Market Research: Does It Matter?

If you want to sell your own perfume you have to look at it as a business. If this is a new business for you, you have to do your homework before you invest. When someone buys a pizza parlour, a bowling alley, or a health club they look into the situation before they sign the papers. They consider the neighborhood, the customer base, whether the existing business is actively growing or declining, and whether the business is likely to produce enough revenue to cover expenses and still yield a profit.

Perfume is no different.

To make sales you need customers. Before you invest you need to assure yourself that you will have enough customers to make your project profitable. You do this by preparing a business plan and before you can develop a realistic business plan you need to conduct some market research.

The most important questions are, "Are there people who will buy my perfume?" and "How will I go about selling it to them?"

In short, you need to know who your customers will be and how you will make sales to them.

This cannot be vague. This cannot be wishful thinking. You have to have a realistic, practical, way to make sales or you cannot be in the perfume business.

Anyone can make a perfume to sell but not everyone can make sales.

What is your plan?

 When you first thought of launching a perfume, how did you plan to sell it? Did you plan to do the selling yourself or were you banking on turning sales over to some other organization (Walmart? Macy's?) that you thought would do the selling for you? If it's the second case, have you looked into the vendor requirements for these stores? These requirements are published on the stores' websites. Reading them will give you some sense of the steep climb you will have and the money and management skills that will be required to develop a relationship with a major chain.

More realistically, if you want to be in the perfume business, you'll find a way to make sales -- yourself -- by carving out some sort of niche for yourself.  (Read "61 Basic Strategies For Selling Your Own Perfume" for ideas.)

If you are approaching this business in a practical way, you'll be working to make a profit on a small scale initially rather than getting in way over your head and taking a colossal loss.

If starting small doesn't appeal to you, you might not be a good candidate for owning your own business.

Market Research For You

I've started a series of articles on market research on a scale anyone can undertake. This series appears on my other blog, "Learning To Make Perfume." It seems to apply to both making and marketing perfume as, if you're trying to make perfume to make money, you need to answer a few basic questions first. These answers can be fetched through some very simple, inexpensive, market research. They are essential.