You want to start selling your product and see how other people react to it... but it's harder than it looks! How will you advertise it? Read on for our tips, strategies and basic information on how to get your product to market.

Steps

Brand development

Update it. Make sure your brand design is always in line with the latest fashion trends. Who wants to go to a beauty salon with a sign from the eighties, or buy products on a site that looks like it is hosted by Narod (especially for young people under 22).

Hire a graphic designer. Don't try to design your own product logo and packaging unless you have advanced design skills and drawing experience. Attractive design is an important link in the production and release of goods, therefore, it is better to leave this matter to experienced people. Find a graphic designer (you can find cheap labor at an art school/university nearby) to design for you.

Design a logo. If your company and product still doesn't have a logo, then you'll need one. Make sure it's easy to read, easy to print, easy to remember, and that the logo is versatile. Your designer will help you come up with an idea.

• The most successful logos feature thick lines and dynamic shapes. Think of the Pepsi logo, Nike or the Batman symbol.

1. Create an unforgettable package for your product. The packaging should have logos, images that will be as well designed as your logo. The packaging should be attractive, matching the style of your product and the face of the company, as well as easily recognizable.

   • Remember: if someone can't remember the name of your product when they tell their friends about it, they will probably say something like: "Go to the next aisle and you will see it on the shelf: this thing is in purple packaging in cool tones , with a white frilly design."

Find your market

1. Get a website. most important thing these days when promoting a product is its own website. Thus, you will get a wider range of consumers than using other marketing moves, as well as your business will become very profitable. It will also be necessary for more effective marketing methods. If you want your site to become really useful, start selling products through it.

   • by the most in a simple way to sell your product would be to sell your product through an Amazon store where your product will be available, and use a special widget, or just a link to your product.

2. Make a press release. For some types of products, a press release can be a really good idea. Find the media outlets that are most connected (for example, whose audience will be interested) with the type of product you will be selling and make a press release that your item will be available soon. This is a great move for new products, especially if they contain innovative technologies.

   Use digital coupons. People like it when they buy a product and understand that they have made a very good deal. Use digital coupons to attract new customers. You can use promo codes, coupons that you can print out and bring to your store, or special QR codes that you can scan with your smartphone and get a discount.

Expanding your business

Become an expert in the market for your product. Do research on your target market. You can search the Internet for information, in a library, or do your own research by inviting a group of people and giving them samples of your products to try.

• Decide what your target market will be. There are various aspects to consider, such as age, gender, educational level, place of residence, interests, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.

1. Make the product perfect for your market. Once you have information about the use of your product and more information about the target market, you can start to modify the product to better suit the target audience.

   • Remember that although opinions about your product will vary greatly, if the criticism of your product converges on one thing, then it may be correct and you should think about it.

2. Develop your sales goals. You will need to think carefully about how much of the product, and at what price, you will have to sell in order for the business to stay afloat. This is very, very important. Balancing can be tricky and it can take time to find the right formula for your business.

In fact, a startup takes off if the founders make it take off. There are exceptions, but very rarely. Usually you have to "accelerate" the company yourself - just like a car before the appearance of an electric starter. To start the engine in those days, you had to turn the iron handle. When it starts, everything is in order, but if you want to go, spin it first!

Clients

First of all, you have to look for clients. Almost all startups go through this. You can not sit and wait for the arrival of users - they will not come. You have to go and bring them yourself.

Of all the startups we've funded, one of the most successful was Stripe, and it faced this challenge to the fullest. In fact, if anyone could sit quietly and wait for customers, then it’s just Stripe, but in Y Combinator they became famous precisely for aggressively attracting users at the initial stage.

Startups that do things for the same startups have a large pool of potential users in other companies that we have funded. No one has used this feature better than Stripe. At Y Combinator, we call their approach "installation according to the method of the Collison brothers" (creators of the service). More modest founders will first ask the user if he wants to try their beta version, and if the answer is yes, they will send a link. But not the Collison brothers. The Collisons were unwilling to just sit and wait. As soon as someone agreed to try Stripe, they immediately said: "Great, let's get a laptop here" - and immediately did all the settings.

