Price is a Blunt Instrument for Marketing

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It’s funny, price is the first thing many people think of when it comes to marketing and positioning. If you have the lowest price, more people will buy right?

Wrong.

Being the low cost leader in any niche is probably the hardest and least desirable position for most businesses in most markets.

If you win on price, you also lose on price down the road. Low price engenders little loyalty and very little good will.

Instead, think opposite.

How can you position yourself as the Premium product or service in your niche?

The top of the pricing spectrum has very little competition and is very rewarding. You get better customers, have more money to put to future development and marketing, and you get the unique position of being at the top of the market.

Don’t use low price as a positioning strategy, there are much easier and more effective strategies… including HIGH price.

 

Build Your Product Under Pressure From Customers

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Image Courtesy of Software Engineering Blog

The best way to ensure that your product gets developed quickly and with the right features is to get customers using it as quickly as possible and use the pressure of their requests to drive the product forward. Of course, this is not quite as easy to do if you are talking about a physical product, but I’ll get to that in a second.

First, if you develop digital products, look for ways to engage customers and prospects very early in the development cycle. Sometimes, that might mean building an ‘advisory team’ of sorts, and sometimes that might mean starting to sell your product with a very small feature set.

The idea of ‘minimum shippable feature set’ is a good one for developing great products fast. Get it out with the bare minimum and get people using it. Then iterate and improve on a steady, consistent basis.

Keep challenging yourself to narrow the first, or next, release of your product down to just the most critical elements.  And then… make it smaller.

It is more expensive and challenging to iterate physical products, but still just as critical.  Maybe you won’t have full launches, but at least get your prototypes, concepts, drawings, models, etc. in front of a good number of current or potential customers.  An ‘inner circle’ of users can help push the development forward as effectively as a large current user base.

Creating a prototype does not have to be complicated, this article from Software Engineering Blog describes some of the simple things that can be done to ensure that the product you build is what the designers and users had in mind.