Is Your New Product Development Failing? Start with Consumers

Is your new product development failing? Maybe you need to go back to square one and start with consumers, not engineering. The role of marketing in prototyping and many other technical aspects of new product development is often very small. If you find your new product development failing, maybe it’s because you didn’t create the right product, one demanded by consumers, or you didn’t effectively incorporate the benefits they demanded in the product you developed.

Why is your new product development failing?

As reported by MIT (based on data from Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen), up to 95% of the approximately 30,000 new products introduced each year fail. That’s after expending an average of $30,000 to $50,000 to develop it. An MIT professor explains that new product development failing is caused by:

many innovations fail because they introduce products or other solutions without a real need for them. There’s no market for the solutions they’ve created

Well, and that’s marketing, by anyone’s definition of the word.

To understand why your new product isn’t delivering profits, let’s look at the optimal new product development process, as shown in the earlier image. For more details on the process, look at this post on the process of new product development.

Note that the image presents a process that proceeds in a logical flow from idea generation to commercialization. Just as with many things, if you start out poorly, you will see your new product development failing. In fact, experts reflect that most new product development failing comes from:

• Misalignment with market realities
• Poor strategic execution
• Internal organizational issues

Does this sound like the problem comes from engineering? No, the reason for new product development failing is mostly a marketing and organizational issue. As an example, I once worked with a Fortune 50 company manufacturing high-end scientific equipment. The engineering department had developed a new product. Thankfully, the management refused to begin marketing the product until after market research supported the sales potential. That’s where my firm came in.

We conducted focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and phone surveys. Uniformly, the customers we contacted said they didn’t want this product. It was too expensive and subject to failure with all the bells and whistles included by the engineers. They viewed this product as the workhorse in their labs and a breakdown caused backups and other problems in their work. They didn’t need all the gadgets; they wanted reliability.

Despite our research, the company agreed to introduce the product (an example of the internal organizational issues mentioned by experts). The breakeven point was 50. The company sold a handful and some of those were returned. An epic failure.

Marketing explains why new product development is failing

Just as your chess game might be doomed by your first moves, these early actions can doom your new product development to failure. Some startups seem doomed to failure with their new product development processes because they’ve thrown the “baby out with the bathwater” by eschewing the necessary foundations for new product development – namely, marketing and design foundations that resonate with consumers.

They have an idea (often based on what they CAN do rather than what they SHOULD do) and start running with it before 1) evaluating the competition or finding their niche; 2) determining what it might cost to build and how much consumers are willing to pay; and 3)  designing an elegant product (UX that’s easy to navigate, a brand that clearly positions the product, and consistent design elements).

In this image, you see reasons for new product development failing, and you can see that most of the factors impacting failure are related to poor marketing. Remember, earlier we quoted the cost of new product development? Well, when they break down the costs, you find this:

• Industrial Design & Engineering: $15,000 – $60,000+.
• Prototyping: $2,000 – $50,000 (3D printing, CNC machining).
• Testing & Refinement: $5,000 – $50,000.
• Manufacturing Setup: $5,000 – $50,000+ (tooling, molds).
• Intellectual Property & Legal: $10,000 – $40,000.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Where do you see the marketing costs reflected in this total cost?
• How much effort was spent on those critical early steps designed to align your efforts with consumer needs, as reflected in this cost breakdown?
• Is this a process bent on new product development failing?

Increasing marketing’s role

We’ve discussed the role of marketing in the new product development process and other ways that marketing benefits the company by the function’s focus on the consumer. Putting the consumer first is, in fact, the entire reason a marketing department should exist. Yet, many companies don’t see things that way.

I once taught a bunch of students from P&G, a major US company. Every one of the students in a marketing role, like brand manager, had a degree in engineering. Teaching them to put consumer needs front and center was met with friction because their own company told them they could run the business by numbers alone (after 2008, when competition was fierce and there was increased pressure for profitability, the CEO came out publicly to acknowledge that this approach was wrong).

Since I cover many aspects of marketing in new product development and in general elsewhere on this site, today I’d like to focus on the role of marketing in prototyping.

Marketing in prototyping

First, let me share that many of the practical aspects I share in this post were based on my experience teaching a class on new product development to students at JMU (James Madison University). While some of the software has advanced since I taught this class, the practical aspects of how marketing involvement in the prototyping process helps keep down the rate of new product development failing.

Why limit the role of marketing in prototyping?