In my opinion, there are two reasons why startup founders do not want to search for users on their own. First, a combination of shyness and laziness. They like to sit at home and write code rather than talking to strangers, most of whom are likely to say no. However, for a new company to be successful, at least one of its founders (usually the CEO) must devote a lot of time to sales and marketing.

The second reason lies in the fact that the achievements at first seem scanty. Newcomers believe that successful, famous startups started out differently. The mistake of such people is to underestimate the aggregate growth rate. We recommend every startup to measure their weekly growth rate. If you have 100 users, then for a weekly growth of 10% by the beginning of the next week, you will have to find ten more customers. And although 110 is not much more than 100, if you manage to maintain growth at the level of 10% per week, then very soon the numbers will pleasantly surprise you. In a year you will already have 14,000 users, and in 2 years - 2 million.

Of course, when the account of simultaneously attracted users goes to thousands, you will have to act differently, and the growth rate will decrease at some point. However, if there is demand, then you can usually start with searching for customers “manually”, and then gradually automate it.

A classic example of this approach is Airbnb. Such sites (the so-called marketplaces) are very difficult to launch, so literally heroic efforts are required initially. In Airbnb's case, that effort went to door-to-door house-to-house searches in New York City, looking for new users and helping existing customers improve their rental offerings. Remembering the cooperation of Y Combinator with the guys from Airbnb, I just can’t imagine them without suitcases on wheels, because they always showed up for our traditional Tuesday dinner from another business trip directly from the plane.

shakiness

Today, Airbnb looks like an indestructible giant, but initially the company's position was very precarious. It was that month of walking around and talking to potential clients in person that separated success from failure.

Such instability at the beginning of the journey is not at all the hallmark of Airbnb. Almost all startups are extremely unstable at the first stage, and this is one of the main misconceptions of their inexperienced creators and investors (as well as journalists and "experts" on the forums). They unconsciously judge start-ups in their infancy by the standards of established companies. It's like looking at a newborn baby and concluding: "It is unlikely that this tiny creature will be able to achieve anything at all."

It's okay if journalists and know-it-alls refuse to take your startup seriously. They are always wrong. It's okay if your startup doesn't inspire investors - they'll change their minds when they see the company grow. The worst thing is if you yourself stop believing in him. I often have to cheer up people who do not see the prospects of their own offspring. Even Bill Gates, who founded Microsoft and then (albeit briefly) returned to Harvard, did not escape this mistake. This would never have happened if he had even remotely imagined what his company would become.

At the early stage of a startup, the question to ask is not “Will this company take over the world?” but “How much can the company grow if the founders get it right?” Doing the right thing often looks laborious and inconsistent. There was hardly anything special about Microsoft when two guys in Albuquerque were writing Basic language interpreters for a few thousand, as they called it then, "amateur enthusiasts." However, today it can be argued that this was the optimal path to dominance in the personal computer software market. I also know for sure that when Airbnb founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia “professionally” photographed the apartments of their first clients, they did not foresee the coming success at all, but simply tried to keep the company afloat. However, it is now also clear that this was the surest way to capture a large market.

How to find users yourself? If you are developing something to solve your own problems, then all that remains is to find people like you, which is usually not difficult. Otherwise, you will have to purposefully look for the most promising source of replenishment of the user base. Usually, this involves attracting an initial group of customers by launching a product or service more or less randomly, and then seeing who shows the most interest in them and trying to attract more of these customers. For example, Pinterest founder Ben Silberman noticed that among the first users of his social network many people who are interested in design. In search of new clients, he went to a conference of bloggers who write about design, and this move was successful.

Satisfaction

You will have to make great efforts not only to acquire users, but also to keep them satisfied. While there was an opportunity (and it was surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a handwritten letter of thanks. Early adopters should feel that registering on your company's website is one of the best decisions of their lives. You, in turn, have to rack your brains: what else to please them?

