This is always my first question to anyone 'toying' with the idea of starting their own fashion brand. Not be harsh, just realistic. Today, more than ever the market place is over crowded, and your brand/product(s) needs to offer something your competitors don't. So, your answer needs to be strong! How do you make your answer strong? You back it up with facts!
The internet is inundated with articles emphasizing "New brands need to be unique to be successful", "You need to offer something different to whats already on the market place". Heck, buyers are looking everyday for products that aren't already on the market place. Yet, there's a limited amount of discussions on how to figure out if your brand/product(s) deserves a spot in the market place.
So, lets get real, organized and clear on whether your brand/product(s) has something to offer the market place no one else does. You need to exceute a series of tasks to gain actual facts on the current market place, your potential consumer and your competition.
Then you'll know whether you need to go back to the drawing board, or not!
Firstly, lets get one thing clear, this process needs to happen in your Design and Development stage and no later! You do not want to go ahead and spend a ton of money on an idea your ego is absolutely certain will sell, when in reality it won't.
Market Research
Yep, you guessed it, market research. You'd be utterly shocked by the amount of people that skip over this part of the development stage, and go straight into producing samples. Guys, STOP! You have to do market research! A lot of people are concerned about the time and cost involved in holding detailed market research, claiming they'd rather use that money towards production instead, others are just unconvinced at what there is to gain from this time consuming task, while some are just too afraid of what the results might show them - too head strong to believe their idea might not be well received. These excuses are nonsense, and potentially extremely expensive 'nonsense' at that!
Here's three very quick reasons why market research is essential to the development of your brand.
1) You are directly communicating with your consumer
Meaning you can pitch your brand and product(s) to your consumer, and get instant feedback before you even have a sample to show them. You will immediately know whether there is a demand for your product(s) by their reactions and opinions. You'll also be able to understand your customer better, allowing you to add or remove services/features to attract them and secure later sales.
2) You are understanding the industry
Your market research is not just focused on your target customer. You also need to spend time looking into facts and statistics of the industry at a whole, if there are certain technologies getting introduced; learning what is working and what isn't for the industry as a whole greatly impacts your brand and it's product(s) as well as it's potential success rate.
3). Get up close and personal with your competitors
Having competitors is a good thing, it means there is already a market for your brand and it's product(s). However, like I said in the beginning, its an overly crowded industry, so getting detailed company information will help truly understand what their success is and what products are working for them.
So, as you can see there is absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain from conducting market research.
Ways to conduct marketing research.
Yes, you could easily hire an outside company to conduct the market research. This is a great idea, if you have the budget for it, it also makes the task a lot less pain inducing for those with little patience for data collection. There are a lot of great companies out there to choose from who can tailor a package for you depending on your budget.
The alternative is conducting it yourself and there are multiple ways you can do this depending on what your budget allows for expenditure. You want to be sure though that you're focusing on the the three main areas of research: your industry, your customer and your competition.
Questionnaires/Surveys are a simple yet effective way to gain quick information, and can be used in a variety of ways: sent to potential customers, used alongside a presentation if you hold a group event.
To close this article, I want to reinforce once more that not only is it essential to your brand and business that you spend the time conducting market research, but it's equally essential that you listen to it, use it and adjust your product(s), operations, services and/or brand for maximum success!