Developing exciting and memorable products is fun. There’s a certain spark and creativity that comes with making new things, particularly when they provide extra value to your customers. There are also common areas where I see brands often get stuck.
Today I want to give you a quick overview of the three biggest problems I see brands face when they’re launching a new product, so hopefully you don’t have to experience any of these problems next time you’re launching a new product.
Watch the video or continue reading the article below ↓
No clear picture of product-market fit
The first big problem I often see brands face is forgetting to clearly define the problem they’re trying to solve and who they are solving it for.
When I see brands ready to launch a product and they can’t clearly articulate who the product is for, what additional value it brings or what specific problems it solves, I know that they’re going to struggle in the marketplace.
I will ask them, tell me what are the pain points that this product addresses? How is it different to the other products that are currently on the market? What is the extra value or the extra unique selling point that your product delivers?
When these questions can’t be clearly answered, I know they’re going to struggle internally when they try to present and position their product to their teams and they’re going to struggle externally when they try and launch the product into the marketplace.
No understanding of regulations
The second major problem I see brands face when they’re launching a new product is they don’t really understand the regulatory landscape and therefore they use ingredients or ingredient dosages that are at incorrect amounts.
They think they can make the therapeutic claims based on a particular ingredient when not realizing that it actually needs to be at a certain quantity or in the case of herbal medicines it needs to be a very specific extract.
In Australia, there’s specific ways that the regulations work in terms of generating therapeutic claims. You need to make sure you’ve got credible sources, ideally two sources as a minimum at the same dosage with the same evidence as is in your formulation.
This is a common area where I see brands don’t do things correctly upfront and then they have to backtrack.
No understanding of the process
The third major problem that I see brands face when launching a new product is they don’t have a clear or robust process so they end up having to backtrack.
Developing products can be straightforward. It can be fun.
You just need to have a system in place that is adaptable and modifiable to your particular product, but takes you from start to end in a clear, streamlined process.
There are many different stakeholders involved in launching a new product. You need to get your raw materials from all different parts of the world. They need to be combined in one TGA facility ready to manufacturer. You need to get your packaging, you need to get your labels, your artwork or your evidence packages, your listing.
There are a lot of different factors and processes involved that need to all come together, so things are on time and so you don’t have to backtrack.
The more clearly you understand the entire process and you can see where all the little bits of the puzzle fit in, the more likely you are to make things streamlined, close the loop on that process and make things happen efficiently and effectively.
So there you have it.
They’re the three biggest problems that I commonly see brands face when launching a new product and hopefully this helps you to not have to make these same mistakes.
