At tempting as that sounds, there’s just something special and exciting about bringing customers a new product that you know they’ll love and value. We get excited around here every time a new product rolls across our desks.
Successfully launching a new product isn’t easy, but there are some guidelines you can follow to stack the deck in your favor a bit.
Identify Needs and Trends
The most important aspect of a successful product launch is ensuring you’re taking advantage of consumer needs and trends. NutraBurst, for example, was born from the understanding that a) people were thinking more and more about their health and wellness, and b) they needed an easy, tasty way to provide their body with vital nutrients. That’s why NutraBurst is loaded with great ingredients and tastes like health and sunshine!
We identified the popularity of CBD oil in the marketplace and responded by developing a line of products that include it. We even produced an entire range of essential oil products based on customer requests and interest in the marketplace.
You need to be careful and flexible, though. You don’t want to be the last person to offer something, and you never want to offer knock-off products just to try to exploit a trend.
Coordinate Your Product Launch
Your marketing and management teams need to get together and pool resources so it’s all hands on deck when your new product is ready to hit the market. As John McCoy says in his piece for Forbes, you need to find agreement among your stakeholders for a marketing campaign and ways to push the first batch of product to people who will serve as your advocates.
Identify opinion-makers, and solicit their response to your product. If you’ve done a good job of identifying a need—and making a product that fits it—getting good word of mouth shouldn’t be a problem.
Listen to Your Customers
Once the new product hits the market, it’s time to listen to feedback from customers. It’s vital in those opening days to solicit responses from the first people who commit to your new offering. If you’ve done your work well, you’ll be hearing about how great your product is, and might even be receiving ideas for making it even better.
If it’s not going well, however, you can be in position to pivot quickly and rescue the product. There’s a lot to learn from a product that doesn’t hit the way you’d planned, and you can even work it to your advantage.
In the end, the customers are our boss, and they’ll let us know what they need. We just need to be ready to meet those needs.
Jack
