A trip around the convention floor of any industry trade convention dramatizes the significant levels of investment and priority given to new product innovation, it is ironic that misfires occur all too often on the path to securing sustainable retail traction.

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What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

• If you build it, they will come – a mistaken belief that an optimal product will sell itself. Rarely, if ever, does that turn out. Even great products fail because of this point of view.
• Brought in too late – we’re retained late in the game to apply a layer of outreach tactics and as such likely devoid of the strategic foundation that guides relevance and resonance.
• No consumer insight to inform approach and messaging – essentially, we’re flying blind on how best to achieve authentic resonance with the consumer.
• Complicated story – people just won’t burn the mental calories to decipher a complex, dense proposition that self-promotes a new solution technology.
• Spray and pray – without the proper homework upfront to define cohorts most likely to buy, the media defaults to pursuing all things to all people, a classic recipe for connection failure.
• Pushing features, benefits and analytical arguments – at a human hardwired to make decisions and take action based on emotional cues and their feelings about the brand.

The smarter play here is a considered, strategic approach with experienced hands helping guide the decisions and plan development. Failing to apply the right approach can be costly in unrealized business because consumers aren’t swarming to buy.

In this product launch strategy guide we will dive into the best practices that will impact your new product introduction success rate.

What We Hope For…

• This is a top planning priority because so much is riding on the outcome
• Everyone is acutely aware of the failure rate of new product launches
• The team has appreciation for getting it right, given first impressions matter greatly
• We’re on board early because our instincts and strategic view honed over decades of directing successful launches are sought after

We have witnessed over and over the unique alchemy of how story, insight, neuroscience, relevance, resonance and strategy play out in helping create new product wins. Especially when the innovation involved is truly a swing for “new” vs. the more common line extension that is really a modest effort to extend the status quo. Some believe this is less risky but then the win is also proportionate compared with the solid gains from launching of a bright new category.

Product Launch Law #1 – Different Is Better Than Better

“Better than” is code for the same, only by degree improved, and that is not a competitively sustainable proposition. Better reinforces sameness, which commoditizes your brand.

Important decisions will inevitably be made in how to package and present new product innovation stories. There will be great temptation to focus on the formulation and specs, given its legacy precedence in CPG marketing. However, people don’t buy fact-based arguments. That said, knowing the food and beverage marketplace can be a sea of similarity in product presentations, it’s important to note here that sound strategy is founded on the opposite: a laser focus on uniqueness and differentiation.

Said another way, your ability to dial an innovation far enough to the left or right that a new category is formed, one that you own and therefore are the “only” option vs. one of many. Some marketers may believe that familiarity is a virtue. While it’s important to present new products in ways that make sense to people, familiarity can also be a trap. Different is usually sticky, memorable and persuasive. “Another one” is less engaging and will require more spending in the chase for competitive “awareness” — at the expense of singularity and a unique story.

Product Launch Principle #2 – The Curious And Reliable Impact Of The Bandwagon Effect

All humans are emotional creatures. We’re systemically concerned about perceived risk, so we look for permission to buy from credible voices. Perceived popularity of something new acts as a form of crowd verification. When multiple sources agree, it can be all that’s needed to tip the scale to trial. That’s why we intentionally plan for what we call the “bandwagon effect.” Based on early adopter audience characteristics, we look for media channels and social platforms where a story in multiple locations will create an impression that the innovation is gaining momentum, popularity and acceptance thus acting as reassurance the buyer won’t be disappointed. We’re always working to build in a sense of certainty.

Product Launch Principle #3 — Insight, Insight And More Insight

Wouldn’t you agree that a resonant story has a better shot at engagement? Thus, why deep dive consumer insight research is never a bad idea. Insight in this case is about understanding their lives and attitudes more fully — their own wants, needs, desires, fears and aspirations. Connecting your new product to lifestyle relevance is essential for engagement. Their views of your brand, what they believe about you and themselves can be an eye-opener to gaps in the story that need closing. This sensitivity to human understanding is essential to success.

Moreover, we learn exactly how to speak to them in language they will see themselves in. Some leadership teams think they inherently know what the consumer believes. It’s been our experience that a fair amount of this is likely misinformed, while exploratory research will unearth relevant insights into their lives that you can connect to storytelling for added context.

• In our view this is how you place the consumer at the center of your planning efforts and work backwards from there. The more you know, the better the communication gets because it is truly a mirror of user lives and priorities.

New Product Launch Practices 

Here’s some top-level guidance we routinely build into new product launch strategies. How this is done specifically will forever and always be based on the brand’s unique heritage, story, advantages, purpose and mission. That said, this represents the hit parade of de-risking new product introductions.