Why do we have to teach this to startups? Why don't the creators understand this? I think for three reasons.

First, many of them are engineers by training, who are not trained to work with clients. They are taught to create reliable and elegant things, and not to please the user like some kind of salesman. Paradoxically, this reluctance of technicians to coddle customers is partly due to the tradition of their profession - after all, before the engineer had much less influence and was responsible only for his narrow area of ​​\u200b\u200bdevelopment, and not for the product as a whole. On the Enterprise crew, Engineer Scotty is allowed to grumble, but certainly not Captain Kirk.

The second reason startups don't pay enough attention to individual customers is the fear that this approach won't scale. When a startup is in its infancy and the founders start to get excited about it, I remind you that in this moment they still have nothing to lose. Yes, if now we try hard to make current users happy with everything, then one day there will be a lot of them, and there will not be enough strength for everyone. I wish you more such "problems". Here, try to achieve this. By the way, if you succeed, you will see that customer satisfaction scales much better than you thought. Partly because there is almost always a way to achieve scaling contrary to initial predictions; and partly because it will already become part of your corporate culture.

I've never seen a startup hit a dead end for trying too hard to please its early adopters.

However, perhaps the main barrier that prevents startups from understanding the importance of caring for the user is the lack of experience among owners of such an attitude towards themselves. Their service standards are often borrowed from companies whose customers were once themselves. As a rule, these are large corporations. Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn't hand-write a thank you letter when you buy a laptop from him. He just can't, but you can. This is one of the advantages of a small company. You can provide a level of service that no other large corporation can provide.

When you understand that the existing conventions are not a barrier to improving the user experience, it will be nice to think about what else you can do for your customers so that they are completely satisfied with communication with your company.

Experience

I was looking for a better way to explain the extremes to which user care needs to be taken. It turned out that Steve Jobs had already done this when he called the Mac "beautiful to the point of insanity." "To the point of madness" is not just a synonym for the word "very". Steve understood this literally: as the need to focus on the quality of the performance to such an extent that in ordinary life it would be considered pathological.

All the most successful startups that we have financed, which is unlikely to surprise the founders of new companies. However, beginners do not understand what this most “beautiful to madness” means for a startup at the very start. When Steve Jobs first said those words, Apple was already an established company. He meant that the design and execution of Mac computers (including their documentation and even packaging - such was the extent of his obsession) should be "madly beautiful." It is not difficult for an engineer to understand such an approach: this is the same requirement to “create reliable and elegant things” - just in a more categorical form.

Founders, on the other hand, find it difficult to understand what this means if they go back to the first couple of months of a startup’s life (perhaps even Steve himself would have had a hard time now). “Insanely great” should not be a product, but a user experience. The product is just one component of this experience. Of course, for a large company, products are dominant. However, you can, and should, provide users with a “crazy great” experience with a raw and unfinished product, making up for the shortcomings with attention to the customer.

It's probably possible. But is it necessary? Undoubtedly! Active engagement with early adopters is not just one way to grow. For most successful startups, this is the most important element of feedback that will result in a product. High Quality. Mousetrap improvement is an iterative process. Even if you follow the path of the most successful startups and make a product that you yourself need, it will not turn out perfect the first time. It is better not to strive for perfection at all at the initial stage (unless, of course, you work in an area where the cost of error is too high). In software development, it is most efficient to roll out the product to users as soon as there is any use from it, and then see what exactly they will do with it. Perfectionism is often an excuse for procrastination, but remember that the initial impression of users is always inaccurate, even if you yourself are one of them.

The first users give the best feedback. As the company grows and you need to do focus groups, you'll dream of being able to observe people using your product at home or in the office, just as you did with your first handful of customers.

Bonfire

Sometimes, the right cure for scaling is consciously focusing on a very narrow market. It's like a fire: first you make a small fire and let it flare up, and then you can add logs.

