Do Business Well

Twelve major reasons why new products fail
Hundreds of new products are launched on to the market every year. Why do some products fail completely, others limp along for a while before being discontinued, and a few become spectacular successes? Many factors can contribute to product failure:

Poor differentiation

A well-differentiated product is perceived by customers as having some desirable characteristic. A poorly differentiated product offers consumers no reason to stop buying what they usually buy. Continue Reading »

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Understand your market

Know your customer, identify his needs — both rational and irrational — and ensure that your product satisfies these needs. This is one of the most important factors for success — all the others depend on it. Continue Reading »

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Possible differentiating factors

With most businesses, it is very important to be better than, or different from, existing businesses in some way that is important to your customers; this is called differentiation. Differentiation usually incurs greater costs, so you should be sure that the benefits gained (selling more or being able to charge a higher price) by differentiating a product or service in a particular way outweigh the costs of doing so. There are a number of ways in which you can differentiate almost any business, for example: Continue Reading »

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Accommodation

Growth in demand: high

Competition: medium

Population growth, urbanization and rising standards of living all stimulate the demand for accommodation. There are opportunities in building, repairing, improving and renting accommodation. Agency operations, temporary accommodation and garden services are also worth investigating. Continue Reading »

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To find ideas for starting new small businesses, you need to follow the procedure for generating ideas from generic needs.

I made a list of ten basic needs — food, education, clothing, accommodation, entertainment, security, transport, business services, health and income generation — and thought of a number of ways to satisfy each of these needs. It was discovered that two or more needs could sometimes be satisfied by the same idea. Continue Reading »

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