Marketing company Leicestershire

LOOK FOR additional products and services that you can offer to your existing clients. If you already have a range of products that are useful to your customers, it can be easy to think that this is all they will want to buy from you. You know your place in the market and you supply to people who appreciate what you do.

While there will always be examples of companies that come unstuck after they diversify, there is no harm in exploring product or brand extensions in order to grow your market share.

Cadbury’s for example has long been known for its chocolate bars. But during the latter part of the 1990s and onwards, it diversified into a very successful range of ice creams. The problem for Cadbury’s was that while in Britain chocolate sales were strong for much of the year, sales fell in the summer months. By offering a range of branded Cadbury’s ice creams during the hot summer months, the company was able to offset the low volume of chocolate sales and of course keep people aware of the Cadbury’s brand and unique chocolate flavour. In fact, if you go to the freezer cabinet now, you will notice that more than half of ice cream products are linked to confectionery you could find all year round. Mars, Twix and Bounty ice cream are all now found in the freezer cabinet. All are items that 20 years ago you would have found only in the newsagents or supermarket shelf.

Coca-Cola and other soft drinks no longer content themselves with a single flavour of the product. In order to cater to different markets and different segments, they have produced a wide range of variations. Traditional Coke with its distinctive red can is still a popular seller, but now Diet Coke, Coca-Cola Zero and Cherry Coke, along with many other variations, are also found on the supermarket shelves. Each type caters for, but does not exclusively appeal to, a different market sector. For example, Diet Coke is strongly marketed toward a young female audience, while Coca- Cola Zero targets a young male audience.

By extending the original Coca-Cola brand into these different directions, the manufacturer had been able to maintain a strong hold of the market while offering slightly different products to different areas and creating a special brand around each one.

I appreciate that you and I are not Coca-Cola with its many hundreds of millions of dollars to spend each year on advertising and marketing, but we can learn a great deal from this market segmentation and introduction of new products.

If you are already offering a product which appeals successfully to truck drivers, for example, what other items do you currently not sell the truck drivers but on a regular basis they need to buy? Are there other items that you could either manufacturer or begin stocking and reselling that would appeal to that audience?

The point is that if they are already coming to you to buy certain items, making them a ready-built market.

The easiest way to introduce new products is to look at your existing customer base and then ask the question: ‘If they are currently buying this from us, what else might they be interested in buying?’ Some simple market research into what they might be interested in and you could start launching new product extensions which could rapidly grow your business.

For marketing advice specific to your business, get in touch and speak with a marketing specialist on 01858 374 170 or email info@idealmarketingcompany.com