1. Purchase Decision Science And The Rule Of Emotion

We know from neuroscience that the decisions and actions taken by every human centers in the limbic region of the brain. This amazing part of our anatomy is driven by emotion not analytical arguments. Want to influence a purchase decision? Let emotion be your guide rather than specsmanship.

This always about context and how the product fits into the consumer’s lifestyle as an enabler on their journey to a happier, healthier and more secure life. It’s how they feel about your brand more than the details of ingredients, sourcing, recipe and manufacturing technique.

2. Consumer Is Always The Hero

Brands notoriously default to talking about themselves and product features to the detriment of consumer engagement. Every consumer wakes up every day believing they are the hero of their life journey. Your storytelling should focus on the consumer, their lifestyle wants, needs and desires. Your brand should be an essential partner on their journey and should serve as their guide and coach. In terms of communications effectiveness, when brands talk incessantly about themselves it competes with the consumer for the hero role, putting the brand in conflict with them right out of the gate. They will simply move on, continuing to search for a brand that is focused on their aspirations.

3. Identify And Remove Any Lingering Sense Of Risk Or Uncertainty

Research continues to reinforce — the most significant barrier to trial and acceptance of new products is any perceived risk of making a bad decision. It is human to avoid disappointment and so if there’s any sense of uncertainty in how the purchase will turn out, consumers usually walk away. This is where validation and verification of what you want them to believe is essential to the assurance and certainty they crave.

Outside expert, credible voices can be effective here to affirm what you want people to believe and then accept the promises you’ve made. Trust is everything and courting it is an active and intentional effort on the brand’s part. This core move is often missing in the launch scheme.

4. The Role Of Higher Purpose, Deeper Meaning And Values

Trust is essential to new product launch traction. The best way to earn that trust is the extent you correctly mine your brand’s “why” – its higher purpose and mission that transcends commerce (profit motive) and represents an expression of your beliefs and values.

Simply stated consumers care more about why you do what you do than either what or how. People want to be part of something greater than themselves so give them something to believe in. This will help imbue your brand with a value system that exudes integrity. The impact of this helps seed rapid acceptance of your innovations.

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5. Awareness Versus Relevance

Chasing awareness has been a dominant feature of CPG marketing for decades. It is usually founded on ‘better than’ thinking instead of differentiation, the real fuel for new product attraction and growth. Yes, consumers need to be ‘aware’ but media tonnage as a tool can be expensive and counterproductive, when the real thing you’re after is engagement founded on emotional connection feeding brand evangelism.

6. Core Message And Story Packaging

Authenticity matters here. That said your story should aim for differentiation and new category creation. How you package and present the innovation story is vital to making this work. Strive for separation from everything else at shelf. Always look at this in the context of solutions to problems consumers are trying to answer that they can only get from you. It’s always about them and their priorities. This is what we mean by correctly “packaging” the story.

7. Launch And Leave

We have spent enough time in the saddle here to observe the all-too-frequent move of heavy up outreach at launch and then three months later going dark, hoping the brand will make it after retail trial incentives have been deployed. However, your product likely hasn’t as yet reached “habit” status, so sustaining levels of investment matter as you move to remind consumers why they made the right decision in the first place.

New products are the lifeblood of your business plan. It’s worth substantial financial gains to think strategically through this process, with the consumer firmly positioned at the center of your thinking and work backwards from there. Retail marketing support is vital in this grand effort due in no small part to the challenges of a crowded shopping environment where products often appear to be identical brand-to-brand.

• Consumer relevance and resonance is the key to your success, thus why knowing them as well as you know your own family members is vital. If you begin here, the rest of what you do will benefit from it.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

How do you keep top-of-mind? And more importantly, how do you stop the inevitable awareness fade as the ripples from your big splash die away? If you’re Walt Disney, you start introducing shorts between your new features, just to keep up awareness of your most popular and lucrative characters. And you do so knowing that such a cue will reactivate interest and re-kick merchandise sales.

Cross-referencing in order to cross-sell. Nothing new in that – except that here it’s happening at a launch. When Disney released Cars 2 for example, audiences were reintroduced to the key characters from Toy Story in a six-minute short. As Albie Hecht observes in BusinessWeek, “It’s a way to extend the characters and the brand without its fans waiting two or three years for a new movie.”

There’s a lesson here.

