Milk Made: Ice Cream by Subscription

Frozen Hot Toddy (honey ice cream, organic spices, lemon zest, bourbon). Coffee+Donuts (coffee ice cream and chunks of donuts). Sound yummy? These are the January flavors from Milk Made, a company offering a $50, 3-month membership that provide hand-delivered, homemade ice cream in parts of NYC. I'd sure like to try these flavors!

Many entrepreneurs plan to start selling at a local Farmer's Market. But some of these are hard to get into because the vendor demand is so great. Maybe this is an alternative model to consider.

As with anything, good market research will let you know if this is a model that can work for your product. For example, who will buy your product? How much (if anything) will they pay? What geographic area should you target? This is an unexpected model for ice cream, but the questions Milk Made needs to answer are still very similar to those of any other product-based business!

If you're a small foodie business in the SF Bay Area, let me know: I'd like to profile you here.

Fancy Food Show: Market Research Snippet

Here are a few highlights from my primary market research work at the Fancy Food show:

Arette Foods sells organic tea seed oil, cold pressed from the seeds of a cousin to the tea plant. I tried several of the flavors, and they were good. I found myself drawn to the booth because they had signs saying tea oil, and I think we've all been fairly well conditioned to think of tea as healthy for us.

Although Arette is only a year old, I was told that China has been using this oil "for thousands of years." It could be interesting to watch Arette, as it tries to introduce a new healthy (think olive) oil to the American consumer. The person in the booth I spoke with said it had been a challenge so far. Lurking in the background for a few minutes, I watched and listened as two buyers came to the booth and dipped a piece of bread into the sample. They both thought it was good, but didn't request any literature. How many times have you tasted something good but not thought to integrate into your cooking or grocery shopping? I wonder what sort of market research Arette did before launching their line?

Food Trend Alert: Sweet Potato

Food forecasters are saying that the sweet potato is going to be an up and coming food. The sweet potato is loaded with fiber, vitamins B6 and C, and beta carotene. The continuing trend toward healthy eating, plus the simplicity of fixing the sweet potato - pop it in the microwave and in a matter of minutes you have a baked potato - may increase its popularity beyond winter holidays.

How can a food entrepreneur use this information? Here are some examples:

• If you're a baker, try making a sweet potato pound cake.
  
• Own a food cart, or thinking about it? Sweet potato pudding is a very popular recipe. If there's a creme brulee guy, why not a sweet potato pudding or sweet potato pie chick?
• Can you serve locavores by growing sweet potatoes?
• Can you create sweet potato recipes?
• Any other ideas?
  

The key here is to tie your entrepreneurial ideas to a growing trend, then test it to see if there might be a market. The health consciousness of the Bay Area makes it a likely geographic area for a healthy food like the sweet potato to take off. Now you can refine it by considering who is most likely to want to eat healthy.

Nickelodeon Study

Renaissance graduates know that psychographics are critical to launching a new product or service. A study from Nickelodeon is worth a read. Here's a highlight:

“As Millennials become parents and Baby Boomers become grandparents, today’s families are different from what we’ve seen and come to expect from previous generations, in that staying together and playing together are the top priorities among everyone in the household,” said Ron Geraci, Senior Vice President, Nickelodeon Research. “Instead of being divided by tastes and clashing over values and things like music and entertainment choices, today’s parents, kids and grandparents are being drawn closer together by them, as well as embracing new value systems of tolerance and acceptance.”

The study is called The Family GPS, reasearch by Harris Interactive. What do you think about the findings?

Dr. NAICS and Your Classification

I get asked all the time by entrepreneurs who need help determining their NAICS classification. Without doubt, it can be hard to figure out how to classify your new business. What is NAICS, you ask (if you already know this, skip the definition)?

