It’s the goal of every business that puts products on shelves to be their customer’s go-to choice. Differentiation from the competition is key if you want to grow your market share. The best way we can learn how to grow is to know what our customers want from our products. It’s a dangerous game to try and guess what this is, but we do know a few commonalities between products that customers tend to lean towards. Here is what customers look for when choosing a new product.
Your product’s packaging is crucial to its success on the shelf. The way that you differentiate yourself through packaging relies on what your competition does with their own packaging. If the competition packs tons of information onto their packaging, you may want to try a more minimalist approach to catch your customers’ attention. The packaging of your product is the first thing your customer will interact with, so it’s important to spend some serious thought and time on it.
At the end of the day, what customers really look for in a product is a solution to their problems. That’s why you can’t overstate or understate what your product does. If you claim that your product will alleviate some sort of problem in your customer’s life, it needs to do that. Making false claims isn’t just bad from a moral sense. If word gets out that your product doesn’t do what it claims, you won’t last very long in business.
Depending on the product you create, bringing an innovation to the market is something that will always grab attention. Customers that regularly buy the same product are unlikely to make a switch unless something disruptive gets introduced. If you have something like this as part of your product, don’t be afraid to highlight the innovation and why it makes your product a better alternative to your competitors’.
When faced with an overwhelming number of brands on a shelf, customers can get easily confused about the differences between them all. One thing that can help your product stand out, and one thing that customers often look for, is a comparison to a well-known brand. If your product performs better than the mainstream brand in a particular area, make sure to let the customer know about this.