Adding new products to your offering is a great way to bring in new customers, and to generate more revenue from existing loyal customers. Developing (or sourcing) new products to offer comes with attendant risks, though: it’s resource-intensive, and if those products fall flat it can cost you more than money. The risk isn’t just to the resources you’ve committed to designing and making those products: a public, visible failure can cause damage to your reputation. It can weaken the brand you’ve been so carefully building.
If you’ve invested time and money in creating a public image for your retail business as cutting edge, solving the problems of your customers before they know they have them, then launching a product that doesn’t find an audience, doesn’t solve those problems, and isn’t affordable either as an everyday necessity or a luxury purchase undermines the promises you’ve made as part of your brand. Similarly, a financial product that doesn’t actually help your clients save, economise or manage their money will make customers doubt if your brand as a whole can do so.
The key to success in this area is to ensure your new product development process is driven by your customers’ needs first, and your ambitions to innovate second. Putting data about your customers, what they value in your brand and how they use your products, at the front of your development process means you’re developing products for niches you can be confident exist, serving the needs of consumers and a price that makes them feel valuable.
There are lots of different ways you can gather this information: you can survey your customers or even interview some of them to find out exactly what they get out of using your products. If you’re selling a digital product like software there’s the possibility that you can gather automatic feedback that shows you directly how customers use what you’re selling. It could also be beneficial to work with a market research company, who has the expertise to ask more searching questions to a wider audience. If you’re hoping to use the launch of this new product to bring in a wider audience, then it’s important to consider why those consumers haven’t chosen your brand yet and incorporate features to help make your product more attractive to them.
The final ingredient in a customer lead process is testing and iteration. Producing a prototype — even if it’s a crude representation of the concept — yields valuable data about how customers respond to the product. It’s important to ‘reality test’ your concepts and designs against how real people use them to ensure you’re making something that your customers will want to pay for. It’s possible for you to become distanced from what people want from your brand or industry overall, and this can lead to you bringing to market a product that your customers don’t, ultimately, want.
Having several rounds of design and testing, informed by feedback from real customers, helps you build something that’s going to be really attractive to the market.
