Accelerate Time to Profitability of New Product Innovations

With new product innovation, it’s critical that you have the right processes and solutions in place throughout development that will ultimately lead to adoption among your target audience and set you up for in-market product success. Because when launching a new product, it isn’t just about your concept succeeding; it’s about your new product getting adopted.

As such, it is important to understand who your audience is, what makes them unique, and why your new product appeals to them specifically. And with the rapidly changing landscape of today’s market, it’s more important than ever you do so quickly. In a recent webinar, our Chief Product Officer Keith Johnson and Product Lead Matt Lucas presented on how brands can accelerate the time to profitability of new product innovations through a new approach that captures this information in just weeks.

The Changing Consumer

We used to live in a world of mass marketing, but consumers have more choices than ever before. The digital landscape has allowed consumers to gather more information on brands and thus expect more of them when it comes to the products and services they use. In other words, the power has shifted. Brands are no longer in control of when and how they communicate with the world; it’s a two way street between them and consumers. As a result, we are now living in a world of personalization.

According to IRI, from 2011 to 2016 there were an estimated $22B dollars that moved from the hands of large corporations to those of smaller companies. Such a drastic change in our market is just one outcome of personalization. Specifically, small brands know they can’t feasibly target an entire population, so instead, they hone in on a specific set of consumers and offer them a unique value proposition.

But big brands spend billions of dollars on trying to achieve personalization, with no real value. In fact, 85% of new product launches fail within the first year and only 20% of ads are effective. Why is this? In reality, only 1.5% of consumers decide the success of a new product within its first 12 months. These are the consumers that brands should be going after, but targeting them is hard because we are still using the solutions built for mass marketing techniques.

For example, testing concepts against benchmarks or norms are commonplace, but that 1.5% is not the general population. If the end goal is consumer adoption, why aren’t we organizing our product development and communications around the people who drive the market? It seems like a simple question, but it requires a new solution and a change in thinking.

Using Data to Improve the Process

The solution is essentially personalization to scale and taking an audience-centric approach. We must stop thinking of the total addressable market as auniform population or norm. Instead, we need to focus on the audience throughout our entire business objective to truly accelerate the time to profitability of our new innovations. Focusing on the audience should start with the strategy and be carried through product development to messaging and activation.

How does this look? We already mentioned that consumers have access to more information on brands, but brands have access to more information on consumers too—thanks to big data.

By combining big data with survey data we can gain a deeper understanding of our audience specific to a product concept. This improves the efficiency of moving from a strategy to activation and accelerates our timeline by providing insights on the target audience that can be used past product development.

To walk through a specific case study of this approach in action and see the level of depth provided when you combine survey data with big data, watch the full webinar. You’ll learn how you can identify, communicate to, and reach your audience for more successful product adoption.