Marketing analysis should not only be included at the end of your development process but more importantly in the beginning stages as well.  Check out the US Chamber of commerce Small Business Resource Tools for VERY useful business advice.

  One of the very first steps if not the very first step to a successful product is to identify who and what your target market will be.  This is a crucial step and will give you the insight you need before committing ANY money to product development.  This will require some leg work on your part and possibly some market analysis research cost for reports.  A good source for market analysis research reports are university / collage  computer systems.  If you are an alumni or know someone who is, this information can be accessed free of charge.

 What to do once you have this information?  This will give an idea of the market available to sell your product to.  As an example lets say you have an innovative idea for a new fishing product.  Lets say it is a salt water lure.  What you need to know is what size in $ is this industry.  How many salt water fishermen are there in your target market.  Who are the top three competitors you will be facing.  What are their respective market shares by %.  What is the average price structure of a salt water lure.  Properly funded, what percentage can you expect to grab within the first three years of production.  remember even a 1/2 of 1% or 1% of a 500 million dollar industry is still $5,000,000 US.  So you want to keep your expectations realistic and your investors will be more inclined to buy into your project.

Now you can translate your expected percentage of market share into expected annual quantities for production.  Why is this so important before product development begins?  The expected quantity will drive the type of process to be used for manufacturing.  The type of manufacturing required will drive the type of assembly process.  All of these factors will drive the design thus our creed...  Design for manufacturing.  It is extremely important to have the correct methods of assembly or production to achieve the required annual quantities or you may not be able to keep up with demand.

 Marketing has got to be the single most important step of the entire process. No matter how good your product is, it will not sell it self. If your target customers do not know about it, or the appearance is not exciting enough, they will not buy it! So choose the marketing method and company you want to represent your product carefully.

A very useful tool to utilize is the US Chamber of commerce Product development and Marketing tools.  

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