Market Research

Big companies dump a ton of money into market research to see if their new product ideas will actually catch on in the consumer market. So what's a small company - with a very limited budget - to do? Up until now I've been mainly going by my gut but I'm beginning to wonder if that's necessarily the best course of action. As I look at the new products I'm thinking about introducing in 2008 I realize they fall into one of two catagories:
1. Products that are in line with current market trends or I've had a substational number of retailers ask for a similar type product
2. It sounds good to me

To try and offset some of the risk involved with those products that fall into catagory #2 I'm thinking about doing a little market research of my own. Of course, I'm trying to make it as cheap as possible. First of all I realized I'm going to tap into my business school's network of over-eager graduate students and have them do some of the market research for me. Business schools are actually a pretty under-utilized asset for small businesses and many business school classes require some sort of work with a real company. My bschool has a marketing research course that almost everyone takes and it requires student teams to work on a real-world problem for a real-world company. Best of all, they do the work for free. Granted, sometimes you get what you pay for but I figure it's worth a shot. Which reminds me I need to get in touch with the department head before the end of their fall quarter.

The second thing I'm thinking of doing to test the product is try to get a booth at one of the local farmer's markets and simply see how/if the product sells/what do consumers say about it, etc. I'm still not totally set on this idea and have a meeting scheduled with a friend who launched her company via one of the local farmer's markets to discuss the idea further. The benefits to this idea is that the farmer's markets in my area are very popular and get a ton of foot traffic so it could prove to be a really useful tool. The markets are also relatively cheap and there's always the chance that any revenue brought in could help offset my production space costs in the slower summer months. On the other hand, it means I have to be there week-in and week-out and if the idea totally flops then that could make for a very long summer!