon careful consideration of:

Qualitative research is original company research ("primary") on a subject in the normal course of company business ("non-experimental"). It is primarily concerned with getting a subjective "feel" for the research topic, not a numerical, statistically predictable measure.

City and regional test markets may provide the most reliable real-world feedback on new product success. However, small companies generally do not conduct formal market research field studies in a controlled group of stores, where panels of stores are matched and distribution, in-store merchandising, and advertising is done for you by the market research company for tens of thousands of dollars per test group of stores.

Quantitative research is a type of non-experimental market research that provides numerical measurement and reliable statistical predictability of the results to the total target population. Like qualitative research, this is original company research ("primary") on a subject in the normal course of company business ("non-experimental").

To get an accurate handle on the what the market's reaction will be, at least 25 qualified people should be interviewed for each significant product difference or formula. This will provide the basis for directional evaluation and changes in the prototype, or product positioning.

Field studies are a type of experimental, primary market research that is more accessible to small businesses. They are generally real-world tests in a controlled group of stores or in a single city.

Laboratory studies are a type of primary marketing research that are often used by larger consumer products companies. The downside, for small businesses, is that they cost from $50,000 to over $100,000 per test leg. On the other hand, these tests have a high degree of reliability and correlation with actual market performance when the test product, pricing, and advertising are similar to those actually used in the real market. They can save companies many millions of dollars in potentially wasted marketing spending by showing weaknesses in product, advertising, pricing, or other variables prior to real-world marketing.