Prototyping has been the purview of folks trained in software development, engineering, or graphic design (in fact, we teach prototyping in both areas). The assumption is that students in these functional areas have the skills necessary to build prototypes. But changes in the nature and technology of prototyping mean that marketing and prototyping fit together. Marketing has a significant advantage when it comes to prototyping, as well, since marketers are also trained to discover unmet needs among consumers and to test concepts. Marketers are in the perfect position to translate consumer needs into viable products, so why not have them involved in prototyping?

Rapid prototyping

Rapid prototyping has come a long way in the digital age. In the past, engineers created a full-scale physical model of the new product, which was a long, expensive process. Today, those same models are created through CAD (computer-aided design) and 3-D printing at a significantly lower cost and shorter time frame.

In today’s market spaces, prototyping frequently involves wireframing to build a website or an app.

New tools allow marketers to take a more active role in prototyping, to be on the front lines in translating customer needs into finished products, and make concept testing more effective. This is especially true in industries moving toward a two-phase development process where the first part of the process is all-digital, allowing more breadth of concept testing before the high cost of building a physical product.

New tools reduce the learning curve for prototyping

In my class, marketing students, working in teams, used POP (Prototyping on Paper) to create clickable models of their app. This software is still available and is more advanced than the version we used. In our case, we were working to develop an app rather than a physical product and the students weren’t given any limits on the type of app they developed. Each team developed its own app.

Marketing in prototyping: Step 1

The first step is probably the hardest (and the thing marketers do better than almost anyone else in the organization): to come up with product that satisfies a real customer need; one that is radically new compared to existing products, not something that just adds a new twist to an already successful product. Apple Computers nearly failed using the process of innovation to create a better version of their computer until they brought be Steve Jobs, who introduced the radically different Macintosh.

Step 2

Next, teams must brainstorm the user interface, being sure to consider all the ways consumers might use your app, website, or product. Things to consider include for a website or app (obviously, given the broad dimensions of new physical products, it’s impossible to create a list like this):

• Should users be able to enter at a single point or should you set up multiple entry points
• Will you require a login? Companies tend to default to yes, but having to provide personal information might discourage users from going any further down the sales funnel. For instance, someone interested in seeing what meal plan pricing and menus look like, might not want to provide an email or other information until they’re closer to making a decision to purchase your meal app. A company should carefully consider consumer attitudes before deciding to require a login.
• Flow — how might consumers want to navigate through the website? Is the navigation intuitive? Companies should provide navigation tools to allow users to easily find the information they want with as few clicks as possible.
• What does conversion look like and how do you accomplish conversion in a streamlined fashion? As an example, Amazon significantly increased their close rate (and lowered shopping cart abandonment), when they went to their one-click buying option.

Once you have your wireframes, you can start testing the concept with internal or external users.  As you can see, in much of what we’ve done so far, there’s a big role for marketing in prototyping and none of it is particularly technical.

Step 3

Step 3 can be much more technical, but with some of the rapid prototyping tools out there, like POP, marketers don’t need any special skills.

The development team now takes the wireframes and draws out what the actual screens should look like. In the early stages, I recommend just drawing them out freehand, but, as testing gets the team closer to the final layout, the team should use templates to create more professional-looking screens.

Step 4

Different tools allow prototyping in their own way, but, with POP, it’s as easy as taking a picture of your screens (see image on the right). Once you have all the screens captured, upload them to the POP app on your mobile.

Step 5

Now, the trick is to make your presumptive hyperlinks live. That’s easily done within the POP app by drawing a box around each active link and selecting a destination location on another screen image.

You can test your new app by using the PLAY option in POP to make sure all your hyperlinks go to the correct screen location.

Even better, without writing a single line of code, you can hand your new app to users who can test it out and try to break it. Instead of expensive fixes that would be required if you’d already programmed the app, it’s as simple as re-drawing your images, taking new pictures, and defining your hyperlinks again. Or, if you’ve made a mistake in determining where a hyperlink should go, it’s simple to fix it by changing the linkage in POP.

I worked with a company helping them bring a SaaS product to market. We spent a year going back and forth with prospective users with clickable prototypes. After each iteration, the next version took into consideration the suggested improvements until we had a prototype we felt would work well for most of our prospective users.

Final step

Now, you hand your finished prototype to your designer and your development team. No more misunderstandings about how the app or website should be constructed. No expensive fixes when the finished product doesn’t meet users’ needs.

Easy, fast, cheap. What could be better?

Final thoughts on marketing in prototyping

So, using a system like POP, anyone can create workable prototypes of apps and websites. And, there are some really good arguments for putting prototyping in the hands of marketers who are trained to interface with customers and understand their needs.

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