Bigger companies usually have more money to plough into the presentation and promotion (advertising, publicity and selling) of their products. But this doesn’t necessarily mean they have the advantage. Careful thought and questions cost nothing and these are all you really need to ensure that you can design a product that satisfies your customers‘ needs and has a special place in the market.

Assuming that you are able to implement the design of your product or service properly, attention to your customers‘ needs is a far better guarantee of success than expensive advertising.

Zolia Rumble of Success Stories suggests the following ideas on marketing and how to locate and contact your customer on a small budget. Some of them you will already have worked through, but remember: the secret of success is constant revision and consolidation of your ideas, plus the continual questioning of your objectives and methods.

Plan your product or service: What needs will it meet? Marketing is based on the theory of consumer behaviour — what makes people act and buy as they do? The central idea is that people act or buy in order to fulfil unsatisfied needs.

To market your product successfully, you will have to try to classify the type of need that your product or service will meet. (If you’re not meeting any real need or want, or are doing so for only for a tiny group, you may need to think again!)

At the most basic level, there are the physiological needs — hunger, thirst and procreation. Then comes a need for security — shelter, a secure environment, assured income, etc. Then a need for love and belonging — social acceptance, family love, fitting in with people. People may also experience further needs for esteem — being looked up to by others — and self-esteem (concern about one’s own achievements, even ifthey are not recognised by other people).

Thinking about whether your product satisfies an ‘esteem’ need or a ’security’ need for example, will help you decide how to prepare, package, present and distribute the product.

For instance, if you want to start a catering service and can provide menus based on currently very popular foods, then aim your marketing and publicity at the people whose priorities are love and belonging — those who like to do the socially-accepted, ‘in’ thing and who feel most comfortable with a popular concept.

Or, if you intend to provide menus that are more ‘up‑market‘, exclusive and innovative, aim at those to whomesteem is important.

This is called targeting. If you analyse what type of needs you are best suited to fulfil, and make sure that your product or service does in fact fulfil a real need, you have the basis for marketing success.

Check your ideas — are they valid? Don’t assume that your potential customers have the same tastes and ideas as you. Check that there really are sufficient people with the needs you are setting out to satisfy and check their response to what you are offering — does your product actually meet their needs and requirements?

This testing is crucial and should provide much useful feedback and suggestions.

Targeting Once you’ve defined the needs your product will meet, and have researched reactions and whether there really is a need for what you are doing, you should pinpoint exactly who will react most favourably to your product or service.

Which age group, income bracket, personality type or occupation group seems to have the biggest need for your product?

Answering these questions will give you guidelines as to who fits into your target market, who are the people most likely to buy, who you should bear in mind when designing the way your product works and looks, and where and at what price it will be sold.

Price it right Your best guideline to price — given, of course, that you cover costs and give yourself at least a minimum profit margin — is the type of person who will be buying the product.

Is that person prepared to pay a lot so long as the product has the right image (and does the job, of course), or is that person more concerned with value for money?

A good rule is to look at what your target customer is prepared to pay or is already paying for a similar product. A lot of small businesses make the mistake either of thinking that they have to compete on a price basis — or they overprice because they haven’t found their cheapest suppliers — and sometimes they simply haven’t checked what everyone else ischarging.

There may be a very good reason why the price of a competitive product is higher than yours and it’s worth defining that reason to your own satisfaction before you start.

If you have competition at a similar price, don’t automatically go for a price cut to make sales, use other persuasions to secure customers. Base them on the advantages of your product over the competition — simpler design, higher quality, better delivery.

It is clever pricing — not over or underpricing — that will sell your product. The old adage that ‘Cheapest is not always the best’ still holds sway with a great many consumers, even in a poor economy.

Placing your product on the market A major decision about your product is how it will get to the customer. Will you sell direct to the end-user, or form a chain of people in order to get that product in position?

