NEW PRODUCT INTRODUCTIONS
NEW SERVICE INTRODUCTIONS
PROPOSITION DEVELOPMENT
As a small, medium, large or even global enterprise there will be sections or individuals in your business who will want to innovate. They believe they have an idea, which may be ’the future of our business’ - it may also be a reaction to what the competition have just launched. Either way it can provide an interesting opportunity or a potentially costly venture.
We have worked with clients across many different sectors: from construction products to cloud based services - to help them really understand the potential for their next innovation or variation. This may include a new product or service recently launched, which is under performing or one under consideration.
Our experience has shown that often the concept and rationale behind a new innovation is sound but it is the launch approach and execution, which often falls short and as a result, the idea itself bears the brunt of the criticism rather than the approach. The end result being a shelving of the idea with little chance of it being revisited as the company (or rather certain individuals) will take the view that: “we tried that once and it didn’t work”.
It is human nature to avoid pain, which is sometimes disguised as RISK. It’s easy for companies to continue doing what they’ve always done but this inertia is a risk in itself.
Those companies who continue to succeed, continue to innovate.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Our Approach:
We do not claim to be a market research company in the traditional sense. Whilst our activities gather insight, we typically follow on from where market research companies stop.
We have come across numerous examples where according to all the research, your new product or service should have been a roaring success - but it wasn’t.
A research company will follow a brief. Often the brief is based on knowledge of your existing business or market and some educated assumptions on where you may want to lead the research. However, capturing research saying prospective customers would buy your new product or service vs. actually making the purchase can be poles apart.
Our insight gathering goes further and market testing goes further, it goes beyond the research to get to the root issues and therefore the real solutions. This is best explained with some real life examples (company identities have been protected for confidentiality).
Company A typically services the B2B market and creates a new product, which provides benefits for the end consumer - at a premium.
All the market research indicates that this is a benefit consumers would pay extra for such benefits.
Company A sells through distributors, who sell to installers, who have the final interaction with end consumers.
Company A has relationships with their distributors only and therefore they focus all their sales and marketing efforts on influencing the distributors to order and promote this product to the installers focussing on product features and consumer benefits. The installers believe that consumers want the cheapest option and are therefore are not willing to buy a more expensive product from the distributor as this would be a risk to their business. The few installers who bought the product didn’t have support either in installing the product or in communicating the benefits effectively to their customers. Their negative experience was shared in forums.
As a result the distributor had vey little sales, placed no repeat orders with Company A and was left with a bitter experience, which will leave a negative impression for any future new product introductions. Company A begins the internal process of why (who is to blame) for this failure.
By gathering insights from the whole supplier chain an alternative approach would be to focus on supporting the installers. Do they need training, do they need sales & marketing materials to help them promote the product once they understand how this can give their business a boost? However, can or does Company A want to develop relationships with a new channel of installers and what are the cost implications of doing this vs. the speed of reward?
We would typically suggest that to truly answer such questions TEST, TEST, TEST - run some pilots. The insights and learning through pilots ultimately a lower cost and risk approach, whilst providing a deeper appreciation of how to grow (or ditch) your new proposition compared to full blown launch and failure.
Other by products from pilots and tests is that this approach can reveal a totally new channel opportunity for your product. Another example:
Company B provides cloud based services aimed at the micro business sector. They continually add new features to their product suite and believe that they are very competitive based on their feature rich product suite, which offers more functionality than their nearest competitor. What they initially failed to realise was that micro business customers were scared of by the level of functionality and didn’t feel comfortable paying for something when they would only ever use 20% of what is could do.
However, this increased level of functionality meant that Company B created a product ideal for the medium enterprise market. Once they had an understanding of this, they moved focus from on-line sales & marketing activity, to face to face sales - following a successful pilot.
Depending on you existing in-house resource, we can follow this whole process through from insight gathering through to sales sourcing or training.
To explore further, complete the contact form, or leave a message on 0115 647 6477 today.
LET'S WORK
#TOGETHER
You want to grow your business. Let us help!