How To Ensure A Successful Product Launch In A New Market?

Your product is selling very well in your home town and now you want to expand your business to overseas markets.

But a product selling in one market doesn’t mean that it is selling in another one. Research may be needed to find out if there is strong NEED in the target market. Only by knowing the local statistics you can decide how much you are going to invest on promoting your products.

Speaking of researches, you may hire someone who understand the market very well and do all the things for you, but not every business owners can afford to invest millions on doing research, and not all the statistics are acquirable. But lucky is that, in most cases, you can still do some preliminary researches and generate statistics yourself.

Here are some of the things that you need to investigate before going into a new market.

Things That You Need To Know before Entering A New Market

Needs

Market NEED is the most important indicator but it is also the thing that most business owners have omitted. They tend to invest millions on marketing and expect to see results but this is completely putting the cart before the horse.

As marketing is an art of stimulating one’s desire of buying a product, NEEDS is always the prerequisite of a successful launch. You will have to find out the differences between market provisions and demand and try to fit in the gap with your products.

If you find people are not asking for any of your products, then the market should not be the one you are targeting. If you decided to move on to educate the market and create a need for your products, you will have to consider the ROI of your plan.

Product Features

Product appearance and practicalities I would say, is second important to Need. Even you have identified that there is a huge need in a market, if you are not fitting your customers’ taste, you will still lose your chance.

For example, Tesla wanted to sell its cars to Hong Kong, where is the first place in Asia the government encourages importing of more electric cars by lowering its tax. Tesla had to modify its car internal and structure because Hong Kong is a right-steering city. And more, Hong Kong Chinese prefers white or black over any other colours of cars.

By knowing all these, Telsa has successfully captured the Chinese market and saved tremendous costs by only offering limited choices of colours.

Norms and Cultures

Knowing the norms and cultural practise of your potential customers would help to define a better market positioning for your products.

Take Malaysia as an example. Malaysia is a multicultural nation with Chinese, Malaysian and Indian being the 3 major ethnics in the country. Though Malaysia is an Islamic state, people enjoy high level of religious freedom. Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and other religions made up of people’s spiritual life, and they are not simply affecting people’s religious practise but also their purchasing behaviour.

Buddhism Chinese tend not to consume beef-products and Malaysian Islam do not eat pork, while Indians are mostly vegetarians if not, they prefer mutton over beef. Companies operating food-related business in Malaysia has to register a Halal license. Like Mcdonald’s, they have to register one Halal license per each of its food product including cakes and ice-cream.

All these constitute tremendous initial cost of starting up a food related business in Malaysia.

Ways of Marketing

Though we know Social Media is a nice way to reach out end-users directly, the ecosystem of social marketing has been going more and more complicated in recent years.

Audiences no longer just read ADs on Facebook or Instagram, they need storytellers like Key Opinion Leader (KOL) to deliver message. For some products they may go better with Youtubers, while some may go better with traditional newspapers. Without fully understanding the local mind, you can hardly market your products efficiently and effectively.

How Spear can help to enter a new market?

Spear is more than a linguistic service provider, we are the bridge to markets across cultures.

We got offices in major business hubs and our local teams would be happy to offer you their robust local support. As the local experts understand clearly the trends of local markets, we are able to help tapping your products into a new market.

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