I love marketing, especially new product marketing. What is it about launching a brand that’s so appealing? In a word – immortality. Other than having children, creating and launching a successful brand is a unique opportunity to work on something that will live on long after your professional career is over. If you’re a marketer, there’s nothing better.
Sadly, the odds of any brand you work on outlasting the time you’re a marketer are long. Fewer than 3 percent of the 30,000 consumer products launched in the U.S. each year generate more than $50 million in sales, according to a recent Harvard Business Review article. The vast majority (95 percent) of new products fail. Despite these financial disasters, new-product teams rise from the ashes and try again and again to be one of the few new brands that survive and thrive.
Why such a dismal rate of new brand failures? There are a number of reasons. First, a real consumer need was not meet. Others: it was devoid of a meaningful benefit or its price was too high.
Product Sell Thyself
The most unforgivable reason, and one that is totally within control, though, is a belief that the product will sell itself. You can find this kind of blind arrogance in Silicon Valley and across the United States. Companies and new-product teams are so certain their new product, app, service, website, etc. is so amazing it is going to sell itself. “Wait till this product launch goes viral – people are going to go crazy to get our new _________. There’s going to be a really long waiting list.”
Hate to break bad news, but that’s very likely not happening. First, it’s a long shot your (or any) new brand launch is going to “go viral.” And even if it does, it might not be the kind of brand launch you were hoping for – anybody remember New Coke?
No Strategy
More to the point, the main culprit with unsuccessful launches often is there’s no strategy developed to ensure the product is successfully marketed to a target audience.
Imagine if before a product or service is launched, the launch team had crystal clear alignment and understanding of certain critical questions.
- Who exactly is this product designed for and why it will appeal to them (at a functional and emotional level)?
- What do we want the target audience to do based on the introductory marketing message?
- What’s the primary benefit promise to the target audience and why would its members believe it?
- What will be the look and feel of the introductory brand messaging?
- What media choices are going to be made to get out this initial message to the target audience?
- How will evaluation of the new product’s marketing campaign be handled (i.e. key metrics)?
The ideas for these questions come from the ABCDE method for creating an effective communication brief, outlined in “Crafting Persuasion” (www.craftingpersuasion.com).
The “acid test” is to separate team members and then ask them these questions individually. It is essential they provide consistent answers to the questions. If you study successful product launches, their team members were able to do this, i.e., answer critical strategic questions confidently before product marketing started.
I offer the following examples:
Crown Maple
Robb Turner, whose daytime job is running an energy hedge fund, had a passion for doing something with the mountainous property he had purchased in upstate New York. Robb made a simple yet daunting request. Create the world’s greatest maple syrup brand.
There were a number of key challenges and questions to deal with in creating the brand he envisioned, but eventually Turner and I launched Crown Maple (www.crownmaple.com). The brand has won awards and is about to celebrate its first decade of business.
“Quite possibly the purest maple syrup on Earth” was the tagline. Initially it had a limited distribution. Premium restaurants, bars (for use as a mixer) and grocery chains took the syrup. It also promoted itself as a branded ingredient in a number of premium products (such as chocolate).
Crown Maple launched with a clear vision of its target audience. It aimed at foodies who wanted the very best in whatever comestible they loved. The pricing, packaging and marketing were consistent with this objective.
Once Crown Maple established its premium image, the company increased distribution. It also increased the number and variety of products made under the brand’s name.
Planning Before Launch
We’ll never know if Crown Maple is “the world’s greatest maple syrup.” Still, it has won accolades from the food world and has a large enough following that one can make the argument that it is among the premier brands in its category.
The planning done before the launch of Crown Maple demonstrated the importance and power of being very clear about whom you are going after and what you want the brand to be before you ship the first bottle. I’m confident it is one of those brands that will be around long after I’ve turned in my marketing license.
eBay Express
The first half-dozen years of the 2000s was a heady time for those working at eBay. The company was one of the darlings of the internet. Yet, even then you could sense that the thrill of bidding on an auction item was starting to fade.
The company needed something to keep it growing in line with the explosive expansion of the e-commerce category. Amazon was eating ebay’s lunch. eBay made the decision it needed to diversify from the auction format and start offering fixed price listings.
An incredible amount of work went into developing the fixed price listing platform that become eBay Express. There was extensive in-depth research with buyers and sellers as well as eBay’s development partners. This was a going to be a separate site from eBay.com and would be a real bonus for sellers since their listings would appear on both sites (eBay.com and eBayExpress.com) without additional fees. In April 2006, the site was finally ready to go live.
What’s in a Name? Plenty
Despite the work that went into the launch of this brand, it failed. One issue stemmed from the name. Since eBay was used in the brand name, it ended up confusing users (who loved auctions). Similarly, new customers, who preferred fixed-price listings, were not attracted to it.
eBay Express counted on the popularity of eBay to get it trials. As such, it lacked marketing resources.
Another issue was that consumer research focused too much on existing buyers and sellers and not nearly enough on online buyers. These were the people who were flocking to Amazon and raving about something called Amazon Prime, which launched in 2005.
eBay reached a painful decision in early 2008; eBay express would close. Many of its features reside on eBay.com, where buyers can select between a variety of formats (such as fixed price or auction, new or used, etc.). Perhaps if eBay Express had launched as a new brand, instead of a spin-off from eBay, it would have had more success.
To note, in 2005 eBay launched a site in Canada called Kijiji (www.kijiji.ca) that was an online classified business. It is still doing well today.
Strategy Before Execution
A favorite business mantra is “Strategy Before Execution.” Launching a business that features a new product or service is challenging enough under the best circumstances. The evidence is the sobering rate of new product failures. Creating a brand is not for the faint of heart (or for a lot of VCs).
Give yourself and your team a competitive advantage by taking the time to do some in-depth critical strategic thinking about how you want to market your new product or service before you launch it. Doing that level of strategic planning and work can dramatically increase your odds of success.
Editor’s Note: The ideas in this article are adapted from “Crafting Persuasion,” co-authored with Ed Tazzia and Bob Pearson.
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