Read
New Product Success - How do some firms succeed, on a regular basis?
by Steve Brody, Associate
The answer could be the development of a corporate culture that tolerates mistakes and risk taking.
What is the value of mistakes? Does your company know how to turn mistakes into lessons learned and opportunities?
If so, you have probably figured out one of the secrets to New Product Success. That secret is that most success with new products do not occur based on a nice, neat plan. But rather, someone with keen observation skills, noticed something that was not working, and then had the creativity to make changes and revisions and go back to the marketplace and try again.
So ask your employees this question. What happens when people make mistakes and how are they treated? Are they punished or criticized when they fail? The answer will give you an indication of your company's internal culture and value system with respect to taking risks. And their willingness to try new things.
If you want to develop successful new products or services, learn to be great at observing your customer’s behavior and get out of the prediction game, where your internal people think they know how your audience will react to new ideas. Observe more and predict less. The great marketers use this empirical approach and repeat it over and over again.
It has been reported that at 3M every month, management hands out awards for failures. Failures!!!! Why would they want to encourage failures? Or are they really creating an environment where risk taking and innovation are encouraged? They know that if people do not try a lot of things…..you don’t have much chance of tripping over the unplanned success.
When you're developing a new product, it's almost impossible to predict success. However, you can significantly limit your failures if you create a structured process and increase the number of times that employees have to try new things. Don't look for home runs every time; instead, aim for numerous singles. Be prepared for a great deal of trial and error and take the time to get plenty of customer feedback. Start with your staff for feedback, so you don't have a blank sheet of paper, then turn to your customers for even more valuable insights.
Pay attention to what customers do, not what they say. Find ways to observe behavior.
After developing a new product, it's important to find ways to gain commercial exposure by testing. That means asking customers to purchase the product. It's not enough to just ask customers about their interest or purchase intent. To get a true reading, they actually have to make a choice.
Many times people will tell you things about your product that they think you want to hear, but their behavior belies what they say. When I was in the orange juice business, we conducted focus groups with women who had young children living at home. There were 10-12 people in a room, and I sat behind a one-way mirror, observing. A facilitator asked the participants, "What do you serve your children to drink?" The mothers would always reply, "I only serve my kids orange juice and apple juice, because it's nutritious. I don't let them drink anything else." Of course, that's the acceptable thing to say in front of other mothers.
Through additional research, called diary panels, we observed their actual behavior. There we found two containers of orange juice to ten containers of soft drinks. Away from the other mothers, they would break down and admit that many times they in fact, did not serve their children just juice. The secret is to observe what they do; you will learn more about your product and its use.
The key is to receive feedback from your audience, on a regular basis. But, if you are a small to medium size firm, how do you do this on an affordable basis? Large firms can spend significant dollars on professional market research but what can you do? I have used with several of my clients a very affordable, web based, research tool called Zoomerang.com. This is a preformatted market research vehicle that is easily administered as long as you have email addresses of your audience or prospects. You can choose the type of study, for example: customer satisfaction, product awareness, concept proposal. You could even use it for employee matters to include: employee morale, satisfaction, 360 degree review format. And you can receive up to 10,000 responses for less than $2000 including some consultant design assistance. A price that any small to midsize business can afford.
So learn to make failures your friend, not your undertaker. Create lessons learned from efforts that do not work initially...seek feedback from your audience...make revisions, then go back out to the market and try your revised idea again. It just might work this time!!! My wish for you is many failures….but may they be small ones….so that you can go back again and repeat the process, and then may you trip over that idea that may just be your next BIG SUCCESS!! Happy trials.
More articles...
