Assignment 29A

With so many students going to college now, it's easy to see why there is an opening in the market for a bag that would work for college students for many uses. College students are facing increasing costs of living, with increased importance on trying to save space and live in smaller areas. Many students live in very small apartments, or even in dorm rooms. These students do not have very much space and also very little extra money so even if they did have the space to store multiple bags it is unlikely that they would purchase them anyway.  Because of this many of today's college students find themselves without a proper bag for many overnight stays. geographically there's no real indication for where this market is, but rather it is with all of the college students we have no room for a bag or even business travelers who face unexpected conditions and never know how much stuff they need to pack. The market is definitely defined more to the younger people, due to the fact that they tend not to own homes and don't have the space that may be required to store multiple bags. There is very little in the market now to satisfy this need for the customer, so they have no loyalty if there were to be a better option I'm sure they would switch easily. Typically people in the situation now are trying to find ways to take up less space with storing more bags or simply use one bag for every purpose. I would not say that this opportunity is huge, as it is mostly selling to college students who have very little extra money. But this is a very real issue for many of these college students so I'm sure that many of them would be happy to purchase an item I would make things easier for them. I believe this window of opportunity will be opened for a while but not for much longer as someone else is sure to enter the market to begin selling these bags for multiple purposes to these college students and business travelers. It's a fairly simple opportunity but one that is relatively untouched so far in the market as many companies who create bags started to categorize their bags into how many nights they can carry worth of clothing.

The innovation in my product is the ability to change the dimensions of the bag to suit your needs exactly. This is achieved through a series of zippers and pockets that allow the bag to be unzipped and expanded in many different areas to change your company simply one or two nights to a full week. The bag is a relatively easy thing to manufacture and can be done by small local textile companies. The costs of production would increase a lot once sales exceed what can be done by a small supplier, but once the shift is made to a large manufacturer, the costs should start to decrease overall. I would like to be selling this bag for around $60 as I believe many people will find use from this bag, but I don't think it will be something that they purchased more than once. The innovation here really revolves around the understanding of constraints within the home in storage, and ideally college students like myself but no longer have to try and make do with one bag that's huge or way too small because we don't have the space to store multiple bags. The goal with this product is to allow customers to have one bag that they can zip up and make very small and easy to store, and when the need arises, expand the bag to fit their needs for that specific moment. I would like customers to see this bag as one bag to fit all their needs no matter how long the trip may be.

People who live in very small homes like college students will no longer have the issue of trying to store multiple bags for multiple occasions but instead will just have the one bag that they can use for all of their needs. I believe that customers will buy this innovation because it solves an issue that not many people really realize exists for them until the situation arises where they're trying to pack for a trip and realize they have only one bag and it does not suit their needs for this trip. This difficulty in identifying the issue means that people are not normally looking for solution as they would only really be interested in the solution during the same time as they’re experiencing the issue and this means that would marketing the product we will have to remind consumers of the issue in order to make them desire the solution that we provided. I don't think it will be very hard to get consumers to switch to this product due to the fact that there are very few solutions out there that do the same thing. As of now, it seems that the most prevalent solution is simply own one bag and try to make do with it whether it's cramming tons of stuff in it or caring one huge bag for one night away. I believe that college students and business travelers who have this issue will see that this product we have provided is very helpful and I think they will switch with great ease.

I received some positive feedback letting me know my idea was well thought out and detailed. The best feedback I got through was letting me know how helpful it would be to include some kind of cost structure or understanding. I used this and tried to explain how costs would work for creating these bags, but without solid numbers, I can't provide an exact cost structure. I hope that with some explanation of how costs would work for creating and selling these bags, people will have a better understanding of how it all works.