Know What It Takes for New Product Success?

We are all very familiar with the very high failure rate for new products and services. Everyone who has launched a product that eventually failed thought it was going to be a success.

While nothing in life, innovation, and marketing is guaranteed, we can know what our chances for success are for a new product or service. We can know what it takes to double your chances of success as compared to the average of 25% for all new products.

As background, over a decade ago Doug Hall and two PhD’s developed patented Merwyn Technology. While it provides many of the insights from other products like BASES and Acupoll, it is much faster, less expensive, and just as validated as these other sources. Most importantly, you have access to the inner workings of Merwyn Technology. These inner workings provide very specific, validated insights into the three critical components driving your chances for success. This information enables you to get a very good general sense of how you are meeting success criteria and how you can improve your chances for success.

An important note – I have zero business or financial connection with the providers of Merwyn Technology. Besides being an avid practitioner of its capabilities, Doug Hall and I were brand managers together at Procter & Gamble and have worked together numerous times over the years.

Having said that, here is a brief overview of the three critical factors determining your chances for success.

1. Benefit Communication: you need to communicate a very clear, specific, statement of how you meet an important potential customer need. This sounds easy, but you would be surprised how it is almost always sub- optimized. Not doing this right plus communicating features instead of benefits can significantly reduce your chances for success. Specifically, weak benefit communication has only a 13% chance for success compared to very strong benefit communication that has a 38% chance for success.
2. Credibility Communication: it is very well known that potential customers of a new product (frankly, even existing products) are very skeptical of benefit claims. As a result, improving your chances for success absolutely requires providing a highly credible reason to believe that you can deliver the benefit you just promised. Again, the strength of your communicated credibility directly impacts your chances for success – a weak reason has only an 18% chance for success compared to a very strong reason that has a 42% chance for success.
3. Dramatic Difference Communication: in a previous article, I addressed the most difficult part of new product success – convincing a competitive customer to switch to your product. Your chances for success are directly related to how dramatically better your benefit delivery is than some/most/all of the competition. Not surprisingly, the strength of your dramatic difference communication directly impacts your chances for success – a weak difference has only a 15% chance for success as compared to 53% for a very strong dramatic difference.

At Innovate2Grow Experts, we regularly use Merwyn Technology to help clients with a wide variety of needs. We help clients with existing products to dramatically improve the persuasiveness of current sales and marketing communication. We help clients looking to develop new products with deeper insights into what is required to at least double their chances for success compared to the average new product – – it’s a way of setting the bar high in their new product idea generation.

To learn more you can go to the Innovation Best Practices podcast. Episodes 7 – 12 will provide you more insights.

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Richard has spent most of his career in and around innovation – senior leader at Procter & Gamble and Gallo, professor at Arizona State University, author of six books, and a very successful entrepreneur in the innovation and creativity business. He’s a regular podcaster. Check out i2ge.com and bluesagecreative.com. Follow him @Innovate2Grow