The more people who sell your product, the more profit you give away and the less control you have, but you can obviously sell far more of your product this way. You can sell to a retailer or to a wholesaler, either on your own or through agents.

Each person in the chain takes a cut — but don’t be put off by this. Established shops and wholesalers have existing clients, infra-structures and marketing ‘images’ which you may not be able to reach on a small budget.otion, sales

It’s well worth considering the potential increase in sales that you could achieve and the administration hassles you could save yourself by getting your product onto the market through a specialist distributor. But use your commonsense: if your product is not designed for a mass market, you don’t need to give those profit margins away!

Remember also that you don’t have to sell huge volumes to make good money. Many people are prepared to pay more for an exclusive product — if it’s really unique and good quality, don’t underprice yourself.

Some pointers in deciding how to get your product onto the market are:

*If you appoint agents, make sure they are well motivated people and that you provide a generous incentive. Provide a sales kit and institute a system for financial control.

*If you are selling to wholesalers or retailers, find out what the accepted discount is in your industry (a couple of well-placed telephone calls should suffice), before committing yourself. But don’t think twice about giving them the accepted margin.

*Research the volumes a retailer or wholesaler might be able to sell for you by asking both them and their competitors, and by finding published market/sales data if possible. Use this as a basis for comparison. How many can you sell at full price, compared to the volumes you can expect them to sell at 25%, 33%, 50% or whatever discount?

Now you need to take a look at promoting your product — by advertising and publicity.

FIXED COSTS

Also known as overheads, these refer to business expenditure, which is basically constant or fixed irrespective of the level of trading. Rent, rates, most salaries, and insurance, are examples of fixed costs.

VARIABLE COSTS

Also known as direct costs, these comprise expenditure which varies directly in relation to the level of business; for instance, the costs of raw materials.

The price you choose needs to meet your fixed and variable costs, and then make a surplus (your profit) on top. This is the minimum you need to make from your sales stay in business. With fixed costs it therefore makes a good deal of difference whether you sell one item or a hundred items per year, or provide a service for one day or a hundred days, since the entire fixed costs have to be recovered on those sales. Dividing the fixed costs by one, a hundred, or whatever, obviously huge impact on the end price. Be very has a cautious in predicting your likely sales in terms of units sold or chargeable time.

Fixed costs must always be kept to a minimum _as they can float upwards and soon overwhelm the profitability of a business. Businesses are usually better at controlling their “variable costs“. For example, when a supplier raises their prices, most businesses take notice and, where the rise is unjustified, they will challenge it or find a new supplier.

SENDING THE RIGHT SIGNALS

While costs are an important element in calculating a price — one you should never lose sight of — there are numerous other factors you need to take into account. For instance, your selling price can send an important signal to your customers. In the absence of other indicators, the price tells them if you are offering a cut-price deal or if you are at the top end of the market. To decide where your own price should lie demands knowledge of your target market and what the likely buyers are prepared to pay. This requires prior experience of the trade or accurate interpretation of your market research results.

In general terms, if you price slightly on the low side you will make more sales, but with a lower margin, and if you price slightly on the high side, you will make fewer sales but with a greater margin, so the net profit will remain the same. The problem is, of course, knowing what constitutes a “high” or a “low” price; if youhave existing competitors they will have already created price norms in the market. Finally, if you have one major customer, they may simply dictate what price they will pay, in which case your calculations will tell you if that issufficient for your business to be viable.

The flat and bed-sitter brigade

Provided you have a proper lease drawn up, renting out part of the house as a flat is the most trouble free way of having people under your roof. Failing that, properly equipped bed-sitting rooms should bring you equally trouble-free tenants. You need, of course, to have a large house to do this. And you may have to spend out capital in the first place to equip the accommodation. But over the months you should quickly recoup your outlay.

