What would your marketing strategies be?

**Hurray** · 10-20-2010 12:23 PM

What would your marketing strategies be?

Imagine a situation:
There is a new product in the market and you have a very good contact with the manufacturers. However you own neither a shop nor a retail outlet. Thus your sole business approach to make quick bucks would be to have sellers who already have shops sell your product.
Now the question is, how do you go about contacting the sellers? Will you just show up to their shops?

Or, would you have a completely different approach to sell the product?

Hurray

**rogercbryan** · 10-20-2010 01:42 PM

The questions doesn't really make sense. Do you have the product? Are you going to buy them from the manufacturer and then resell them? Are you trying to do a drop shipping business? Are you trying to sell in retail stores or online or both?

There is no such thing as a quick buck! No matter how you look at this you'll have inventory management, order fulfillment, contracts, AR/AP... Please be more precise about what you are trying to do.

**generationy** · 10-21-2010 10:07 AM

WOW! Thanks for posting that! I am sure a lot of people have just that question! One of the things that I would do is to find out where your competition is. Which stores are carrying their products? Which stores are related in audience interest as the stores that are carrying those products? Perhaps you can pitch to them? Maintain focus when you are going out to reach out to those stores. Also, don't push to much.

Here are a few articles to help you:

How To Find Distributors
Sales and Marketing

Good luck!

**Hurray** · 10-21-2010 11:49 AM

Rogercbryan,
I do not have the product right now but I can get a hand on it easily. I also have money to invest on it.
Generationy,
Thanks for your suggestions.

Well let's say the product is a scarf made from lama wool. Now the manufacturers that you have contact with are ready to produce as many of them as you want. Your only problem is selling.You do not own a retail store and there are other competitors online so you think it would not be profitable to go online. But you realize that you do not see this product much in the market. So what options have you got left to sell them? The best option you think is to have some stores carry this product. Now the question is, how would you chose with stores to approach to, how would you then approach them, and would you propose them a commission on sales or ask them to buy the product and let them decide the selling price?
Or is there another better way to sell the product?

Think of it this way, Oakley come up with designer sunglasses but you find tons of stores selling their sunglasses. You hardly see just "an oakley store." Now with our situation, let us say you want to brand this scarf. Now how do you get to the similar situation as oakley?

Hurray

**rogercbryan** · 10-21-2010 12:59 PM

If you are new to the market you will need to buy the product and then consign the product to any store that will take them. This means you'll give it them for free with an agree upon final payment if and when they sell them. In this case you may even need to pay the store for the shelf space upfront. In some cases you can try to make lots (100 units) and then market them directly to stores that carry similar products. You'll need to do some pricing research to see if there is a margin that you can live off of here. The other route is to sell them on Amazon for a while to see if anyone is buying. You'd actually be amazed at what you can learn from an Amazon test run. Lastly you can start your own site selling. Not as hard as you would think to do that.

Getting stores to put your items on their shelves is not easy. You're going to have to spend some money on marketing and free samples before anyone is going to take a meeting with you and considering that you have viable product that is priced competitively.