This is exactly what the founders of Facebook did. At first it was made only for students at Harvard University. There were only a few thousand potential customers, but they all believed that the network was created just for them, so they managed to gain a critical mass of initial users very quickly. Even when Facebook expanded beyond Harvard, the network remained for a long time reserved for students of a few colleges. In an interview for our Startup School, Mark Zuckerberg told me how much time it took to collect data on class schedules at each college, but for the students who did this, the site immediately became a home.

If a startup is a marketplace, then it almost always starts from one of the narrow segments of the selected market. However, this approach can work for other startups as well. It always makes sense to look for a segment in which you can quickly gain a critical mass of users.

Most start-ups that use the "building a fire" strategy do so unconsciously. They create a product for themselves and their friends, who are the first active users. Later, they suddenly realize that they can offer it to a wider audience. This strategy works great even when implemented unconsciously. The danger here is that if you act unconsciously, you can simply miss some part of the system. For example, it happens that the product is not made for themselves and friends, or the development is carried out in a corporate environment, and then friends do not become the first active users. In this case, the original market "on a silver platter" you will no longer have.

In the B2B model, the best active users usually come from other startups. They are more open to new things - partly simply by nature, and partly because they are at the very beginning of the journey and have not yet decided on priorities. In addition, if successful, startups begin to grow rapidly, and your company - along with them. One of the many subtle benefits of the Y Combinator model (and in particular the transformation of Y Combinator into a big project) is that B2B startups today have an immediate marketplace of hundreds of other startups.

Meraki

There is a way for hardware startups to forget about scaling, which we call the Meraki trick. We have not worked with Meraki itself, but it was founded by graduate students of one of the founders of Y Combinator Robert Morris, so we are aware of all the events. They started by assembling routers themselves - that's where you really should forget about scaling.

Hardware startups often face an obstacle that software developers don't know about. The minimum order for a factory run run is typically several hundred thousand dollars. There is a vicious circle: without a product there will be no growth, and without growth you will not attract funds for the production of a product. Previously, hardware startups were completely dependent on investors, so they needed to have serious persuasion skills. With the advent of crowdfunding (more precisely, the pre-order system), the situation has changed, but I still recommend using the Meraki trick when possible. This is exactly what Pebble, the developer of smartwatches, did. Its workers assembled the first few hundred products themselves. If the company had not passed this stage, it would hardly have been able to sell $ 10 million worth of watches after entering Kickstarter.

Just like the hypertrophied attention to the first customers, independent production of products is a very important stage for hardware startups. By doing the production yourself, you can modify the design faster than by placing an order somewhere else. In doing so, you also get faster feedback that is simply not available under other circumstances. Eric Mijicowski of Pebble once mentioned that he realized "how important it is to find good screws." Well, who would have thought?

Consulting

Sometimes we recommend that B2B startups take the extreme step of picking one user and developing specifically for them, as if you were an advisor to that particular client. The first user becomes a kind of "mould" for the product. You need to make changes until your product fully meets their needs, as a result you usually find that other users also need it. Even if these customers are few, there will certainly be more of them in the neighboring market segment. As long as there is at least one user with a real need that you can somehow satisfy, you have a foothold - because you are doing something right. And a larger startup does not need to start.

Consulting is a classic example of working without scale. However (as with other gift giving options), you can safely engage in this activity only as long as you are not paid for it. It is here that many cross the line of what is permitted. As long as you are a product company that simply shows additional attention to the client, he will only be grateful, even if some problems are not completely solved. But when the client starts paying for the same attention on an hourly basis, he expects you to do whatever he wants.

Another consulting option that allows you to get customers who are initially indifferent to the product is to work with your own software “on their behalf”. We have taken this approach with Viaweb. trading companies to whom we offered to try our service for creating online stores, they often refused, but did not mind if we did it ourselves. We agreed because we were ready to do anything for the sake of users. Of course, at that moment we felt like "weaklings": after all, instead of large strategic partnerships to create online stores, we had to sell suitcases, pens and men's shirts. However, now it is clear that the course was chosen correctly, because we understood how the client feels when working with our service. Sometimes feedback appeared almost instantly: while working on the site of a store, I suddenly realized what function we were missing. Then I quickly finished writing this function and returned to work on the site.

