Successful product launches don’t happen by accident. They’re built on processes and methods proven to communicate your value proposition. They’re designed to grow your business and, most significantly, they intentionally exceed the expectations of customers, channel partners, employees, industry analysts and “the Street”. Your product launch shapes those expectations. You get one chance to make that first impression. Successful product launches create the internal and external excitement that drives market adoption.

Scientific product development processes such as the Capability Maturity Model and product development life cycle may be understood by many in your organization, but many product and marketing organizations still approach product launches as art instead of science. As a result, many launches don’t achieve expectations for your product’s profitability.

In a world of shorter product life cycles, can you afford months and years to recover from a launch that falls short or misses the mark? For a highly successful and repeatable product launch, consider implementing the ‘four pillars’ for a successful product launch. We’ll cover the first pillar here and follow up with the next three in following posts.

FOUR PILLARS FOR A SUCCESSFUL PRODUCT LAUNCH

Pillar 1 – Building the Launch Team
Launch management isn’t a part-time job. It has to be your team’s day job for the duration of the launch. Successful companies dedicate teams exclusively to the challenges of building market momentum for a new product launch. Companies that excel at product launch strive for consistency. They use the same team from launch to launch, leveraging their experience and knowledge of shared processes and organizational decision-making.

Dedicated launch teams can include members from project management, public relations, product management, product marketing, engineering management, online marketing, social media marketing, customer support, and events management. You can create such teams with company resources or use a combination of on-site consultants to staff up and down as needed.

Recognize that launch roles can’t be defined on a one-off basis. Your launch plan will help you identify the right resources and when those resources are needed. This plan will drive your search for partners and team members with proven experience and demonstrated skill sets. You may need to augment your current staff to fill in needed skill set. In some cases you may need to hire or contract launch management leadership.

“The larger the launch and the organization, the more a program management skill set is a critical factor,” says Amdocs vice president of Product Marketing Eric Carrasquilla. “Finding people is not the problem. Breaking them free from their ‘day jobs’ is the problem. You can’t do a launch on the side,” he says, adding, “It’s got to be your day job.”

Next week we will cover Pillar #2, “Over-deliver and Exceed Expectations.” What is your experience with Launch Teams?

These days, brands are looking for loyalty wherever they can find it. With consumers increasingly careful about spending, and even health insurance being seen by some as discretionary, brands need to hold onto as many customers as possible. Our recent work for a health care client suggests that what seem like automatic renewals may lull brands into a false sense of customer loyalty.
 
Think about it. When it comes to health insurance, most Americans still get their insurance through their job. Every year, Open Enrollment is the one time everyone can change health plans or coverage, no matter how dissatisfied they become with their plan or coverage. The rest of the year, people are locked into their health plan and coverage barring life events (e.g., birth, marriage, divorce).

Back in the day when people rarely changed jobs, it was also rare to change insurance providers. In fact, in our recent research with consumers who get their insurance through work, over a third have had the same insurance coverage (and the same job) for 10+ years, and over half have had the same insurance through work for over 5 years. However, job longevity is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

When it comes to changing health insurance coverage, just the thought of it can make people anxious. Consumers are skeptical of the motives of most players in the category (insurance companies, drug companies, employers), find it difficult to understand the total costs of treatment under different plans, and prefer anonymity for fear of repercussions on-the-job at renewal time.

By identifying life events that cause people to take stock of their situation – like getting married or starting a family or by providing or publicizing coverage options consumers really do care about (e.g., wellness and preventative care) — shrewd marketers will have an opportunity to take share in the health insurance category. And as people who have been unemployed and unable to afford coverage hopefully find jobs and begin to enjoy coverage again, health plans will have a unique opportunity to increase enrollment.

Health care is not generally known for brand innovation, and customer has clearly been taken for granted, historically. That might change if a competitor found a way to get consumers’ attention and make it easy for them to act on their dissatisfaction with incumbents during open enrollment or when life events occur.

Have questions or comments? Let me hear it!

Back in June 2008 when I wrote my blog and presentation titled The Mobile Internet Revolution is Here, there were some detractors who said that others had predicted that for years with little results to show. In that presentation, I applied the principles outlined in Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
 
The latest data indicates explosive growth over the past year. The Fierce Mobile article about a Quantcast report points to 148% growth in the mobile web usage in 2009. According to this source, mobile page views represent 1.3% of all web page views for North America. And the report seems to focus just on page views from browsers, so misses all the other mobile internet traffic generated by client software on mobile devices that receives and sends email or Twitter messages, pushes of news stories, etc., meaning that the true number is doubtless higher.

