There’s one concept in the commerce world that I never understood-first buying large quantities of an item and only then begin to sell. It’s not that I don’t understand the rationale behind it, but in our age of efficiency I can’t seem to understand the need to purchase items a season in advance, wait for the delivery, and only then sell them.
You’re probably laughing, because for years the commerce world has functioned this way. Production and purchasing of a product are dependent on many factors: trends and fashions of the brands, colors, smells, experiences, and more. That’s not to mention that in many cases, production takes place in China Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Peru. How can we connect all these moving parts?
The truth is, this article doesn’t encourage production in Israel(even though I am always in favor of local production). I’m here so we can understand together thewheel of your production from a different lens-the market before all.
When I talk about the market before all, I believe that until today, we (online marketing professionals)dealt with appropriate personal marketing according to in-depth separation of the target audience in order to try to sell the product. As the season progresses, we add the comfort of promotions in order to increase sales. The new world that will exist after Corona will require us to sell products that haven’t even been produced in order to understand if it’s even appropriate to produce these products in mass quantities.
Sell a product that only exists in the form of a sketch? You must think I am joking. But I’m not! The goal here is to sell a product that you understand is possible to produce, however has only been produced once or twice. That way you can make sure that all of the components work well together and you can discover how long it will take the costumer to produce the product, and even reach the stage of photographs. At this point your probably wondering how?
Production in Israel is not the way! I outsource the production of my website to China, my shoes are made in Italy, and so on and so forth. I have one thing to say about this- so what? Look at how much time it takes for shoes to arrive here. In this time, you can entirely remove part of the process, or alternatively, demand a different product! It is possible! Think about all of the potential the exporting products has to offer, like savings on raw materials. If you’ve already committed to purchasing raw materials, at least you can be flexible and play around with different color sand styles that can be used for different seasons.
If you’ve gotten this far, we’ll continue to the main point: the sales. You can sell your product that’s been produced only once to an existing costumer in order to understand if it’s worth your while to continue to produce it. If yes, then how much of it? Beyond saving money, it’s possible to transform the process of sales into a unique customer experience where the customer is a part of the journey that the product embarks on. Like Eyal Shani’s tomatoes
Changing the direction of the marketing funnel won’t just produce advantages to your business, it will change the entire customer experience. This shift will allow you to understand your future audience more efficiently, and predict future trends more quickly and efficiently.
Until next time.
Omer.
