How do I bring a product to market?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today I'm going to talk about how to bring your product to market. So there's— we're going to assume that you have a marketable product. We're going to assume that it can be manufactured. And we're going to assume that it has the right price point, you can afford to produce it, all this stuff. We're just going to talk about how— the overall process of what does it look like in terms of steps of how do you actually market a product and what kind of options you might be looking at. Now, if you're a big company, you can obviously put more money into it, or if you are infinitely wealthy, get investors. kind of opens doors into putting more money and be able to have it happen quicker. But I just want to high-level talk about and answer the question, you know, how do you bring a product to market? And the answer is there's a few different ways. One of the ways that I'd like to go over is this kind of groundswell roots movement kind of way, which is Oftentimes achieved through getting your product into the hands of people who become brand advocates. So doing a grassroots campaign, it means interacting with people, doing pop-ups, really getting a community of people around you. And, you know, obviously, if you're— we can't always do in-person events, so, you know, it can be through digital means as well. There's not really a limitation. It doesn't have to be physically— proximity is not required in order to build a following. And so with that process, it's a lot of, you make the product, you know, you make prototypes or do short run or something like that, where you get a few of them and then you show people and you find people that really love it, really need your product, really It solves— they're your core market, your core people. They become brand advocates. They're going to sell it to everybody they know pretty much because you solved something that's really important to them, a problem that was really important to them, gave them— your product created an opportunity for them they were literally looking for, you know, something like that. And that's how you grassroots. And so you end up— your marketing budget, so to speak, is really just getting product into those people's hands. And that can be, you know, it can be things like social media influencers, um, and not, but it can't be in a bought way. The only way that really, really works, uh, because people are aware of what happens when you just, you pay a celebrity, uh, to endorse your product. It's got to be real. You know, that only gets you so far, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about actual grassroots. And so that's one way to market, and basically it's word of mouth. It's completely word of mouth. You get people who really love it and they just tell everybody they know about it. That's going to be one avenue. A lot of startups use that because the cost is very low. They can, you can use, you know, if you can, you can use prototypes sometimes, you know, high-level prototypes, obviously, but if a prototype can do the work and solve the problem, give the opportunity, then you can get people on your team really quickly for very little cost. And because it's word of mouth, you're not, you know, maybe you do a commission structure of Oh, you get, you know, if you tell one friend, you get $5, they get $5 or whatever. There's a bunch of ways to incentivize, but it's all dependent on a sale actually happening. And so it, it can really work. It can also be very slow. So if you don't do it right, or you don't have it to the right mix of people at the right time, you know, it's a little bit like a cooking recipe. You throw off some recipe, you can still get there, but it's not going to be quite the same. And so that can— the duration can end up taking a lot longer to get there. And that's why you'll have, you know, the 10 years to an overnight success, where it's 10 years of the product, the product's been out for 10 years, and then all of a sudden overnight becomes a big thing. That's often a Word of mouth, they're getting there, they're getting there, they're getting there. And suddenly you hit a tipping point in the amount of people that you have that are your brand advocates. They're your champions. They tell everybody. You get to a certain tipping point and it flips over. And now all of a sudden everybody knows about you. You're, you're being talked about and you have that quote unquote overnight success that everybody wants and You can get there really slowly. You can also work really quickly. So, you know, it's something that products that are fads— so take fidget spinners, not quite dead as a fad, but their hype is, is over. It's not the number one thing everywhere, everyone talking about that. Those products became That's very much a grassroots, not really advertising, just a lot of people started talking about it really quickly and it spiked and it's tapered off. But that is, is that kind of same kind of marketing, and it happens unintentionally as well. So you could accidentally do this. Obviously putting intention into it and being conscious of it will make it work better, but It's also part of everybody's marketing. Everybody wants that because that's basically free marketing. Then your— if your go-to-market path in consumer products especially, you have kind of 2 options. You can dive down into box stores and going on you know, getting sold by someone else. And, uh, in today's market, I would consider Amazon to be that, um, if you have it fulfilled by Amazon, because you're not shipping product to a customer at all. You're shipping product to one of Amazon's warehouses. You're shipping a product to one of, you know, Walmart's, uh, warehouses. You're shipping it to Kroger warehouse, Target warehouse. Right? You're shipping it to 1, 2, 3, you know, however many locations and warehouses that distributor wants, but you are not sending a product to an individual customer. And so that creates a distributor model, and Amazon is— can be one of those options. When you use Amazon on the other side where you are fulfilling it, not Amazon, that's the same as direct-to-consumer, is you're just using a platform. Some people use Amazon as the platform to direct consumers. Some people build their own website. Some people— Facebook and Instagram and a lot of other social media are creating their own way for you to sell directly