New Product Launch

Only a small percentage of new products launched actually find their way to our local retail store shelves, and then the customers decide if those products will be successful.

Image source: joshuamasonblog.com

Today the product design and development process is not only in the hands of the marketing management teams anymore. Indeed, external factors and people have a growing influence on innovations and new products.

Inviting external people such as customers, researchers, and even the public into the new-product innovation and launch processes is called Crowdsourcing. If the same targeted customer participates in the product development, this product has of course way more chances to be successful. Sometimes marketers can totally forget one key aspect of the product, the packaging or the communication strategy, and the saying “two heads are better than one” takes way more sense when hundreds of people help them to design and launch a new product effectively.

Companies can use crowdsourcing for every stage of the product launch process. For example, Netflix had created a contest open to everyone to improve their platform. By promising a $1 million prize, more the 50,000 individuals skilled in computing have worked on the project and Netflix improved its platform with the help of external sources.

Small companies can also use crowdsourcing, and even way before starting the product launch process. Small entrepreneurs can pitch their project on Crowd-funding or Crowd-speaking platforms to know if their project is viable before even starting financing it. I discovered during my work on Crowd-funding (see Sources) that Crowd-speaking platform such as Thunderclap are actually used to assess the attractiveness of a product or service when Crowd-funding platforms such as Kickstarter are used to raise money.

The success of those platforms proves that consumers are really willing to invest time or money into product design and development to participate in creating better products for themselves to buy. And more than creating better products, crowdsourcing adds more value to those products and create a strong relationship with customers than feel like they have been listened to and that marketing is not only making people buy stuff they do not want.