Lodgers, or paying guests

Many different categories of people want to rent rooms as lodgers, sharing your kitchen to prepare their own meals. There are businessmen and women who find themselves working away from home, for instance. In this case they will tend to go off early in the morning, come home early evening and perhaps go out again, and be away at weekends. This category of paying guest is probably the most trouble-free, and should have no difficulty meeting the rent. But if you want someone to chat to from time to time, you may well be out of luck.

Single 9 to 5 workers come next in the trouble-free stakes. They tend to be around at weekends but are likely to have organised themselves a fairly heavy social life and will, therefore, not be under your feet all the time. Both these categories can be taken in without impinging much on your daily life. Both are likely to need somewhere safe to park a car.

The third category are people without regular hours. Students, for instance, who may be at home studying for part of the day, and professionals — people who work all kinds of shifts round the clock — actors, journalists, social workers, probation officers, doctors and nurses in particular. Their presence in your house would be more noticeable than in the case of the 9 to 5 set. Renee, an ex-nurse, specialises in taking in people from the local hospital, for instance.

I like to have students or young doctors staying with me,’ she says. ‘It keeps me in touch with the medical world and we can talk the same shop. I also understand the long, erratic hours they have to work, something that some landladies would find difficult to come to terms with.’

Many of Renee’s lodgers are on night duty some of the time. She has them on a paying guest basis, but also provides meals for most of them — often at unusual hours — supper as late as 10 or 11 o’clock at night, for instance.

`If they’re really going to be late, I leave some soup to be heated up and sandwiches,’ says Renee, who has never married and feels that her students are her ‘family’. ‘I agonise with them over exam results, and if somebody fails, I feel as bad about it as if it’s happening to me!’

Bed and breakfast

Bed and breakfast, whether it is on a regular or just a short-term basis will bring in more cash than lodgers or straightforward letting, provided you have a good supply of people to draw on. And since you are probably getting breakfast for the family every day, it adds very little extra work.

To make bed and breakfast really successful, it’s best to have a separate bathroom for your visitors, or at least a washbasin in their room, so they don’t collide with the rest of a household in the morning rush. And you’ll need a good supply of bed linen and sheets — as I’ve already said, the non-iron, quick drying polyester/cotton mix is best. Bed and breakfast means just that, and you are not obliged to provide a separate sitting room with TV. But if you are going for long-term stays, then you will need, probably, to put a small television set in the bedroom.

Mobile phones demand becomes intense in the market. Many consumers wonder the top brand phone with the best price. Is it difficult to find? Or is it difficult to compare?

I personally have to agree, the top brand with the best price is hard to find. Maybe it is the common sense; the tops brand has to be compensated with a price.

But wait a minute, look for a better price wouldn’t be possible. A lot of consumers do look around, just like me, in several shopping malls, trying for a few pounds discount.

I won’t say it is an economical way to look for a small discount. But most time, who knows, might be big one.

I like to introduce a time saving and big discount place, nobody wants to miss this. Omio is an online Nokia phones price compared site. There is a total list of all Nokia phones selling on the market. Omio compares deals from all the major online Nokia phones retailers. For example, the Nokia 5800, the top price listed on omio is £149.95. Compared to the market price £229, immediate £80 savings. Who won’t like the deal? Let’s see the Nokia N96, there are already many deals made there. The best price is as little as £24.46 per month.

Service refers to all the activities which create a bond between organisations and their clients or customers. This is a very broad definition, but it is fully justified because all organisations, be they manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, banks or government departments, have a service component. Certainly the extent of the service component varies from organisation to organisation, but everyone ultimately has a role in service.

Types of service

There are ‘assist me’ services:

* assist me to find and buy a house

* assist me to keep the books of my business

* assist me to regain my health

And there are ‘repair it’ services. Customers have come to expect and demand that a manufacturer’s obligation to guarantee the performance of a product should extend further than the date of delivery. The quality of a company’s ‘repair it’ service contributes significantly to its success in the marketplace.

