Please help! Company has developed a new product: Disposable lawn chairs.?

Question

As a marketing director, it's a job to ensure that it sells.

Come up with a name for the product.
What would the public pay for the lawn chair. Explain answer. These chairs have to be out in the public eye. You have $50,000 number of chairs at your disposal. What would one do?

Answer 1

Are you joking? What a waste! What a horrible product for our environment! I thought disposable DVDs were the worst product ever, but this takes the cake.

Answer 2

The naming of your product could be one of the most important decisions you will make. A name's originality and legal availability will create a real asset value of its own, as it becomes marketed and gains market acceptance.

The name you choose will become the focal point of all the benefits and features that relate to your product. Customers will be able to find and refer others to it in the future.

Since any names that are suggested here may already be owned by another party, I wanted to go a different route...

I suggest either hiring a name creation firm or get together with your friends and/or family and throw a "name party" & have everyone bounce some ideas around. Compile a listing of names that you like the best. Once you have that list, do as much free research as you can before you delve into comprehensive research.

I listed some links where you can do some preliminary name checking. However, please be aware that this is merely scratching the surface of what's out there.

Only comprehensive research will tell you if the name is truly available. But, these links are free & a great place to start, so I'd try them out first.

Comprehensive research consists of looking at marks that are similar in Sound, Appearance or Meaning in the pending & registered Federal AND State trademark files as well as the US National Common-Law files.

There are other sites that offer free searching capabilities in conjunction with their commercial services, so I'm not able to post those links due to the Yahoo! TOS. You'll also want to check domain names & yellow pages, so simply do a search for "free domain name search" and "national yellowpages" and the appropriate links will pop up.

Hope that helps! I wish you much success & happiness in all your ventures!

Answer 3

The fundamental flaw is that somebody designed a product before researching the market. Good luck with that. It's just a homework assignment, right?

First of all, you're competing with white plastic that Wal-Mart sells for $4.97 all day. That's pretty close to disposable already, and it doesn't have that negative anti-green image.

Now, if your chairs are bio-degradable, you might have something there. You might put them in the high-end garden catalogs, sell them to places that do a lot of outdoor events like golf courses (weddings), concert venues etc. Heck Home Depot might even run a test. Maybe offer some to the White House for free, so they can use in their Rose Garden events.

But positioning and design are crucial - take a lesson from Target using famous designers to make cheap stuff that doesn't look cheap. Your chairs should be a different, better shape than the standard white plastic ones.

Answer 4

Sit-Eaze - the chair that travels w/ you!
Chair Lite - easy to use, no worries if you lose!
Seat to Go - don't leave home w/ out it, but don't come home w/ it!

Depending on the size (should be 3 - kids, average, big man), a range from $5-$20. They should come in at least 3 colors, and be reusable to a point - think Glad Ware. Also, sell individually and in sets. That would set the price range.

You would want to target the outdoorsy people - fishing, hunting, etc. Show a fisherman losing his chair in the lake, bird hunter just forgeting to bring it in from the field.

Then, show taking them to an outside concert, it starting to rain and the owners running back to the car, w/o the chair. And show a child using one while painting, making a mess in the chair.

Contact me to let me know when I get my free samples! I have a rough and rowdy crowd that would be a great test market.