Taking Existing Offerings to New Markets: Three Variables

There are three levels of complexity when companies take existing products and services to new markets.

FrogDog does a considerable amount of work helping client companies launch products and services—and take existing products and services to new markets and audiences.

For the latter, we’ve helped bring service components from a medical supplier together into a package we could take to large medical manufacturers, we’ve helped bring a catalogue business into the brick-and-mortar world, we’ve found new customers for an e-commerce sporting goods retailer, and more.

And we’ve learned over our years of experience that there are three levels of complexity in taking existing products and services to new markets. Let us explain—and save you some grief and frustration in the process.

Taking a Product to a New Market

Entering a new market means understanding a new target audience, a new competitive landscape, and different market dynamics.

Once you have your arms around these three key areas of understanding, you need to create new messages, a new strategy, and a separate set of marketing tactics that take the new market’s dynamics into account. After all, what worked for your current market—with its specific target audiences, competitive landscape, market dynamics, and so on—won’t directly translate to a new target audience in a new market set in a different dynamic.

Sometimes, just getting the right marketing strategy and plan in place for tackling a new market is enough to set you up for success. In these cases, you can implement your market-entry plan with your current overall branding, visuals, look and feel, and voice and tone.

In other, more complex, cases, you’ll find that you need to adjust the look and feel and voice and tone of your marketing as well—and potentially your packaging will need an adjustment, too. This may mean that the same product is packaged differently and is promoted by marketing that looks different from your other marketing efforts, depending on which market you’re targeting.

Yet if you escape the new-market entrance with only new marketing and new packaging, you’re still getting off relatively luckily.

Why?

Because sometimes, even a completely new look, feel, voice, tone, and marketing effort aren’t enough to make a product work for a new audience.

Sometimes, you need to adjust the product or service itself.

Does Your Offering Need Adjustment?

Even if your product has value as a solution to a new target market’s problems, the elements of the actual product itself may not appeal to the new group.

For example, a very useful item that appears to be designed for a different generation than your new target group—whether older or younger—can make the new product a “turn off” for the additional market.

Here’s why: People buy products that align with their self-concepts. Even if you make the marketing efforts and the package design appeal to a new group in a new market, they need the product inside the package to fit with their group’s identity for them to like it, get excited about it, and talk about it to their friends.

We’ve seen it happen not infrequently here at FrogDog. Client companies come to us with the desire to find a new market for an existing offering—and we love to help with these types of projects. Yet our marketing efforts can only take their success so far if the clients aren’t open to adjusting their products as well—whether the offering is the décor and menu options in a restaurant, a style and manner of service delivery, the ergonomics of a razor in a box, or the offerings in a mail-order business’s print and on-line catalogue.

In these cases, adjustments to the product or service made in response to the research findings of our marketing strategy and planning process, made concurrently with the development of our marketing strategy and messaging and tactical plan, can come together at launch time for truly powerful success.

Need Help?

Need to determine how to enter a new market—and whether your product needs to adjust if you do? Contact FrogDog.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net