What is the Market Summary Report?
The Market Summary Report is a market research report giving a side-by-side comparison of all the products currently being sold in the market.
8 Key Pieces of Information
Sales
Sales is simply how many units the particular product sold last year.
Retail Price
Retail Price is the recommended retail price that each firm set for their product(s). You need to remember that the wholesale price is retail price minus the retailer margin, so it’s possible that a cheaper product than yours might have a higher wholesale price if that firm has lower retail margins.
Awareness
Awareness is a measure of how many consumers in that segment are aware of your product due to your corporate brand advertising and product advertising.
An awareness rating of 0.50 means that 50% of the consumers in that segment are aware of your product. When trying to raise the awareness level of your product(s), you need to pay attention to making sure that you are targeting your budgets to the media types that the particular segment watches the most.
Public Relations (PR)
PR is a measure of how many consumers in that segment have a “good” public relations image of your product due to your PR expenditure. When consumers read bike magazines you want them to see your product being reviewed and talked about and that is what your PR budgets are for. A PR rating of 0.40 means that 40% of the consumers in that segment have heard some good PR about your product.
Distribution
The distribution rating is a measure of how much distribution coverage your product has. A distribution rating of 0.65 means that 65% of consumers in that segment will find your product in a store they regularly shop at.
The only way to improve your distribution rating is to convince more stores to stock
your bikes
Quality
The quality rating is a measure of how many units of your product are returned under warranty. If approximately 2% of your sales are returned under warranty then your rating will be approximately 0.50, but if you can reduce it to approximately 0.3% of your sales being returned under warranty then your quality rating will rise to 0.90. In MikesBikes the only control you have over quality is how much money you allocate to your quality improvement budget each year.
Delivery
Delivery is a measure of how often your retailers run out of stock of your bikes. A delivery performance rating of 1.0 means that your factory never stocks out of bikes, however if your factory stocks out of bikes this year, then next year your delivery performance rating will fall. The lower your delivery performance rating, the less likely that retailers will want to stock your bikes. However be careful, as some segments are more sensitive than others to stocking out.
Product Specs
The “product specs” rating is a measure of how close your product is to the segment’s ideal dimensions for “tech” and “style”. A rating of 1.0 means that your product is 100% what the segments wants, a rating of less than 1.0 means that it is not. As MikesBikes progresses you will be offered numerous product development projects that will improve the product spec ratings of your products, if your product spec ratings are lower than your competitors it means that they are spending more money on product development than you are.