Marketing Research on Selling High-End Adult Clothing and Accessories

Our company, which is successful in selling high-end adult clothing and accessories, is now considering about launching an exclusive line of high-end children's clothing. Since children clothing is a completely new market for us, entering in to the market means opportunities and challenges at the same time. As we have no previous experience about selling children’s clothing, it’s will be hard for managers to develop marketing plan for the proposed children's clothing line. Gathering marketing information should be our first step. The information needed can be gathered from our company’s internal data base, the competitive marketing intelligence, and by conducting marketing research. However, the first two methods cannot give us a full picture about the potential market and fit the specific situation that we are facing. Marketing research, which is a systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data, can give us insights into customer behavior and satisfaction. Thus, only by doing a detailed, impartial and relevant marketing research that helps us to better understand customers' wants and needs as well as the competitive environment, can we devote ourselves to the new product line. In our marketing research, we need to understand the preferences of potential customers, their behaviors and mentality, the size of our target market, as well as identify and evaluate our competitors.

In general, there are four steps in the process of marketing research, defining the problem and research objective is the first step. As we are clear that we are going to enter the high-end children’s clothing market, we will use descriptive research method to know the market potential for a product or the demographics and attitudes of consumers. We can ask about people’s attitude about high-end children’s clothing, what items, product features, and service aspects they feel are important, why people want to buy it and what criteria they want us to meet because some people focus on the brand, thus we will sell more famous brands clothing, others may concern more about the material and comfort level, thus we will strict control the quality of our clothing form the suppliers. Thus, only by doing descriptive researches we are able to know what specific kinds of clothing people are expecting. Then, for the pricing issue, we can do the casual research to know about our customer’s price sensitivity. We can design questions like: would you accept a 5% percent of price increasing in children’s clothing which will bring you a much higher quality. As we know about consumer’s preferences, we can set our prices properly.