Market Penetration: A Fun Last Topic

Here are some tips for increasing your market penetration:

1. Maintain or increase your product's market share by using more aggressive pricing, launching a smart ad campaign, and look for avenues of sales promotion.
2. Secure dominance in growth markets by finding a new a growing demographic, psychographic, or sociographic to market to. For example, if you notice that people over the age of 65 are starting to buy a particular clothing item a lot, market to those people to capture that growing demographic.
3. DESTROY YOUR COMPETITORS!...with loyalty programs to guarantee a place in the market share. Many grocery stores and websites do this now where you sign up for a membership to receive bonus deals and coupons. Kmart tried this tactic a little too late and now they are hard to find. 
4. This sort of ties in with number 3, but try to get your customers to use your product in greater quantity or more often. After introducing a loyalty program or mailing list, you can continue to advertise a new product or a product that has something new with it. For example, Kraft Mac and Cheese removed the artificial dyes from their "cheese" powder to make it seem like a healthier value (it is still cheese powder, people). 

For all you avid readers out there, Smartling has a pretty comprehensive list about the basics of market penetration (how to plan, when to penetrate a market, how to, etc.) that I will link right here: https://www.smartling.com/market-penetration/

This will be the last blog post for this class. Hopefully everyone learned a lot. I can see I had some regular clicks from within the class so that was neat. Good luck in the Entrepreneur World everyone! 

Subscription Services: The Model of the Future

Have you heard of services like Nature Box or Blue Apron? Ipsy? Loot Crate? Birch Box? All of these are part of a hot new trend: subscription box services. These are services that promise "curated boxes" of whatever genre of products the consumer is interested in. Like make-up? Try ipsy. Like geek gear? Try Loot Crate. There are so many of the services now, and they are relatively cheap to subscribe to, ranging from $10 to $40 per month. So what makes these so appealing to customers? Is this just a fad or a real business venture?

You might be surprised to find out these business are actually quite lucrative. One entrepreneur made a subscription box service that earned $50,000 in 6 months. And the overheard for these businesses is pretty low. Finding products to put in the boxes, hosting a website, and covering shipping costs are the main costs these business face.

These businesses are popular with the younger generations who like the mystery of whats in every box. The boxes are a good example of what it means to know your customers. People want these boxes and the experiences they provide. Many of these boxes have received capital investment and it has quickly become a multi-mullion dollar industry.

These subscription services have somehow managed to market a box without telling you exactly whats in it. This teaches us that strong marketing can be more important than the product itself. Understanding what your customers need, seeing the costs of a businesses, and making relationships with other companies can make a business successful. I think what we have learned in this class, most of all, is that how you market your company is how successful it will be. So put in the research, the time, and the money to develop your brand.