Whether your business is struggling to meet goals or is performing well and ready to take it to the next level, one of the most important things for any company to do is continually expand and improve its product mix. It’s vital to avoid letting your offerings grow stagnant and outdated, so let’s look at some of the biggest reasons to continue evolving and tinkering with your product mix to increase your bottom line and maintain your standing in your industry.
Competition
Competition within an industry is perhaps the most significant driving force behind innovations and improvements in a company’s catalog. Earning customer loyalty is a difficult task, and once you’ve built a reputation of providing a quality product that your customers would recommend to a friend, you want to maintain that loyalty and turn customers into lifetime customers.
By continually evolving and expanding your product mix to add performance advantages and additional features, remove underused or poorly-reviewed features, and offer a superior customer experience, you can give yourself a significant competitive advantage.
Market Demand
Many times, changes in a company’s product mix are motivated by the ever-evolving demands of their customer base. Perhaps the most significant driving factor in this regard is technology, as the internet and mobile devices have revolutionized the business world and forced nearly every business to continually evolve to keep up. In many cases, those that were unable to do so just didn’t survive.
It used to be that a website with an online sales portal was enough, but with people spending more and more time on their smartphones, the business world has further transitioned toward the leading mobile platforms like Apple and Android. Most forward-thinking companies that hire a developer to create a mobile app offering customers a way to buy products engage in services and process payments on their mobile devices are already a step ahead of their competitors.
Attracting New Customers
No matter how successful a business is or how many loyal customers it has, there’s always room for more. By identifying the disconnect between current and prospective customers, you can design and offer new products to appeal to new customers who may not have the same level of interest in your existing product lines.
Generating Buzz
Many companies with well-known brands like Sony, Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft generate a great deal of attention just with the announcement of a new generation of their most successful product lines. If you already have an established brand name, you can leverage that reputation and customer loyalty to create excitement by offering both new products and more advanced versions of your current products.
The Product Life Cycle
Products move through four stages during the product life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. The final step, decline, is usually reached when a product is no longer useful to a customer, either because their needs have changed, or because competitors offer a newer and more advanced product than yours. If your current product is reaching the end of its life cycle and you have nothing to replace it with, you risk being overtaken by your competitors.
Periodically analyzing your current product mix for growth and improvement opportunities is essential. No company or product exists in a vacuum, and by proactively evolving with the factors covered above, you will put yourself in a prime position to stay at the forefront of your industry for years to come.