Manually

There is a more extreme option: do not work with your service, but simply become it. If you have few users, then some tasks can be done manually and automated later. This will allow you to launch the project faster, and when the time comes for automation, you will already know exactly what needs to be done, because after manual work, the necessary information will be stored in the “muscle memory”.

When manually executed elements appear to the user as part of the software, the work begins to take on the features of a joke. For example, when “instantly” providing their first users with accounts for accepting online payments from bank cards, the founders of Stripe simply registered these accounts for them manually.

Some startups could work completely in manual mode at the first stage. If you have a potential client with a problem that needs to be solved and you can solve it manually, then get down to business and work while you can, and then gradually automate the bottleneck. Of course, solving problems without automation is scary, but much more scary is the more common case when there is automation, but it does not solve problems.

launch

There is one tactic that almost never works - this is a large-scale launch of the project. Some startup founders seem to think that the company is less like an airplane and more like an artillery shell. They believe that great success can only be achieved by launching a project with a sufficiently high initial speed. Such people tend to announce the launch at the same time in eight different places, and not before a certain date. Yes, and certainly on Tuesday, because they read somewhere that the best day to launch a project is Tuesday.

It is not difficult to understand that the launch does not play any role. Take a few successful startups - do you remember how they started? The launch has one task - to attract the first group of users. Your success in a few months depends more on the ability to satisfy the needs of these users than on their number.

Why do startup founders attach such importance to the launch? This is due to a combination of selfishness and laziness. Such people think their product is so great that anyone who hears about it immediately decides to join the ranks of customers. In addition, they find it much easier to attract users by simply announcing their existence than to search for them one by one. But even if your service is really great, users will still accumulate gradually. Partly because great products look strange at first, but mainly because people have other concerns.

Partnerships don't usually work either. They don't work for startups in general, and especially not as a means of generating growth. There is a common misconception among newcomers that partnering with a large company will be a major breakthrough for them. However, after six months, everyone unanimously says that they had to work much more than expected, but there was practically no effect.

It’s not enough to just do something great in the beginning. First, you need to make an outstanding effort. Any strategy that relies not on effort but on a large-scale launch or a large partner in finding clients is highly questionable in itself.

Vector

Since the start-up always requires laborious work without the possibility of scaling, it no longer makes sense to consider startup ideas as scalars. An idea is best thought of as a combination of a product that is planned to be built and a non-scalable work that is required to launch a startup.

It would be useful to consider ideas in this way, because, having two components, one can look for creative solutions not only for the first, but also for the second. However, in most cases, the second component is unchanged: finding customers "in manual mode" and providing them with an unrivaled user experience. The main advantage of representing a startup in the form of a vector is the ability to remind their creators that they need to work hard in two dimensions at once.

In the best scenario, both components of this vector will contribute to the formation of the "DNA" of the company. The work without the effect of scaling, which must be carried out at the initial stage, is not just a "necessary evil", it will forever change the company for the better. If you actively attract users while the company is small, then when it grows, you will most likely be active as well. By making your own equipment or working with your own software You will gain knowledge that you will not learn anywhere else. And most importantly: if you had to work hard to keep the first few users happy, then you will work the same way when there are a lot of them.

In fact, Emerson didn't even mention mousetraps. He wrote: “If a man has good grain, wood, boards, or pigs to sell, or he is better than others at making chairs, knives, crucibles, or church organs, then you will find a wide, well-trodden road to his house, even if he lives in the deep forest.

Thanks to Sam Altman for the advice to get this idea straight. By the way, keep in mind that shifting sales to a hired specialist will not work. At first, you need to deal with them yourself, but later you can already find someone to replace you.

