A lot of people ask me how to market their brand new product or invention. What I’d like to tell you about this is that there are sort-of two main routes you can go.

Option 1: Market Yourself

The first route is, you can market yourself, which means you can take it directly to market. You can set up a website that has e-commerce functionality.You can get that brand well-developed and push hard yourself. In which case, you’ll keep all of the margin on that product for yourself and you won’t have to worry about other distributors and what they do with it.

So, if you do that, it just means that you’re gonna have to spend quite a lot more time and focus, developing your brand and making sure that you’re doing sufficient marketing to really carry it forth into the market.

Option 2: Work with Distributors

The second route then is to go to distributors, so retail chains that might be able to use it or online stores that might be able to carry it, because those companies will already have an established customer base. And that might be something that’s more useful to you if, say, people don’t know the product exists, or you need to get it exposure and you just don’t feel that you have the budget to really create a worldwide, or even a national or local sensation, on your own.

Now, between going directly to the consumer yourself and going to a distributor, there’s a pricing trick that you have to be careful of. You have to make sure that, if you are going to do both at the same time, you keep your retail price high enough that you don’t undercut your distributor. So, if you want to do a little bit of both, you just have to make sure that there’s quite a bit of room between the retail price that you’re offering it at and what you’re selling it to the retailer for.

Option 3: Find a Manufacturers’ Sales Agent

There’s one other thing you can do if you need to go to distributors but you just have no idea how to do that, there are a special group of people called manufacturers’ sales agents and they might specialize in the type of product you sell. For example, if yours is a pharmaceutical product, you could get a manufacturer sales agent that specializes in various pharmaceuticals to add your product to their line card. They might have several different products and they can just add yours onto it because they’re already visiting all of those drugstore chains anyway. So, you’d do well to look up manufacturers’ sales agents. There is an association in most countries for them. And see if you can find a manufacturers’ sales agent that has a specialty in the type of product lines that you’re selling. It might have a similar target market.

So, that’s it in a nutshell! I hope that you’ll do well marketing your product. If you need assistance with that, be sure to give us a call here at Tenato. We’d be very happy to help you.