Product Design & Launch Strategy

New product development comes at a high financial risk, especially when you know that multiple global studies demonstrate that about 80% of all new product launches fail within 12 months of introduction. This in spite of huge budgets for innovation, product development, and marketing.

Why is the success rate so low? Although there are numerous reasons, a poor launch execution is surely one of them. No matter how good the product is, if the commercial implementation is poor, then failure is almost guaranteed. 

The main reason for failure is that product owners underestimate the efforts and budgets required to launch a new product successfully. In mature markets the efforts required to motivate existing users to exchange their existing brand for your product or service are very high. At the same time, when markets are immature, the creating first time trial often takes much longer than anticipated, by the time of which you start creating uptake, the product is often already withdrawn from the market due to a lack of cash in. Often, marketing budgets are simply too low or the sales execution insufficient to enable a successful take-off.

But also during the pre-product design stage many things can go wrong. An over optimistic customer uptake time frame, or an overestimation of customer protentail are examples of a poor starts of a successful product launch. 

A good situation assessment is of course the basis, but often not taken seriously enough. A market study of USD 80,000 might be a very good investment to avoid a potential loss of USD 3.5 Mn.

During the product design stage plenty of things can go wrong as well. The customer-centric design process ensures that the launch product meets all requirements to increase the chance of a successful launch at the highest possible level by ensuring that during each stage the customer's feedback is included in the product development. 

Customer-Centric product development and introduction aims at a success rate of over 60%. A provision is that during each stage, the minimal thresholds are surpassed to gain an attractive ROI over five years.