Every brand has a set of core products. These products are synonymous with your brand, define your brand identity, and draw customers to your store. As a result, they directly affect your bottom line.
It is therefore critical that you pay close attention to these products while performing inventory management and planning marketing strategies.
However, before you can maximize the potential of your core products, you must first understand their unique attributes and learn how to identify them.
What Is a Core Product?
Simply put, a core product is the most prominent product or service that your brand is known for. This is the product that people automatically associate with you. It’s also the product from which they expect the most value.
For instance, here’s a well-known example:
Vans heavily leans on five classic styles. These are the Era, Old Skool, Slip-on, Authentic, and Sk8-Hi. These shoes have significant cultural relevance which keeps customers loyal and encourages repeat business (thereby increasing sales revenue as a result!). Today, the brand is worth over $2.3 billion and when anyone mentions Vans, these are the styles that instantly spring to mind.
Why Define Your Core Products?
Most of the shoppers visiting your store are likely searching for these products. Whether that is your website, mobile app, or even kiosk, in all likelihood, your core products are going to be your bestsellers. The 80/20 rule applies here: 80% of the time, your customers will purchase 20% of your products.
As a result, the display of and access to your core products will most directly affect the overall customer experience. Should customers come to you in search of your core products only to find them out of stock, they are probably going to be greatly disappointed. In the worst-case scenario, you might end up losing those customers for good.
However, you can avoid such situations by properly managing and merchandising your core products. If you’ve defined your core products, you can then pay close attention to their inventory levels and ensure that they’re restocked whenever inventory begins to run low.
Importance of Product Selection and Core Products
As a brand, you have complete control over which products to promote as your core products. Remember, these products are the ones that people will associate with your brand so they need to be selected carefully.
Your product selection process should start with market surveys to determine how your customer base feels about your products. Based on these surveys, you can narrow down your core product list. You might then consider the product pricing to figure out the optimal amount. Typically affordable products sell in higher quantities while expensive ones may have larger profit margins.
Finally, you need to decide on the number of core products you should have. Typically, a small selection of products that satisfy most customer needs is best. It’s also easier to manage inventory levels when you’re dealing with five core products instead of 20 or more.
How to Market Core Products Online?
Now that you know all about core products and how to select them, you need to learn how to promote them. Here’s how to effectively market your core products online.
Highlight Core Products with Online Visual Merchandising
Visual merchandising is one of the best ways to showcase your core products. You can leverage a wide range of visuals–from images and GIFs to videos–to display the core products in your online store.
The goal is to highlight your core products. While you should do this for all your products, it’s important to pay special attention to these iconic items. Make sure you:
- Keep them at the top of the page, i.e above the fold
- Increase the size of their thumbnails
- Use the best, most eye-catching visuals possible
To arrange your storefront, you can leverage our Smart Merchandiser platform. It has a visual drag-and-drop storefront manager you can use to shift products to their optimal location, which makes visual merchandising easy.
Establish Iconic Core Products with eCommerce Merchandising
How do you make sure your online customers instantly recognize your core products? Here are some recommendations:
- Display them in related products
- Show them among the recommended products from your brand
- Include them in every relevant product collection
- Add them to the “Frequently bought with” section
- Display them prominently in their respective categories
With Smart Merchandiser, you can achieve all of this seamlessly. You can arrange all the products on your website storefront using its drag-and-drop builder. Additionally, you can leverage advanced business rules to place them in prominent spots.
Keep Core Products In-Stock with Smart Merchandiser
Finally, when you’re dealing with your core products, it’s important to ensure that they’re always in stock. A core product stockout can disappoint your customers and harm your brand image. You might also end up losing those customers to other competitors.
To avoid this, you must always keep an eye on your inventory levels. Manually managing your inventory can lead to a host of headaches. That’s why it’s helpful to leverage an inventory management platform like Smart Merchandiser.
This tool gives you the ability to define your core products based on attributes like conversion rates or page views. You can also set alerts so that you’re notified whenever their inventory levels fall below a particular threshold. Also, the Smart Merchandiser platform makes it easy to get a real-time run-down of the inventory levels of all your products anytime you need one.
Conclusion
Core products are the lifeblood of any brand and you must define them for your business.
To promote these core products, you must highlight them in your store and place them in prominent positions on product listing pages. Additionally, you should add them to product collections and make sure that you use the best visuals to market them. Finally, you must monitor their stock levels continuously so you never miss a potential sale or disappoint a brand loyalist.
Smart Merchandiser is designed to make e-commerce easy so get in touch with us today to schedule a demo.