The ideal price for any product or service is one that is acceptable to both buyer and seller.

In setting prices for your product or service, one of the first calculations you must do is to estimate approximately how large your potential sales volume could be, based on a reasonable assessment of your potential market share in the product category, at different price levels. Knowing the size of the existing market is critical to determining if there are enough customers to establish and grow a business.

Walk through any store and look at packages on the shelves. Decide which ones catch your eye in any given section, and why. Chances are the majority of packages that stand out have what's called "graphic identity."

Packaging can be simple cardstock tags printed or stamped in black ink (e.g., on machinery, tools, clothing, etc.), or unique, one-of-a-kind containers that are more valuable than their product contents (e.g., imported, hand-blown crystal oil and vinegar cruets).

The unique collection of brand or business values that differentiates the business from the competition is known as "positioning." Packaging designs should communicate the business positioning or unique set of values.

Many companies, large and small, spend years successfully developing a new product with great market promise but do not adequately test their packaging, pricing, and advertising prior to introduction.

Once you've introduced a new product or service or developed significant improvements to existing ones, you'll naturally want to do some follow-up to measure the success of the project. Whether the introduction is ultimately successful or not, you need to be able to learn from the process to achieve more success down the line.

Packaging and pricing represent a very concrete way to communicate with your target market and express the positioning of your business.

There are as many methods to screen new product ideas as there are consultants. Perhaps most, if not all of them, are valid. But small companies cannot afford to incur costly product development failures as part of "the normal course of big business." Even one product failure in a small company may threaten its survival if a large amount of time, scarce resources, and personnel are committed to it.

Successfully creating a real-life product that mirrors your new product concept and meets your company's cost parameters is difficult. It takes months and years, even for smaller companies to accomplish.

Sometimes the best, least expensive, fastest, and least risky way to introduce new products is to copy or improve upon a competitor's new product introduction.

Brainstorming is a way of generating a lot of new ideas, quickly. Once you have a long list of possibilities to work from, you can begin to evaluate each idea from a more practical standpoint. The brainstorming techniques pioneered by Alex Osborn include:

Good ideas can come from anywhere! But can one consciously foster creativity and new ideas on demand? Certain successful companies and creative experts suggest that it is not as hard as most people think. Everyone can be more creative with technique, practice, and motivation. Perhaps "a leap of faith" is also required for the skeptical.

New product development can be categorized into:

How often do small companies go out and test their products against competitive products with users of the product? Every five years? Ten years? Never? Even when a direct competitor introduces a new product, most small companies react by introducing a similar or slightly improved version of the same product instead of considering the sales potential and strengths of their entire line.

Small companies are often discouraged about product development because of the perceived difficulty, time, and expense ("...only really big companies can afford to do it!"). Sometimes it is as easy as:

Once you've created your company mission statement (or have explicitly recognized the mission you've been pursuing), you can begin considering how to accomplish that mission by developing and refining your product or service offerings.

Today's accelerated rate of change and information growth means small companies will inevitably face increased competition in their market niches. Small companies need to embrace and seek out change, rather than avoid it or wait until change is forced upon them by competitors.

A small company should consciously decide on its position within its category of products as a:

A company mission statement can be a powerful force to clearly define your company's purpose for existence. In the beginning, your company was formed to accomplish something that did not exist in the marketplace, or to do a better job than existing companies. What was that special purpose? Small companies seldom take the time to discuss or write out their company mission, but they should. It will pay measurable financial dividends over time.

As an example of how a company mission statement can serve as a focus for improvement in your business's performance, consider the case of Fred's Grocery, a small one-store business, which suffered sales declines when a large chain supermarket opened a store in the neighborhood.

New businesses are always in a rush to get new products to market. But how many new products or new businesses fail because the concept is never quite executed correctly for the intended target buyer? When a company doesn't take the time to do it right in the first place, it somehow always has to find the time to correct it later, often at great cost in unnecessary spending, lost time, lost sales, and lost market share.

When doing quantitative market research, there are two ways to select test respondents:

The design of a good quantitative questionnaire depends upon careful consideration of:

If you're doing quantitative market research, in most cases, the sample size for the number of respondents you'll test is determined by your available budget and by the confidence levels that you desire or can accept.