Differentiating Your Premium Product – Nigeria Market Case Study
Business Analysis is also about sales strategy to differentiating your premium product in a saturated market. Finding new customers can be quite challenging, especially in a market where there is porous border and influx of different products in the market. Nigeria market system allows flowing in of substandard products hence many products find its way into the market. I will share in this blog how I approached this challenge and how Business Analyisis skills helped.
Three strategies for Premium Product Differentiation
As a Technical Sales Specialist, I needed to create a competitive advantage for my product and make my product superior to alternatives in the market. I needed to differentiate my product in such market. To achieve this, I implemented three (3) strategies that helped set my products apart from its competitors.
1. By Creating a Niche Market
As a premium and relatively new products in the market, it was important for me to do more research to better understand who the buyers and users of my products are. I did that by creating a market segmentation which helps me to understand why and who buy premium products based on its qualities and value proposition. This helped me to limit target audience and leads to a greater increase in sales and returns on investment for marketing spend. It was easy to conclude that the product is not for everyone but for a specific target.
2. By Building Quality Relationships
One of the many mistakes sales consultant makes is they focus more on sales rather than building rewarding relationships. In a country like Nigeria, brand building takes time, so blending in right proportion a dynamite product with unmatched customer service and a pinch of personalization can help build genuine connections. Stakeholder analysis, a Business Analysis task described in Babok, can help a lot. Willingness to do more homework and showing genuine concerns about customer needs helped set apart my products from competition. I presented myself more as a solution provider than a sales person.
3. By Creating Brand Loyalty
It was important to know customer will always associate elements of your brand such as logo, color and specific features on your products. As simple as those features can be, they will help differentiate ones products from the competitors such as it helped my products. The fact that the material of my product is unique and the ease of identification of it gave my clients more reasons to always come back. Also, using a strong social media presence to promote and keep tab of what the customers were saying about my product helped me to be rather proactive rather than reactive. This is a key drive in a country like Nigeria.
Conclusion on Differentiating Premium Product
In conclusion, product differentiation allowed me to increase my market share from zero percent to around twenty (20) percent, results which came from me being able to sell my products at a higher price and hence increase my profits, because customers are willing to pay more in exchange for durability, aesthetics and customer service.