This technique works because as your company expands, size encourages further growth. As Patrick Collison wrote: “At some point, the experience of working at Stripe changed significantly. It’s as if the company has turned from a boulder that we drag uphill into a railroad car that rolls downhill on its own.”

Along with other more obvious benefits, working with the Y Combinator fund helps founders of companies correctly assess their ambitions - after all, we know very well what many successful startups looked like at the very beginning of their journey.

If it is difficult for your product to get even a small group of observable users (for example, you develop enterprise software), and you do not have the right connections in this area, then you will have to rely on cold calls and ask to be introduced to the right people. However, is it worth spending time on such an idea?

Harry Tan drew attention to an interesting trap that startup founders fall into at the initial stage. They want to appear big so much that they copy even the shortcomings of large companies, including indifference to individual users. It seems more "professional" to them. It's actually better to accept the fact that you're a small company and take full advantage of it.

Your understanding of users simply cannot be completely accurate, as their needs often change in response to the product you create. Offer them a personal computer and they'll suddenly want to run spreadsheets on it that someone invented when they got your computer.

If you can quickly attract customers in one segment, and solvency is higher in another, then it is better to stop at the first one. These people are likely to be the first active users to contribute to the development of the product, while you do not have to put in extra effort to generate sales. It’s not a big deal if they have less money, because at the initial stage, it doesn’t take much to maintain the planned growth rate.

Yes, it is possible that the product you created will be useful for exactly one user. However, as a rule, such cases are obvious even for beginners. Therefore, if you do not have complete confidence that there is only one potential client, then you should not worry.

The relationship between the scale of the launch and the success of the project can even be reversed. All the launches that I personally remember turned out to be huge failures, for example, Segway or Google Wave. Google Wave is the most frightening example, because the idea, in my opinion, was excellent, but the pompous launch greatly contributed to its failure.

Google grew into a big company by relying on Yahoo, but it wasn't a partnership. Yahoo was a client of Google.

It will also remind startup founders that an idea that does not use the second component, that is, that does not involve any actions to launch (for example, because it is impossible to find users "in manual mode") is most likely a bad idea. At least not specifically for them.

Anastasia Zakatova, Head of Marketing at Diet-18, St. Petersburg

What questions will you find answered in this article?

• What is the best product promotion strategy to follow when launching a new product
• Who in the company should initiate the creation of new products and be responsible for bringing them to the market
• What are the costs of expanding the range

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• What are the two requirements for new products from Oki?

According to statistics, in 90% of cases, the promotion of a new product to the market is unsuccessful. Let me give an example of the game Angry Birds (an application for Apple's mobile devices): the popular version of this game was the 52nd attempt of the company - that is, 51 birds did not reach their goal. Imagine how many companies did not dare to launch their 52nd bird.

However, this does not mean that you are required to bring as many new products to the market as possible, hoping that one of them will work. On the contrary, I am a supporter of a balanced approach, when the decision to promote a product is based on a serious analysis of the existing assortment 1 . Suffice it to say that, for example, in the meat market of the North-West of Russia, 80% of sales are provided by only 29 of the existing 375 SKUs ( English . stock keeping unit - a unit of trade stocks).

If you, after analyzing the assortment, are convinced of the need to launch new products, this article will help to reduce the number of attempts to a minimum and increase the chances of promoting a new product for success.

¹More about this in an article by the same author, published in the May issue of the journal (GD. 2013. No. 5.). In the same place you will find explanations and characteristics of the terms and methods of assortment analysis used below. - Note. editions.

• How to increase sales: three ways proven in practice

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Promotion of a new product to the market: what strategy is better to follow

Strategy 1. Trajectory of the innovator.

The novelty is introduced to an empty market (a new niche is created). The main investments are directed to product development. The money is taken from the profits brought in by "cash cows" (cf. rice. 1). This is what most manufacturers do. For example, 3D technologies did not hit the market in five minutes - the need for them was felt six years before TVs with this feature first appeared on the market.