The Mobile Internet Revolution is, indeed, already here. Are you ready?

The recent New York Times article, Is Our Data Too Vulnerable in the Cloud?, points out the real concerns and risks of our storing all our data in “the Cloud”.
 
While some of the commenters point out that many of these security concerns apply as well to data stored on enterprise servers, laptops, and desktops — the perceptions and fears are real. Any further hiccups in cloud computing can set back the growth of these services, as a result of low user confidence. As evidence, consider how many people we all know still fear paying bills by internet.

What is needed is for cloud computing service providers to display the equivalent of a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” to certify their data security is up to the standards of the best enterprises. This will help consumers and CIOs feel more comfortable leaving their data in the cloud.

To be effective this certification needs to address network and physical security, and also needs to apply global standards to meet the different needs of different jurisdictions. For example the theory of cloud computing is that we should not care where in the world our data is stored; but EU enterprises have stricter privacy rules than many others and need to know their data security is up to EU standards regardless where it resides.

Who will provide this certification? Perhaps auditors? Perhaps anew entity that creates a trusted brand? Someone ought to. Soon.

I am often amazed by how much Google understands and practices good business logic. The latest is their support for the Data Liberation Front. This is a group of employees with a common mission: “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.”
 
There is much evidence that Google wants to be a leader in cloud computing, and they seem to realize that cloud computing is attractive only if it is possible to cost effectively and easily make our data portable. The old web strategy of trying to create “Stickiness” usually involved having customers invest much time and effort to add their own data and meta data, and thus, make it difficult for them to move. But instead, Google has realized that people could be reluctant to invest themselves totally in a specific cloud computing application (such as in Google Apps) if it is difficult to get their data out somewhere down the road and move to another service. Fixing this increases the trust level.

I wholeheartedly support this approach. I have found myself checking on several cloud computing sites (PBWorks and Evernote to name two) and have invested in their use only when I saw I could get my data out in some common format — such as XML.

Good for Google! This type of initiative sets a great standard for others to follow and may it help cement Google’s leadership.

A recent post in eMarketer, titled Putting Targeting to Work, points out that online publishers are offering increasing options to target advertising, advertisers get tremendous improvements in efficiency (quotes 400%), but that few advertisers are using these tools well.
 
The leading types of targeting offered included:

• Geography (presumably regional, but capable of more precise targeting),
• Contextual (what is the user doing or wanting at the moment),
• Demographic (self-explanatory),
• Time-targeting (presumably different ads for different times of day).

Interesting that behavioral targeting is near the bottom of the list. As an advertiser, the rank ordering of these categories equates to my experiences. I got caught up in such things as psychographic segmentation in the 1980s, but soon found that it was a dead end for marketing efficiency.

As advertisers learn to appreciate the value of these other types of targeting, they will turn more and more to the Mobile Web, where there is increased information about the location and context, and a greater opportunity for advertising efficiency and “ambush marketing” . The industry is still caught in the inertia of the former business practices, and so change is slow. But we are soon approaching a day when the only marketers who will be hired will be the ones that understand the advantages of the new technologies for targeted advertising, and who know how to use the tools. Perhaps we are approaching that “tipping point” now?

Our clients are not betting that the economy will get better soon. Not only are budget cuts remaining in place, but the focus on sales, and marketing’s direct impact on sales is growing. I believe this will become part of the “new normal” way of doing business.
 
As it relates to marketing’s direct impact on sales, one area of tremendous focus is lead generation and lead management – no surprise there. An interesting development we see (and we are helping clients with) is that sales is demanding that marketing provide a new service to them. Sales is asking marketing to use a combination of database marketing and market research to create qualified leads for them.
 
Here’s a quick overview of an approach that is working:

• Define the attributes of prospects that are most likely to buy,
• Create a research approach that will screen for those attributes,
• Develop targeted lists from existing customer data and new lists,
• Conduct the research (after screening out the least qualified) to more deeply qualify prospects,
• Collect the data and record in a lead management system,
• Determine the best next step for the company to reach out to each qualified prospect, which could include anything from immediate outreach to defining future nurturing campaigns,

Done correctly, the result will be a shorter sales cycle.

What do you think?

I have to admit that I was disheartened to see the article in the New York Times, “Group of Magazine Publishers Is Said to Be Building an Online Newsstand. My understanding from this article and others on the topic is that Condé Nast (publisher of Wired and other leading magazines), Time Inc, and other magazine publishers are working with Adobe to create a new “iTunes for Magazines”. It appears to be a complete platform of content, shopping site, digital rights management, and distribution to the rumored Apple e-reader due out next year.