The capacity of a motor manufacturer to deliver a high-quality repair service sets it apart in its industry. Numerous research studies have shown that the average customer who is happy with a product tells at least three people of his satisfaction. The average customer who has a problem with an organisation or product will tell nine or ten people about it! The implication for manufacturing companies is that service is an intrinsic part of the product.

There are also ‘guarantee it’ services. These relate to the product itself, be it a hacksaw blade, a motor car or a grilled steak. Factors that play a part are the basic design of the product, and the quality control in its manufacture. A poor design or a badly manufactured product leads to unhappy customers.

‘Help me buy it’ services highlight the sales activity in a firm and include the messages the company sends out to potential customers in advertising and promotion programmes. How it chooses and monitors sales staff, intermediaries or distributors must convey a positive attitude to the customer.

Protect me’ services cover after-sales activities such as parts availability, warranties, complaint handling and overall responsiveness to customer problems. These activities extend beyond ‘repair it’ services.

Yet another service is that of adding value.

Value-added service is more easily understood in terms of experience than in definition. It provides the feel of politeness and caring when delivered in a person-to-person context. The friendly waiter who calls you by your name when you sit down to a meal, or an airline stewardess who notices you are feeling a bit tired and brings you a rug, addsintangible value to the delivery of good service.

Regardless of the type of service, one thing should be abundantly clear: everything revolves around the customer.

The Cost of Bad Customer Service

Some companies may think that they can get away with bad service but there is no doubt that it is costly. Costs arise in handling complaints; in paying refunds or handling returns; in legal action dealing with customerprotection bodies; and in the necessary corrective public relations.

But indirect costs are likely to be far higher and will accrue from lost sales to those directly affected, lost sales to those who are told about the bad service and, above all, from the cost of acquiring new customers toreplace those lost. The latter cost can be ten times greater than the cost of retaining existing customers through good service. The greatest cost of all is the cost of lost opportunities.

Life is filled with an abundance of opportunity. You just need to train yourself to recognise it. An Italian restaurant used to order a huge amount of mozzarella cheese from a rep for dairy products. The rep could not believe it when the owner told him all the cheese was used for just one outlet, so that evening he visited the restaurant. Even though he made a point of arriving early, he was still met with a long queue outside. The restaurant seated about 180 people, so he was seated quickly. He was tended to immediately, and the reasonably priced meal was served in record time. He saw that the tables turned within an hour and that there were also a huge amount of take-away orders being collected. After visiting the restaurant on numerous other occasions, the rep concluded that good service, a well-run operation that allowed quick service, a good energy, and reasonably priced, quality food resulted in huge mozzarella orders and a healthy bank balance. In fact, it wasn’t long before that same proprietor opened a chain of pizza restaurants that he later franchised.

Spend a little

Have you ever thought why people actually buy things? The following are important reasons why shoppers spend their money…

• They are tempted (look how many sweets are dropped into their shopping basket while they wait to be served by a cashier).
• They love sales (try to price at least one of your products as a ’sale’ item).
• They comfort shop.
• They are lazy (people generally tend to buy what is readily available).
• They just love convenience!
• They’re bored — or unhappy.
• They like what they see. Sometimes people are just too lazy to shop around so they buy what they see, so you need to ensure your products are always visible.

Knowing what your customer wants

Reassure your customers that you know what they need. I once saw a hairdresser whose advert read: ‘We understand colour and style’ — now that’s encouraging from a hair salon!

The 90-day test

Statistics report that it takes 90 days to break a habit such as smoking or biting your nails. Well, what do you know, it also takes 90 days for a customer to forget you. Never mind how long it took to build the relationship, or how great your service was, if you don’t make a note to follow up – even if it’s just a courtesy call, a newsletter or a card – you’re gone and forgotten in just three months. Your product will be lost in an out-of-reach corner of the shop.

