Entrepreneurial Product, Pricing and Branding

Today we learned that there are three very important thing that we have to consider as an entrepreneur, they are product innovation, pricing and branding.

First is about product, there are actually four levels of product in the market, core, tangible, augmented and communicated. Until what level do you want to bring your product? It really depends on every individual.. Anyway, communicated is the ideal standard that everybody wants to achieve, where the company has a good image in the market and the brand is easily recognized by people. Our product is an innovative snacks, packed in tubes and suitable for events. It means that our product can be categorized into non-durable good, with new product innovation (where new ideas are being generated, new efforts made and new resources needed) in packaging, ease of use and degree of customization. We aimed it into the middle to upper market category and we really want to build a prestigious image and high-class brand for the product. There are still so many areas where we can innovate and upgrade our products into, like reliability and durability. We haven't thought about these before, but in the future, these things will seriously be taken into consideration.

Another very important thing is pricing because it shows the value of the product, it may vary from time to time, it differentiates one product from the other, it is one of the customer's considerations before purchasing and it may change without prior notice. There are several factors that will influence the price of our product like cost of good and demand. Besides, once we set the price of our product, there are still factors that will be influenced by it such as sales volume and sales revenue. That is why setting the right price for one product may be a very hard work to do. I think, since our target market is the middle to upper economy, then we will use skimming pricing strategy and we will give discount when there is a large number of order.

The last thing we discussed today was about branding. I knew that brand is really important for a product, it may add value to the product itself through brand awareness (brand recognition and recall) as well as creating brand image (from the attribute and may give benefits to the company). Why do people buy overpriced leather Louis Vuitton bags? For the prestige that it gives to the people who wear it! Yeah, that's how powerful a brand is, it may help you with your profit margin but u also have to be careful in keeping the prestigious image of the brand. There are also several types of branding like individual, umbrella, sub-branding and co-branding. For the meantime, we will still use individual branding for our project since we don't have too many products too offer yet and it is still a long way to go to build a good image.

Overall, these three factors are really important for a business to go well.. Without a good product offered, then people will not buy it even though the price is competitive and the brand design is cool. The contrary also applies, a good product with a good brand may not survive with irrational price! So, these three factors complete each other in a way or another!