Helping startups get further, faster.

When designing new products vision is great. Vision is important and the spark of and idea is critical. However, if you are not paying attention to what the customer wants and  needs, you are going to spend too much time selling without really listening, refining and creating a product that creates value and generates revenue.

The key reasons new products tend to have such high failure rates include:

• Lack of market orientation: firms tend to omit many of the critical marketing tasks, particularly those in the early phases of a project. These can range from lack of understanding about customer needs and wants to poor brand strategy and positioning.
• Poor quality of execution: Without an effective roadmap and action plan for new products, projects often run late and over-budget or may not ever make it to market.
• Moving too quickly: Speed to market is often a false economy. When corners are cut mistakes are made, the project moves off target and activities have to be repeated all at great time and money expense.
• Not enough homework: For many new ventures the upfront homework simply doesn’t get done. Projects tend to move from idea through to full-scale development without due diligence.  During this phase the market and product must be defined, the obvious losers should be weeded out, and executive decisions to commit significant resources must be made.
• Lack of product value for the customer: Differentiated products offering unique customer benefits relevant to their needs and wants succeed. Vague value propositions and a lack of benefits cause new products to fail.
• No focus and a lack of resources: Lack of time, money and people is the cause of many execution and operational issues in new product development.  Lack of focus is characterized by spending too much time on trivial issues and diverting attention away from milestones and objectives.
• Lack of a systemic New Product Development process: Without following a structured and systematic process; successfully achieving new product development is an adhoc, expensive exercise. Implementing a process helps entrepreneurs sort out the winning from losing ideas, creating better returns from time and investment devoted to new product development.

New product development is a core service offered by StartUP Marketing. If you’re interested in developing a new product effectively and avoiding these mistakes contact us.