This announcement comes at a time when we have an explosion of platforms for e-readers: the Amazon Kindle, the Sony eBook reader, the imminent Barnes & Noble Nook, and perhaps others. Users will not be able to read content bought on one platform on the other readers, which means consumers need to choose wisely — or hold off. In the case of magazines, there is already a great application and store at Zinio, that works great on PCs and tablets.

I am all for electronic distribution of content, and am glad to see the traditional media players get with the program rather than try to fight it. And I am all for competition; it makes our system work in the long run. But what is it with all these “platform plays” of late? When will people learn that it is often better to stick to what one knows and go with the prevailing technologies, rather than create a whole new platform?

By platform, I mean the proprietary links among the content, user interfaces, delivery methods, applications, devices, and so forth. iTunes is a platform play, and we can thank Apple for legitimizing the whole digital music industry with their design. Platforms can make real sense when (a) there are no other solutions in the market to which to attach, and (b) when it is necessary to control the end-to-end experience (as Apple argues) to ensure happy customers. Platform strategies in too many other circumstances are driven by the “not invented here” syndrome, a desire to keep or get a bigger cut of the revenues, a desire to have additional features, or a hope to become the dominant platform and force the competitors to deal on your terms. But so often platform strategies get in the way of what is right for the consumer and hurt your competitive position.

Consider the following examples:

• XM Satellite Radio and Sirius chose different technologies that required different equipment to decode the signals. As a result they confused customers who did not want to have to select one or the other, they spent most of their early years fighting against each other, and by the time they merged it was too late to save the category.
• Just about every wireless carrier created their own “walled garden” of content, applications, and commerce — and restricted user’s access to the outside world. Most consumers found the content in the walled garden to be inferior even to the hobbled access to content on the outside, and revolted. This led to a delay in the growth of the mobile internet, a waste of resources, and a growing consumer resentment of the wireless carriers.
• AOL fell into the “walled garden” trap with their internet service and were slow to open access to the web for their users. This strategy backfired. Now they are enjoying some success as a content provider.
• While Apple’s iPhone platform was a powerful driver of smartphone growth and almost single-handedly built the category, it is now under fire for being a walled garden in its own right. That is increasing the appeal of open platforms such as Google’s Android.
• In the U.S., the wireless carriers diverged in the 1990s into GSM and CDMA as distinct platforms. While CDMA is on the wane worldwide, and LTE 4th generation data will bring back a convergence, the U.S. consumers have paid a price for there being multiple platforms — limited roaming domestically and internationally, more expensive handsets, inability to move from one carrier to another, and devices locked into different networks.

Developing, winning, and sustaining leadership with a platform play is a very tall order. There is usually room for only one or two platforms to succeed in any given industry. My challenge to the strategists in the media industry is to weigh the pros and cons of joining an existing platform versus creating a new one. While winning with a new platform play might yield better results if it succeeds, my sense is that the time-adjusted, expected value of the platform play falls way short of ‘going with the flow’.

MG Siegler wrote an interesting piece in the TechCrunch Section of the Washington Post, titled “The Problem with iPhone Killers?“.   In this article he makes the case that the new Android phones are actually killers for Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, RIM, etc. — that the battle is for which operating system will be the counterweight to the Apple/iPhone ecosystem, much like we see with PCs.
 
Apple will be the “closed” system, with the simplicity of a narrow range of devices and one-stop-shop for everything.  He is betting, with good justification, that the Android operating system and business model will win out over the other non-Apple systems. For a while, it will be more confusing for customers with the wide range of devices/applications/networks, but that eventually it will have a larger world-wide device share than the iPhone family.

I find this compelling.  With the launch of the “Droid” phone and all the interest in the increased range of choice for Android devices, this will be an interesting season.

In a recent article in eMarketer points out that Online advertising spending in the UK now exceeds TV advertising.  This is one of those critical milestones in the journey to making advertising more efficient and funding more online business models.  They report that the UK is the first major country to reach this mark.

Yes, the UK has a different type of TV market — more subscription-based than advertising-based because of the role of the BBC.  And yes, this study lumps many types of online advertising into the same bucket to make it appear larger.  Just the same, the implications are clear for much of the world:

• The efficiency, targeting, and measurability appeal of online advertising is beginning to overcome the inertia that has held it back.
• Marketing is becoming increasing a mathematics field, with improved measurement and analytical tools.
• We will soon need to start worrying about the business model for creating great TV content.  The trend to online advertising is matched by the trend toward more cheap-productions reality TV.
• The growth of mobile internet advertising is no doubt tracking along with the shift to online advertising share.