This strategy suits most companies that offer both services and products, only research is organized differently in them. In service companies, the initiators and driving force of research are usually a marketer, director, or financier, while in high-tech firms, scientists, engineers, designers, and programmers.

Look at your portfolio using the Boston Consulting Group Matrix. If your “wild cats” segment is empty, and there are a lot of goods in the “cash cows” segment, it's time to invest the money received from the “cows” in research, development and promotion of products.

Let me remind you that the pull technology ( English . pull) is always preferred over push technology ( English . push). This means that it is better to first study the potential and then create a product that will best match it, instead of first creating a product and then trying to push it to the market. Despite the obviousness of what has been said, only a few use the pull strategy Russian companies. Much more often, the idea of ​​a new product goes down to the technology department for implementation, and then the sellers try to find a way to sell the novelty.

Strategy 2. Follower Trajectory

A new product is introduced to a market that already has a leader. The main task is to conquer the market by forcing out the leader. The expansion of the share requires significant cash injections to maintain an aggressive promotion policy (see. rice. 2). This policy is followed by many market players (well-known and not so famous): Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, BMW, Audi, manufacturers of confectionery and meat products. The strategy is applicable to products whose replicated characteristics do not require complex technology, are intuitive, attract consumers and are obvious to manufacturers. How does this happen? The manufacturer either sees that a successful product has appeared on the market and launches a copy into production, or, independently of the competitor, comes up with the same novelty. As a result, two similar products appear on the market almost at the same time. Further struggle depends on budgets or on the accuracy of hitting the consumer. Such a strategy is acceptable for companies that prefer to spend money on the promotion stage, rather than on the development stage.

I want to warn against blind copying of the leading product. By creating an exact copy, you repeat not only the advantages, but also the shortcomings of the original. In addition, it is very expensive to force out a leading product from the market if your product is no different from it. Promotion will cost a little less if the new product has obvious differences. Therefore, it is useful to survey consumers and find out what they think about the leading product, what features they like and what they don’t. Then you will have more chances to create a novelty that repeats the advantages, but is devoid of the disadvantages of a competitor product.

Main reasons for failure

Support plays a key role in the success of a product. A novelty that has appeared on the market, but has not received sufficient support, will quickly lose its position - it will lose sales volumes (if by some chance it managed to gain them) and will not be sold consistently (see Fig. rice. 3). Therefore, when planning to expand the range, you must be prepared for serious intellectual and (or) financial investments. It is difficult to give an example of such products, because, having entered the market, they lost their positions and did not become famous. Even if the product was certainly good, but if its promotion turned out to be weak (unsuccessful advertising, absence in retail outlets, poor display, unfavorable label), the product quickly left the shelves.

It also happens that a company introducing a new product does not guess the needs, and it immediately falls into the category of "dogs" (see. rice. 4). As an example, we can recall the jam in the Cosmic tube. It would seem that the idea is a win-win: a retro product that was popular in Soviet times, the absence of direct competitors ... But either Soviet consumers grew up and stopped eating jam from a tube, or there were too many competing products that could satisfy the need for delicacy (in Soviet times such products were in short supply), or a plastic (instead of a metal) tube and a not very successful label repelled nostalgic adults and did not attract a new generation - in general, now we will no longer be able to understand the reasons for the collapse, because research has not been done. One thing is clear: the money spent on equipment and promotion has gone to waste.

Who in the company should initiate the creation of new products and be responsible for bringing products to market

According to statistics, most often the development of new products is started by CEOs and technologists (54% of cases), and not at all by marketers, who should supposedly know everything about the needs of customers better than anyone else. There is nothing wrong with this if the idea, from whomever it comes, is tested. Unfortunately, it often happens that a company is not critical of the proposals of the first persons or sales managers (see. rice. 5).

