In last month’s issue, we created a fictitious product – a car that can fly, where you, as the management team or the entrepreneur, is tasked to advertise, promote and market this car globally.

In this second part article, we look at the sales and distribution function and see how marketing research tools are applied.

1. Product Distribution

When the product is ready to be distributed, it has to be carefully planned, to avoid over stocking or inadequate supply in specific outlets. Logistics and distribution tracking may be done at this stage to ensure the product’s distribution is optimized. Equally important is the entire selection of outlets, its image and location.

In location testing, we conduct a series of surveys and interviews with prospective resellers to determine where and how large the size of the outlet. This is assuming a physical brick-and-mortar store is required. (For virtual products, a similar location test can also be done, except it is to identify appropriate portals or URLs for the Internet).

2. Media / Advertising / Promotion

The actual execution of the advertisement and promotion has to be planned with the help of Media Planners and Media Buyers, to obtain maximum reach and impact. Once an advertisement campaign is executed, the success of the campaign can be tracked in two forms: (a) advertisement expenditure measurement study, to determine the media voice share and the effectiveness of the advertisement, and (b) the audience viewership/listenership/readership of the media where the advertisement is posted.

3. Retails Sales

Once the product goes on sale, the entire sales process has to be tracked and monitored to ensure adequate supply and effectiveness in the sales force. Retail measurement studies are available to determine the brand share, market share, category share and product share of the product. This can be tracked periodically and indexed against competitive brands.

4. Consumer Research

Finally, after the product is available for a significant period of time, where sufficient units are sold, the company may start the traditional consumer research surveys – either via face-to-face interviews, telephone, email or online interviews, or via central location tests.

This sort of research will provide the company with consumer perception, consumer usage behavior, awareness of the product’s properties, incidence and frequency of usage. The study can be either quantitative or qualitative.

5. Post-Marketing

A good marketing company should always follow-up with its customer after any sales, to ascertain the customer’s satisfaction with the company’s product or services. This could be via a customer satisfaction survey or follow-up phone interview or visit. A customer satisfaction survey will essentially give you rating score on the various attributes measured.