Let Your Customers Determine Your Product Mix And Price Points
It seems obvious doesn’t it? Let your customers determine what products you stock and sell. How else would you approach your business? But it’s not always so obvious, my friends. Look around and ask yourself how you originally went about determining what products you should sell and how do you continue to determine what mix to support? Most of the time it’s ego, personal opinion and some vague idea as to what appears to be selling best or what you hear from your customers that determines your choices.
Within the business plan one determines what their typical client/customer profile would be, in turn determining what price point and product line to support – high-end or entry level. Once this is decided, however, are you excluding other options by predetermining what you sell and thus what your customer profile will be? If you offer no entry level items in a high-end store, you will have no idea what the demand would be for such items and thus will have fixed the deal and the conclusion by limiting the choices in the beginning.
Two things to consider:
1. Have you asked your vendors what sells and what does not? They will certainly be a great help.
2. Ask your clients and monitor your sales, but be careful you are not fixing the answer by only providing one end of the spectrum and not the other, getting no balanced feedback or purchasing data.
Introduce new options frequently and see what happens. Constant research is necessary to make certain you are on target with what the market wants and will purchase. Provide a mix and see what happens. Let the market determine what you should support not the other way around. Don’t decide what you want the answer to be, discover what the market truly demands.
A broader cross section of price points and selection may provide the best set of alternative options as opposed to being either low-end or high-end. You cannot be everything to everybody, this is true, so you may have to make some hard decisions as to exactly who you will be serving. Just make certain your decisions are market-driven.
