Launching a new product on the market? Forget the questionnaires and dedicate yourself to listening to the network!
The bad news is that a good product or service will not necessarily be successful once it is launched in the market. This is because variables such as poor product market fit and over-saturation can turn even a qualitative and innovative product/service launch into a colossal flop.
The good news is that this can be predicted and avoided.
The even better one is that you can know in advance which winning product or service to develop and sell.
But let’s proceed in order…
All Go To Market strategies, always start with a thorough and detailedmarket analysis in which you establish the characteristics of your target market.
Because that is where we start to figure out what product or service to develop for launch.
Aspects to be defined in the first phase of any Go To Market plan for a new product launch are:
✅ The needs of customers
✅The degree of market saturation.
✅ The level of market competition based on the positioning of a particular product/service
In the past, these data were derived exclusively from past industry studies and standard activities such as interviews, questionnaires and focus groups.
An established practice that presented several problems in terms of time, cost, and especially reliability of the final results.
Already, because in addition to being expensive, time-consuming to collect, and non-spontaneous, these survey methods have no defined historical reference that would allow the results to be contextualized with respect to the narrow topicality.
So you can’t tell if there are trends (“trends” in the jargon) that are growing or waning over time and, consequently, if it is the right time to launch the product you want.
Not to mention, to launch a new product you should not ask people what they want, but you should be able to anticipate their future needs.
Do you remember that famous phrase by Henry Ford?
“Ask people what they need, and they will tell you a faster horse.”
Asking people is not the way to go; you have to listen to what they say on the Web to discover the best solution to their needs today and tomorrow. And listening to them means social listening activities!
Web listening for a new product launch: why is it much more effective than a questionnaire, focus group and interview?
If you field social listening, you can “listen” (i.e., carefully read and take note of) all the comments from people who have a particular problem. Problem that you want to solve through the product that you are going to launch in the market.
You can understand how these people are trying to solve at the moment and what they think about the solutions currently available.
What are the aspects of satisfaction and what are the negative aspects that they would like to change?
Listening to the network allows you to gather a great deal of qualitative even before quantitative information that you will need to define your new product, going out to see in an exploratory way what issues people care most about.
When you then identify the different issues, you can delve into them with quantitative research to find out how often there is that problem or how important that solution is, so you get an idea of the size of the potential market.
Read also: How to get started with Web listening (and why a Twitter search isn’t enough for you)
Relying on social listening is like being able to do an interview where you can vary the questions thousands of times when you think of a new one, and where the number of respondents is potentially infinite.
There are two other immediate benefits: first, you can also see how interests are changing over time, that is, see how this trend is evolving over time.
Is it talked about more, less, or is it constant over time?
This information is key when you want to launch a new product. In fact, as you well know, you have to be able to launch it at the right time, neither when it is too premature nor when interest has waned.
Second, find out what is going on not only locally, but around the world . Chances are that when you had the idea for a new line or a totally new product, someone somewhere in the world already had an idea if not the same at least similar.
I tell you this not to belittle your creativity, on the contrary, but because people’s problems are similar all over the world and there are almost 8 billion of us racking our brains to solve them!
Finding out that there are other similar products or services is not a problem; on the contrary, it can help to study what features they have, how they were launched, and how successful they have been. Let’s say it’s a bit like testing at other people’s expense!
By putting all this information together, you can get a clearer idea of what’s going on in your potential market–and make better decisions.
Are you still confused? Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you want to start selling cookies for people on weight-loss diets. Some very good cookies.
Here are two questions you probably have in your mind when deciding whether or not to proceed:
- “How many people on a diet love cookies?”
- “At present, what are the cookies eaten by dieters? Are they considered good?”
Using network listening software, you can look up how many people have made comments about “being on a diet” and “losing weight” along with “cookies.”
Reading their posts, you find that there are many people who, despite having to lose weight, eat cookies and feel very guilty about this behavior. There are also those who actively ask brands which cookies are more diet-friendly because they just can’t do without them (how can you blame them!).
So you go on and find that there is also us very proudly publish our own meals designed for dieting and include certain brands of cookies.
For each you can estimate the total number of mentions, so you can get an idea of how important they are, and find out whether the comments on these cookies are positive or not.
At this point, you can start researching other languages and see around the world which diet cookies are most popular and why, by whom and where.
And finally, you can also look at the overall trend: are those talking about diets on the rise or not?
In short, this was a simple but useful example to give you an idea of how you can explore millions of online conversations to really get your head around the situation before launching a new product or service into the market.
Read also: Social media listening and monitoring: 7 practical applications in the enterprise
In conclusion
Today you discovered how to launch a new product in the market effectively.
Remember that we at CMI can help you every step of the way, conduct market research aimed at achieving your goals, and provide you with hard data that can be immediately transformed into action.
Do you want to know more?
