Karla and Jack

Many inventors are surprised to learn that a critical part of developing your  great idea into a successful product requires figuring out who will buy your product– while you’re developing it.  Do you know who your target customer is? A common answer I get from many inventors  is that “everyone” needs their product and therefore everyone is their target customer.  Even universal products, like tennis shoes, have at least two dozen different manufacturer’s (Nike, Reebok, New Balance, Vans…)  and each manufacturer has dozens of different styles of tennis shoes and multiple color choices for each style.  Let’s say you are  looking for a pair of tennis shoes for your 5 year old daughter. I bet she likes tennis shoes with  lights, bling, or glitter. If your son is a skateboarder he probably likes Vans. You see, even a product as simple as a tennis shoe has to take into account who the target customer is in developing the tennis shoe design.   And your products design has to be manufactured at a price that your target customer will pay (and where you make a profit).

Here’s an example of how to determine who your target customer is before you start designing your product. Jack and I are trying to find time to finish one of our latest products, a small tree puller. To develop this product we have to imagine who we think will buy this product. We know that each of us love the product so that’s a good place to start. I have two huge trees  in my backyard that every spring drops hundreds of helicopter seeds across my backyard. Almost all of them never sprout, or the small seedings get mowed over and don’t survive. But usually several of them sprout between my flowers or bushes and I don’t notice them until suddenly they spring up to about 2 foot foot tall. ( I think they have some kind of super vtiamins  in those helicopter seeds that lets them grow 2 feet tall over night.)  When they do sneek in,  I have to get a shovel and dig them out. which is messy, takes alot of strength, and is time consuming.  We understand the problem we are trying to solve, next is understanding  who our target customer is so we can develop a customer profile. We decided that it  is someone who piddles around in their yard and takes care of their yard themselves.  And its someone who doesn’t want to drag out  a shovel and go the brute force route.  Our customer is probably a woman 40 – 80. We call her “our fussy gardener”. We have named her Agatha.  For Agatha to be able to pull out a small tree (2 feet high or less) she needs a lightweight tool that fits in her garden cart. The tool should supply the “brute force” factor without a heavy motor, so we can use the length of tool to provide the leverage to supplement her strength. The handle should be comfortable. When we researched the tools that are currently on the market to pull out trees we found a space in the market at the $20 – $30 range.  Using Agatha, the fussy gardener, as a customer profile we also started looking for gardening catalogs and specialty garden stores where we could sell the product. We found that the market could be easily reached. Finding these potential distribution outlets gives us people to talk to about our new product idea.  We can talk to buyers for the catalog and store or visit one of these specialty stores and talk with our end customer by  doing a “mall survey”.

We do all this work before creating our product.  This allows us to test out our idea before sinking money into a product. It also helps us to perfect the product to our target customer.  What if  80% of the people we talk say that they don’t have this problem or they have a solution to this problem that we didn’t know about? Then we either rethink our idea or just “can”  the idea and move on to our next great idea. On the other hand, if the people we interview do have this problem, we might present some potential product features and get their input.  This helps us create a product the target customer will value. And, of course, we ask if they would pay $19.99 or $29.99.  This is part of  what we teach other inventors– that you should “Test, before you Invest” in our seminars and books.

If you don’t take the time to understand your target customer you might leave out a critical feature that could make or  break the sale. Several years I was shopping for a new car. I really wanted a sporty car. I test drove a Porshe Boxster, the low end Porshe. It didn’t have cup holders! How can you justify paying about $35,000 for a car and not have a cup holder. This was a deal breaker for me. I am either  not there target customer or they didn’t do a very good job figuring what the important  “must have” features.  Because they missed a key feature,  I crossed their car off my list.  I ended up buying a   sporty-looking two door Honda Accord. It wasn’t as sporty (or as expensive), but it had all the features I wanted–including a cup holder and the feeling of outside with a sun roof.

Creating your customer profile is an integral part of the process for developing a successful new product.  No product can be all things to all people. So instead of thinking that everyone will buy your product, start by picking a group or two and develop the optimal product benefits and features for that group. I leave you with a quote from the President of Betty Crocker  where he contributes their success to understanding their target customer.

“ Our secret to Betty Crocker’s continuing success of Betty Crocker Products is that the company has built careful profiles of the people who buy our products. For the Hamburger Helper dishes, for instance, a typical user is a married female homemaker with three-plus kids and a Ford Escort. She is not good in the kitchen but wants to be. We’ve cut our market research organization in half over the past five years and actually improved our success because we know our consumer.” President Jeff Rotsch  (this quote was from a few years ago).