inside of social media platforms. So you may not even have a real website. You may not be on Amazon. You may just have a Facebook store that you sell through. So the platform does not matter. No, it's like the argument between— not really arguing, the debate between, oh, do I use WordPress or Shopify? It doesn't matter in terms of this conversation because it's a platform that allows you to be direct-to-consumer. And that means you individually, or you are paying a distribution company that doesn't have its own customers to send it out. And that's the key part. You could still have it. have your product manufactured and shipped to a distributor. The difference between that, your distributor, and the distribution model through big warehouses and box stores and Fulfilled by Amazon is that those people all have their own customers. Amazon has customers. Walmart has customers. Kroger has customers. Target has customers. Distribution companies don't have customers. They just do the work for you. They're a service provider where they take your product and they box it and they ship it out for you. And they, of course, charge a little fee. They store your product, all kinds of stuff. That model is still direct-to-consumer because at the end of the day, the customer doesn't know or care who's doing the fulfillment. All they know is they go to one of your website, your platform, and they purchase from you, all branded to you, and it gets— arrives at their door and it isn't, it isn't stuck with, you know, a Walmart packaging. It doesn't have, you know, it's just direct from you. Um, and so direct— those 2 models, you can, you know, the marketing process is vastly different in a lot of ways, but very similar in some. So depending on your, your model, if you're doing a box store, you're doing a distribution model where you are not doing direct-to-consumer, then you may end up doing advertising anyway. So you— part of your agreement may be that you have to advertise and pay for advertising to send customers, and you may do it even if you're not a required to, you may do it to ensure that enough people show up and buy. Because if not enough people show up and buy from those people, they're not going to order any more of your product. And sometimes they'll make you take it back. They'll actually pull it from their shelves and they'll make you take it back, and then you end up paying return fees and you can end up losing, losing money. So oftentimes people will, when they do that model, they will still build a website, they'll still talk about their product, they'll do other marketing efforts To drive people to the— to whoever is actually selling the product. Direct-to-consumer, it's a very, you know, simplified— you're cutting out some middlemen, you are allowing it to be a direct relationship. You own the customer in terms of they talk to you, you talk to them. They aren't going to Walmart for a return, they're going to you for a return. They aren't going to Walmart for issue with the product or question, they're going straight to you and only you. And there's no— they're not going to Walmart's website, they're going to your website. You— they sign up for your newsletter, right? They aren't Walmart's customer, they're your customer, and they build a relationship with you. So a lot of companies are doing that, um, and some big ones. So even Nike, uh, in the past couple years, they Decided to experiment with going down the Amazon route and actually pulled out. They are direct-to-consumer only, except for some, you know, they allow some of their brands to be sold in places like Target and Meijer, but they have drastically moved to a direct-to-consumer model. They have an app, they have products you can only get through their app. They really are moving in that way. So it's not just little companies, not just little startups. Big companies are going to this model because they can build a direct relationship with customers. Um, outside of those, and those are really, you know, you can do this grassroots marketing launch, and that's usually a direct-to-consumer method. You can also, of course, do crowdfunding Crowdfunding is a great way to launch. It is, and I'm pretty sure I've said this before, I'll keep saying it until people understand it. Crowdfunding is a pre-sale platform, so it's still direct-to-consumer. It's still— you're building a relationship, you're using Kickstarter, Indiegogo, whatever platform you're using, you're still using as a platform and It is pre-sales. Say it again, it's pre-sales. The whole point of those platforms is for people to vote with their money by buying your product before it's actually available. All that money is there to allow you to launch the product. It's a launch platform, it's pre-selling it and help get the word out. It's great marketing strategies. Commonly used, it's also very commonly misused. It's— you can put anything you want on there and you can raise a whole bunch of money and you don't have to give away product necessarily. Um, but that's what people really expect, especially if you're going the Kickstarter route that's heavily focused and aimed at, I'm going to give you startup money for product. And that makes it so that I'm one of the first people on the planet to get the product, probably at a discount to what your regular MSRP is. And that's that avenue. There's many other ways between— you can do, you know, co-branded launches. You can team up with a company, have your product launch through their distribution channels. There's, you know, there's as many ways to launch as you want, and it really comes down to the 2 primary models of direct-to-consumer or not. And that will kind of open and close doors, many of them, and will help guide you. And then it's really just fine-tuning your approach that works with your brand. It works with the customers you're trying to get to. You know, it's your exact marketing approach. There's a million and one ways to do it. You just have to optimize it for your brand, your customers, and your product. And deciding that first decision is a really key decision, direct consumer or not. Start there and then you'll be able to pick what path works Invest from there. So I hope that answers the question, you know, how, how can we get products to market? And there are a few different ways that we can do that, and some of those questions you should be asking at the beginning when you decide which way to go.