Solve-It! Marketing Co. - Inventor Newsletter

Solve-It! Marketing Co. is contacted by approximately 150 - 200 new inventors each month with one or multiple products. All are hopeful that we can turn their product or idea into a blockbuster commercial success. Of all these items, we select less than 1 a month to develop.

Why, with so many products and ideas offered are there so few (in our opinion) with a reasonable chance for commercial success? The answer is quite simple. Most independent inventors spend their time developing the product or idea in an almost perfect vacuum. They seize on a solution to a problem (real or imagined) and plunge headlong into its development without much if any marketing input.

The type of marketing input we're describing does not need to be extraordinarily sophisticated at this stage but must address issues like:

1)	Is this a problem experienced by many or just a few consumers?
2)	Are there existing products available to solve this problem?
3)	If so, how well do they sell?
4)	How much do they sell for?
5)	What features do they have?
6)	How will yours compare?
7)	What is the estimated cost to manufacture your item?
8)	How will the estimated retail price of yours compare to competitive products? (To estimate your retail price multiply the cost to manufacture the item, including retail packaging, by 5).

Inventors, for the most part, would agree that this information is important but most of them don't spend enough time gathering it. However, at some point all of these questions will need to be answered for the product to succeed because PRODUCTS ARE NOT SOLD IN A VACUUM, they are sold in the real world, with real competition to ever more sophisticated buyers.

We could probably retire if we collected a dollar from every inventor who told us his product or idea had no competition, only to find out within a few hours of research that there are competitive products and whether they are selling well or poorly in the marketplace. Wouldn't it be valuable to know this before a small fortune was invested in tooling, molds, packaging, materials, etc.?

The main objective of market research is to try to minimize the risk of developing and marketing a new product but it does not assure success. For additional insight into the elements of a successful product launch, see Newsletter #3, titled "I Know This Will Make Me Rich."

In future issues, we will answer questions posed by hopeful inventors, comment on establishing distribution for a product and the alternative of licensing your idea versus manufacturing it yourself.

If there are questions you would like to have answered in future newsletters, please submit them to harold@solve-itmarketing.com and we will do our best to include them.