To me, the key to success in a business is gaining constructive feedback from your customers. Getting feedback allows you to improve your product and make it more appealing towards your target audience. To be able to do this we were given the opportunity to participate in a markets on the common where we then decided we would conduct our product validation.
My plan for the product validation was to make 20-30 cookies of the 3 different flavours and icing design (As stated in my previous post the custom icing didn’t work out) then give them out for free in return for them to complete a Microsoft forms that would give me the feedback based off what my customers opinion of the cookie that they’d tasted. This would then allow me to see which cookie flavour would be the most popular in future upcoming markets.
Altogether I would say that the market was quite successful as many customers enjoyed my cookies and gave good feedback. I also gained some feedback from friends who ordered some giving me some more money in future markets meaning that I wouldn’t have lost any from this one.
The results from my forms are shown below:
My first aim was to find out who my customer was so by finding out the age group and gender would help me identify who my target audience was.
The median price for the vanilla was $1.50, chocolate was $1.25 and lemon was $1.50. Getting these opinions then showed me how much to sell my cookies for, so I decided that I’d sell 1 for $1.50. In terms of the bigger batches of cookies the median prices for vanilla $4, for chocolate $4 and for lemon $5. In my opinion I wasn’t going to sell a big batch of cookies for that much as it would cost me 50cents to produce 1 cookie meaning that my unit price was $1. I’m still unsure about how much to sell the pack of 4 cookies for but am thinking about either $3 which would give me a $1 unit price or $3.50 which would give me a $1.50 unit price.
Some things that I would like to improve from my product validation market in terms of presentation and advertising would be to think about the presentation of my stall before the day of the market as when it came to the day the only things that I had was 1 poster and my cookies in a box meaning that it wasn’t as clear what flavour the different cookies were. I’d say that I also wasn’t the clearest in terms of what my customers were required to do and should’ve made a poster on what to do as many customers kept on continuously asking “How much do they cost” and their understanding of what was required wasn’t the clearest.
To me the most important thing is to see ways how you can improve your cookies. In the last question which was optional I asked them to give any ways that I could improve. The first was to include a new flavour which was choc chip and the second was to make it softer and chewier.
Despite receiving good feedback and having no cookies left by the end there would be many things that I would want to improve on in terms of presentation for future markets. I was happy that we’d done this product validation and am excited to present my improved cookies at later markets after I continue with more ideating.