It’s tempting for brands to think of their products as separate offerings within an overall branding portfolio. They co-ordinate launches to work alongside one another. But what Disney’s strategy shows is how simple and cost-effective it is to provide customers with added-value experiences based on other brands in the stable that they already know and to use these to maintain relevance and top-of-mind between launches without cannibalizing on new offers. All Disney has essentially done is take a format that everyone knows – the movie short – and to elaborate it into an enter-mercial (my new term for a short-movie length commercial that entertains).

Just as interesting is where this development might point other brands.

Increasingly, my sense is that brands will need to look at running longer storylines; stories that they interweave throughout their portfolios at varying degrees of emphasis and that they reintroduce to customers at opportune moments. Cross-referencing and in-jokes pull people in, get them engaged and generate a very real sense of inclusion that heightens the experience. The secret, as Disney has seen, is to make the ‘guest appearance’ significant enough for people to notice without it overshadowing the main event. Six minutes is long enough to do that.

I perceive such appearances as powerful by-the-way opportunities – with the major advantage of course being that they already come pre-packed with familiarity, loyalty and intrigue. New can be exciting. But sometimes, learning what’s new about something customers think they already know can be mighty effective.

Perhaps the new question as you plan your next brand launch is ‘what can we leverage?’

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Trying to be everything for everybody undermines a clear perception of what makes you special or different. If Volvo is to preempt “safety,” they can’t be a convertible or a fancy-looking car that tries to compete with BMW and Mercedes. And they have to innovate new safety ideas.

Convergence is the opposite of sacrifice, as it is all about products that do more. And it’s hard to avoid predictions about converging products in the worlds of computing, communications, consumer electronics, entertainment and publishing.

These predictions go way back. A July 18, 1993, front-page story in Newsday predicted that convergence will cause the eventual demise of videotapes, video stores, newspapers, TV channels, telephone operators, the Yellow Pages, mail-order catalogs, college textbooks, library card catalogs, beepers, VCRs, checkbooks and cassette players.

(We suspect you’ve noticed that many things expected to go away are still alive and well. So much for that prediction.)

More recent predictions have telephones, video, and the Internet all converging at our television sets. Even the cartoonists are getting into the act. Our favorite has a gentleman with his large-screen Sony on his shoulder saying hello into it.

If you study history, convergence rarely happens. Products that do more than they should are quick to die.

In 1937, we had the convertoplane, a combination of helicopter and airplane that never got off the ground. Neither did the 1945 Hall Flying Car or the 1947 Taylor Aerocar.

In 1961, Amphicar was the first combination boat and automobile. The idea sank. (People figured they could park their boat at the marina and get into their car and drive home.)

In recent times, we had AT&T’s EO Personal communicator–a cellphone, fax machine, personal organizer and per-based computer with e-mail. Then there was Okidata’s Doc-it, a desktop printer, fax, scanner and copier. Finally, we were introduced to a PDA, or Apple’s Newton, which was a message pad, fax, beeper, calendar and pen-based computer. All of these are no longer with us.

In a recent New York Times article, Joe Nocera brilliantly outlined the battles underway in the world of smart phones. Palm was wildly successful with organizers; then they introduced the unreliable and unremarkable Treo, essentially an organizer that makes phone calls as well. As Ryan Block, the editor of the consumer electronics blog Engadget observed, “Palm has lost its way.” They are not alone.

BlackBerrys are great at e-mail, but the phone is barely adequate. The Motorola Q crashes almost as often as the Treo. The Apple iPhone is terrific for music and media, but lousy for e-mail and phoning. For marketing reasons, everybody is trying to cram all these complicated features into ever-sleeker, ever-thinner boxes, while also adding longer battery life, and so on. Invariably, smart-phone designers have to make compromises that mean some functions don’t work especially well.

There is also the issue of heritage. All the big smart phone companies are coming at the device from a different starting point. Motorola has its roots in cellphones; not surprisingly, that’s what works best on the Motorola Q. Apple has the iPod and computing in its heritage, so it does music and media well. BlackBerry began as a mobile e-mail company, which is why its e-mail is so much better than everybody else’s.

Creating products that do more than one thing requires sacrifice of a different kind. Designing multifunctional products forces your designers to give up what could be an outstanding single-function design for a lesser design that accommodates the extra functions.

Can a great car be a great boat at the same time? Of course not. If you want a really fast car, get a Ferrari. A fast boat? Get a Cigarette boat.

Can a great Formula One racing tire be great for a passenger car? Of course not. (Racing tires often don’t have any tread.)

People want the best of the breed, not a mutt that contains several breeds. They don’t want to give up important features so that they can do other things with it. Just because you can build it is no insurance that people will buy it.

If your difference is that your product can do a lot of things not very well as opposed to a product that does one thing exceptionally well, you haven’t got much of a difference.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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