Product managers don’t like surprises – meet your product customers!
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Product managers don’t like surprises – meet your product customers!

I find myself telling the product managers I’m working with that they need to understand that one of the most important jobs of a product manager is to give their sales teams good direction: who will buy their product. You may think you know the answer, but like the product managers at 5-Hour Energy Shots, you may be wrong…

The surprise for the 5-hour Energy Shot client

Have you heard of Energy Shot products? These are drinks that come with names that would make any product manager who has ever done branding instantly envious: “6 Hour Power”, “Nitro2Go”, “ZipFizz” and of course the market leader “5 Hour Energy”.

These products are packed with caffeine stimulants and lots of other stuff (vitamins and herbs). The promise is that they will allow the drinker to remain alert for hours after drinking one.

As a product manager, who do you think would be the audience for this type of product? At first glance, you would think that students and people who work long hours (think truckers and police) would probably be your target customers. You would be right, more or less.

As you can see, it turns out that the brand managers of all these energy booster injection products seem to have overlooked a very large and important market: the elderly.

How can you make sure you’re not surprised?

What’s happened is that they recently realized that all those Baby Boomers who are starting to approach retirement age don’t want to slow down.

Brand managers didn’t really do any big market research to find out. Rather, the stories began to return to them. They were little things, like big spikes in sales when the product was placed right next to a product that seniors bought (like wrinkle cream) at a store like Costco and it sold out.

Once they began to realize there might be something here, they began using a proven communication channel, the American Association of Retired Persons to reach this demographic. They ran ads in their magazines and attended their trade shows and gave out products.

Clearly, the Energy Shot brand managers had huge market potential right under their noses for a long time before they realized it was there. How can you prevent this from happening to your product?

The key is to keep your eyes open and watch sales of your product – sellers will only care about making the sale, you should care about how much it sold and who bought it.

It turns out that if there is a drop in sales of your product, that can also tell you a lot. You have some assumptions about how much of your product will sell and to whom it will sell. If that’s not happening, then you need to take a closer look and find out where his thinking went wrong.

What all this means to you

As product and brand managers, we are responsible for identifying who we are going to sell our products to. The power injection product managers thought they had done a good job of doing this, however, their market came back and told them they had missed a very large segment.

In the case of the energy injection product, the senior market had a great need for their product: they don’t want to slow down and feel that the product can help them move forward. Once product managers realized this market existed, they were able to adjust their merchandising and begin to address it.

As product managers, we must ensure that we are not overlooking large untapped customer segments for our products. Looking closely at who is buying our products and making sure we investigate unexpected spikes and dips can reveal untapped customer segments. That should give you something to think about the next time you have one of those energy shots!

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