So all those leads you followed up on or sales you closed in February need to be serviced at the end of May. Companies spend a fortune sourcing new clients when, very often, all they need to do is just look after their existing clients.

Business ethics

A matter of manners

• Millions of rands of potential income is lost daily because of bad business ethics and – quite simply – bad manners.
• People don’t return calls.
• They don’t turn up for appointments.
• They leave telephone messages that are garbled and nonsensical.
• They don’t follow through on their promises, such as quotations.
• They charge too much!

Do yourself a favour…

• Make sure you return all calls.
• Speak clearly, both on the phone and in person.
• Follow up on all leads.

Don’t give up if someone doesn’t return your call. I receive may calls where I can’t hear the name or the number is distorted. People also forget, and some are just too busy. Most of the people with whom I do business are persistent.

I have to confess that I am a very sensitive and rational shopper. I don’t shop anything any more for something I don’t think it is the best. I love eyeglasses. I am myopia patient. I had a good experience with Glassesshop. They had a wide selection of eyeglassess and best eye-care profession. Don’t like most shoppers, I go shopping. I look all the eyeglasses they had. And I ask them questions, most of friends think they are silly questions. But I don’t. Questions like this one “why do you think this eyeglasses lens won’t make me feel sick?” Answers like “our glasses are top brand and they are good for your eyes” or “if you don’t like these lens, I have some expensive ones” fully express the merchant’s profit motivation which is definitely not a good idea for shopper to buy such pair of glasses. That’s why I love Glassesshop. Their eyeglasses profession stands on one point to get the perfect pair of eyeglasses to have a better eye sight to suit your lifestyle. I read a lot. Before I always suffered the tired eyes especially I focus on my reading. As a myopia patient, I hate my bad eyesight. When I first time shop with Glassesshop, I told them my suffering. The next day, I received a list of options of reading frames and lens specially customizing for my reading. I received my first pair of myopia eyeglasses designed for reading. I really love my customized reading glasses. Glassesshop has the wide selection of glasses and full knowledgeable eye-care professions.

Product or design-related strategies

There are three possibilities:

• Product reliability improvement

Here the objective is to lower the customer’s total costs. This is almost always the first approach used by firms.

• Modular design

The entire product is divided into a series of modules which can be repaired or replaced. This helps lower variable costs by making the product easier to repair, a tactic now used by motor car manufacturers. A damaged bumper and the undamaged components with which it forms a system, may simply be replaced by a completely new system.

• Built-in redundancy

In this case, the product has two or more of a critical component. If one fails, the backup takes over. For example, cars have dual braking systems. If the footbrake fails you may use the handbrake.

• Support-related strategies

These strategies concentrate on changing the way in which service is provided. They can be grouped into the following categories:

• Improvement in response time

Companies can improve the speed with which the support system reacts to a failure by making service technicians available, moving them closer to customers and providing rapid handling of emergency parts orders.

• Reductions in product repair time

The aim is to reduce actual repair times by providing improved service technician training, diagnostic equipment and fully equipped mobile repair vans.

• Strategies to reduce customer risk and uncertainty

The objective is to improve after-sales support and customer satisfaction by controlling or even eliminating the potential for financial loss caused by product malfunction. These strategies may be divided into the following categories:

• Warranties

These are used to reduce the customer’s out-of-pocket costs during the immediate post-purchase period and to allay any fears customers may have regarding product reliability.

• Service contracts

Service contracts help to reduce buyers’ uncertainties about maintenance costs. Contracts can be obtained on most types of equipment and there are many options open to customers.

• Information

Information should be freely available to customers; instruction manuals and brochures are not enough. Many customer problems and complaints are caused through product misuse and even abuse. Customers are entitled to, and should receive, accurate and friendly after-sales information at all times.

• Spares

The supply of spares, particularly for ageing equipment, is a major and never-ending source of customer anxiety. Many customers are exploited by suppliers who charge excessively high prices for spare parts and insist on one-sided service contracts.

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