For businesses with large product portfolios, possibly thousands of codes, marketers need to know how to determine what their flagship product line is to come up with the right response strategy for their business.
Common trends of staple product lines
Typically, every brand has at least one category or a core/Signature product line. The starting point of the brand usually starts with a few categories or a certain product line. From the initial flows, the business will identify the best-selling type and gradually shape the brand’s reputation.
For a brand with a steady growth rate, gradually becoming stronger in the first 2 years they will put resources to complete, develop this flagship line become superior in features, benefits, quality and make a good mark in the hearts of customers. When it comes to that brand, consumers will connect very quickly with this flagship product line.
General characteristics of the main product line
With my experience, I draw together the general characteristics of the main product lines including:
- Superior in quality, features or in terms of technology, formula and satisfy the consumer needs of customers.
- These products can have interesting, attractive concept to stimulate, create the desire to own the product.
- If from a staple product and developed into a staple line, it will be a very diverse product line, many types of products to satisfy consumer demand.
- With some brands positioning as cheap brands, the cost factor is a key advantage for their flagship product line.
- In particular, this mainstream is often supported by an advantage that is not easy to replace, copying in the long term. This can be any product related factors such as:
- Technology, color hard to copy.
- High quality materials are difficult to find and pay for small processing orders.
- The price is cheap to the maximum extent.
- The packaging is designed wonderfully, beautifully.
- Product distribution system because when owning the distribution system will create tremendous value, convenience for customers to reach the product. Especially in an era where people always want things to be fast and convenient.
How to define the basic flagship product line
Marketers can identify a competitor’s mainstream through a number of activities that are simply observed at the point of sale and validate assumptions with retail store owners.
When customers visit offline stores, marketers can observe based on common principles. Usually, the main line is often exhibited a lot in terms of categories, for example, a fashion store showcases many models of T-shirts, the high probability that it is the main line, if on the shelves of the Big C supermarket, the products occupy high density facing, the possibility that it is the main line.
However, it should be noted that for the intermediate distribution system, you should observe facing in the main Shelf area, which will reflect more accurately than areas such as the gondola End, for the purpose of promotional sales.
In case the competitor’s product portfolio is too large, marketers can ask the shop owner and wholesaler.
Identifying key product lines will help marketers make strategic decisions to develop and distribute the right product to compete with competitors.
