New Product Development

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.  Other 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: With­out fol­low­ing a struc­tured and sys­tem­atic process; suc­cess­fully achiev­ing new prod­uct devel­op­ment is ambi­tious. How­ever, sys­tems must not be too bureau­cratic they must be a sim­ple process that an entre­pre­neur can apply to every new prod­uct they launch.

New prod­uct devel­op­ment is a core ser­vice offered by StartUP Mar­ket­ing. As one of the only mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies to focus solely on start-ups, we have exten­sive expe­ri­ence in launch­ing and devel­op­ing new prod­ucts and ven­tures.  Our mis­sion is to ensure our clients don’t make these mis­takes and launch new prod­ucts with confidence.