Best Practices

12 Keys to Assure Your New Product Fails
(actually 13!)

  1. Listen to people who have no need for the product, find this out and then try to sell it to them anyway.
  2. Listen to the consumer and then do what the executive wants.
  3. Sample people where they don’t use the product.
  4. Develop a product for one user and find a different consumer who is more interested and don’t try to understand why. Miss the bigger market.
  5. Fail to realize that the package and the product are one and the same – design the package separate and uninvolved with the product – then stick them together and hope they match.
  6. Design cool packaging that is not attractive to your user base; as a result they don’t understand it and therefore don’t consider buying your product. Design packaging that appeals to a base of consumers who will never want your product and/or represent the smaller of the two user groups.
  7. Develop a product that does not reinforce the brand.
  8. Have non–experts set the standards based on their expertise and not anchored to the product or the consumer.
  9. Spend extensive time and money on outdated tools, techniques, and/or thinking, go through analysis paralysis with metrics that are not linked to product/business success.
  10. Launch regardless of consumer interest in your product.
  11. Communicate nothing, communicate the wrong thing, or fail to communicate enough about a new product.
  12. Launch a product that is not quite ready, hoping consumers will not notice the poor design quality.
  13. Get a volume estimate, doubt the forecast, double your pre-launch volume estimate, load the shelves and wonder why your sales didn’t meet your expectations.