Is your idea a good idea?

Market research is crucial to understand if your idea is feasible.

What is market research about? It is about opening your eyes on the market, observing and analyzing the market, the competitors and the consumers.

When I started my market research, I had several questions in mind:

- How is the market today? the size of the U.S. market?
- Who will be my customer? Will they buy my product?
- Who are my competitors? How many of them?

Market research

When I started my research, I realized that my product was already on the market and that the competition was really high. So I decided to narrow my specifications to give more value to the product. I will import handmade, unique and quality product and I will put high emphasize on packaging and customer service. Market research helps me to develop my idea and the vision of my business.

Market information

Observing the market gives you information on the prices of the competitors, their selling techniques, their products and their services.

For example, I am going to sell my product online via a well designed website. So, I started to analyze my competitors’ website, their styles and designs, their prices and their delivery service (time and price). This helps me to understand what I want (safer service, credit card payments…) and don’t want to offer to my customer (poor packaging, flashy color...)

Analyzing your competitors’ strategies helps you to develop your business vision and you Dos and Don’ts want to offer list.

As said before, my target market is highly competitive, so I decided to evaluate the market. According to the USA Department of commerce, in 2007 my target market reached 64.5 billion dollars with a constant growth of 5.9%.

This shows that the U.S market is an attractive market open for new entrepreneurs.

Next, analysis of customers buying behaviour