Once I worked in a confectionery company and observed such a situation. Sales managers assured with one voice: if the company starts producing marshmallows, they will be able to sell huge batches of the new product to current customers. The decision was made, equipment was purchased, the first tons of marshmallows were produced. But the product turned out to be very expensive and it was not possible to sell it in the planned quantity. Then the technologists simplified the recipe, but the new marshmallow was poorly stored (spread). Managers said that they needed marshmallows of the same quality, but at a lower price. Unfortunately, it turned out too late that bad (but cheap) and good (but expensive) marshmallows already exist on the market, and our customers wanted a good and cheap one and were ready to buy in large quantities only. As a result, the equipment stopped (see also: What do different specialists of the company want when they offer to release a new product).

What do different specialists of the company want, offering to release a new product

CEO(owner). Implement a long-term business strategy and your ideas.

Sales managers. Create a product that will be appreciated by partners (purchasers, merchandisers, suppliers, etc.), and not by end consumers. They do not need a strategically advantageous or high-margin product.

Production workers. Simplify technological operations, increase product yield, reduce production waste.

Suppliers. Reduce the cost of raw materials, increase its shelf life.

Marketers. Satisfy the needs of the end consumer, come up with a unique product that has no analogues on the market.

• How to determine the size of the market and what it is for

How much does it cost to bring a new product to market

It must be understood that expanding the range is always associated with significant costs - either at the development stage or at the promotion stage. There are no successful new products that do not require any investment and sell themselves. I will list the most costly items of expenditure for expanding the range:

• investment in R&D (development and testing of product and packaging);
• purchase of new equipment or reconfiguration of old;
• packaging, storage, remuneration of buyers and logisticians;
• remuneration of sales managers who will promote a new product, the cost of including new products in the range of retail chains (input bonuses);
• advertising costs (catalogs, leaflets, etc.); this is a necessary expense item, because very often buyers do not suspect what products can meet their needs, and do not pay attention to new products.

Practitioner tells

Sergey Lebedev Marketing Director of OKI Systems Rus, Moscow

With a history spanning 130 years, Oki has to constantly expand the lineup and not be afraid of bold experiments. The decision to launch new products on the market is made by the developers and marketers of the head office in Japan. Now, in their opinion, the Russian market is developing very actively and therefore it is possible to significantly improve the position by expanding the range. The key to the success of the novelty is its versatility, as well as the presence of customers who will definitely buy it. I will illustrate this with examples.

The new product must be multifunctional. New products that perform only one task are no longer promising, because the market is filled with all kinds of printers, copiers, multifunctional devices and scanners. Therefore, the company, in partnership with a developer of programs for DICOM devices (from the English digital imaging and communications in medicine - an industry standard for creating, storing, transmitting and visualizing medical images and patient documents), launched an unusual device on the market. It can print not only ordinary office documents, but also X-rays, ultrasounds and MRIs, replacing bulky and expensive medical equipment. To date, devices of this class are being tested in several medical institutions, which are considering the possibility of purchasing them.

A new product must necessarily meet the needs of specific customers, which the company knows for sure. Small printing firms were asked to make a device that could print in white on color media. In response, our company offered a printer with white toner. Demand for the new device, however, is not very high yet, but this product is high-marginal, since there are no analogues to it today.

Reference

Anastasia Zakatova Graduated from St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Arts (SPbGATI) and St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University (SPbSPU) with a degree in marketing. Since 2003, he has been working in communication technologies in marketing. Reads a course in marketing communications at St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University. Full member of the Club of St. Petersburg marketers.

Commercial and industrial group "Diet-18"
Areas of activity: import of meat; meat processing; production of chilled semi-finished meat products; sale of meat products through our own distribution network
Number of staff: 1500
Annual turnover: 2% of Russian meat imports (according to the company)
Subscriber of the magazine "General Director": since 2009

OOO OKI Systems Rus
Field of activity: sale of printing devices manufactured by the Japanese company Oki Data Corp. (“OKI Systems Rus” is its Russian representative office)
Number of staff: 19
Annual sales of devices and consumables:$18.7 million (April 1, 2012 to March 31, 2013)