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS, pronounced Nakes) was developed as the standard for use by Federal statistical agencies in classifying business establishments for the collection, analysis, and publication of statistical data related to the business economy of the U.S. NAICS was developed under the auspices of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and adopted in 1997 to replace the old Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system. It was also developed in cooperation with the statistical agencies of Canada and Mexico to establish a 3-country standard that allows for a high level of comparability in business statistics among the three countries. -- official Census Bureau NAICS website

Why should you care? Because if you know how your business is classified, you can use the classification to find other same-classified businesses through a source like ReferenceUSA, and compare your business to others. You'll remember this from our class.

If you have trouble figuring out your NAICS classification, and you've really, really tried, then send an email to Dr. NAICS at naics@census.gov. They ask you to please include your telephone number in your email message in case they need to call you for more information.

International Houseware Association Tradeshow

Entrepreneurs who have taken one of my marketing classes know that I am a big believer in going to tradeshows. You don't need to have a booth to gather invaluable market research.

The International Houseware Association runs the International Home + Housewares Show in the Spring. If you cannot make these tradeshows, sometimes you'll get lucky: an attendee, like a Gourmet Retailer journalist, will write about the trends she/he discovered. In March 2009, Gourmet Retailer published an article that identified the following trends: Living in Our Kitchens, The Wellness Kitchen & Cooking for Fun, Living Within Our Means, and The Green Kitchen. If you're in the food business, these trends are worth checking out.

If you know your industry tradeshow is taking place, be extra-vigilant in visiting related websites, and searching for press releases.

Market Research for Designers: Color Palettes

If you make clothing, handbags, or other accessories, you know you've got to keep up with the hot new colors. You can download a PDF swatchbook from Pantone, called Pantone Fashion Color Report Fall 2009. It's late to be looking at colors for 2009, but it's also free, and if you're still building your line or accessories, it's perfect.

Pantone also publishes the PANTONE VIEW Colour Planner, which is $750. But take a look at their press release: they don't include swatches, but it does discuss the eight palettes for use in women’s wear, menswear, and active wear. palettes

Who's Using Twitter?

Want to do a little market research on who's using twitter? A nifty new tool to use is Buzzom, which makes it easy to find people by by searching the bios of twitterers. You can then decide who you want to follow, and you can do that right from Buzzom too. You need to have a twitter account, so sign up first, then go flit around.

The OTHER Social Media Sites

I taught the first class of the four-week Start your Own Business class at the Ren. Center. Great class, really looking forward to seeing how everyone develops their business ideas.

Next week we'll be talking about how to find where your customers hang out. One area I want to bring up is that there are lots of social media sites BEYOND Facebook.

For example, I like to cook every now and again. Foodbuzz is a social media site focusing on - yep - foodies. I cruised on over to that site when I'm in creative cooking mode. Another site I just heard about is Tip'd, "a community for financial news, ideas, and tips." I'll be checking that out too.

These sites don't have the same overall traffic as Facebook or MySpace. But what they do have is users highly interested in food or finance. If that's your market, that's where you want to be, above being on general social media sites. They also provide an inexpensive, powerful way to increase your understanding of your customers.

Go find your social media sites. Then let us know where you like to hang out.

Learn More From Your Client in 15 Minutes A Day

One of the consistent issues I hear from clients is that they don't like to do research. They have bad visions of being in high school and having to write that book report. "Yuck," they say.

So I've been thinking about this problem for awhile. With good market research, I've seen how it is so much easier for my clients to:

• decide what product or service to sell (!)
• describe their product/service;
• price their product/service;
• design a marketing plan that doesn't waste time or money by being in the wrong place at the wrong time; and
• SELL their product/service

So, what can you accomplish in 15 minutes?

• read your Google alerts
• visit your trade association website
• view a video on survey design fundamentals (this is really only 10 minutes!)
• create a mini survey for your best customers
• call one ongoing customer and check in with them
• call one ongoing customer and ask them the questions from your survey
• create a free survey on survey monkey or zoomerang and send it out to your email list

Got some more ideas?