Future Recommendations
Our segmentation is an essential factor that was not thoroughly analyzed, thus resulting in a major failure of our product. The segment for our product line SOFT was broad and had multiple target audiences that were looking for different elements in a product. This was due to targeting our segment based on the price of the product instead of specific demographic, psychographic, behavioural or geographic aspects of a target market and what they were looking for in a product. This was portrayed by our target market of both Shoppers and Savers. What we later found out was, Explorers were most attracted to our product but Savers were actually the highest segment in the market. However, instead of creating a new product, we decided to change our entire SOFT line to target only the Explorers and later on only the Savers.
The product was successful at the beginning of the experiment. However, it ended up having a decline in performance. This could possibly be since it had a short product life cycle as it was targeting two groups who are constantly looking for a new product with better functions and of better value than the one being currently used. Due to the lack of brand loyalty throughout this segment, our product could have reached the declining phase of its product cycle fast and the fact that we did not release a new product that met the constantly changing market had a major impact on the outcome.
In the future, we recommend keeping the SOLO product as is and making sure we release a new product with improvements to its function as soon as it approaches the declining phase of its life cycle so we do not make the same mistake. Moreover, we would discontinue the SOFT product and launch a new product to target the large Savers segment. By doing so, not only are we targeting a market that is large, we are also targeting a specific segment. In addition, since this new product will have a specific positioning in the Savers market, it will not be confusing to the consumers and will target the price sensitivity of the Savers. Changing SOFT’s target market multiple times was an unsuccessful tactic as it already had a certain image in the market, thus even though the product features were changed, the name of the product still represented a certain image, making it hard to target a completely different segment.