Reasons Your Product Launch is Failing

You don’t even need to consult the market research to know that launching a new product is cumbersome, complex and costly. Often a look around at the faces sitting at your boardroom table, or a quick scan of internal team emails reveal the frustration, anxiety and sheer chaos surrounding a new unveil.
But let’s just say you did want to consult the stats. Just how harrowing are they? Well let’s take a look:
66 percent of new products fail within two years
96 percent of all innovations fail to return their cost of capital
Despite such grim statistics, the top third of the best performing companies introduce an average of 47 new products per year, according to the Harvard Business Review. Forty-seven new products per year. Let’s think about that for a moment. That’s about three new products a month, or almost one every week.
Competition just got a lot fiercer for your pending launch.
Worried you will quickly find yourself in that 66 percent of companies that fail within two years? Fearful your product launch is already taking some poor turns? Let’s take a look at three reasons your product launch might already be failing:
You Don’t Have a Strategy: A robust go-to-market strategy can’t be slapped together over night. Instead, it requires attention to detail, forward-facing planning and deep perspective. In other words, it takes time. There are so many moving parts that go into launching a new product and so many questions you have to answer. For example: How will you introduce your new product?; How will you keep generating buzz after the initial PR is released?; and What’s the story surrounding your new product? Successful launches embrace an integrated approach to marketing. They rely on the use of blogs, PRs, email marketing, white papers, social media… the list goes on. They rely on strategic editorial and distribution schedules to ensure maximum impact for each asset. And they rely on intuition, innovation and insight. If your strategy consists of a long-winded game of “Eeny Miny Moe” to determine who’s on deck for blogging this week, it may be time to revisit.
You Don’t Have the Expertise: Time for a gut-check. How many people on your staff have launched products before at previous companies? How many have beat the odds and succeeded? Chances are that while your existing team has enjoyed its fair share of crowning achievements, it still lacks the expertise needed to fully launch a new product. For example, just because your marketing manager is great at everyday blogging does not mean he or she knows the specific types of entries that should accompany a new product launch. To have a robust go-to-market strategy and the best chance for success, you need your A-team. This means having the best bloggers, PR strategists, social media specialists and designers at your disposal, well-versed in product launch content strategy, not just everyday content strategy.
You Lack Innovation: Today’s go-to-market strategy needs to be more innovative than ever before. Think of how many companies sell the same thing. Coke and Pepsi. Android and Apple. Colgate and Crest. So the question becomes: how will you make your strategy stand out? You can probably recall the first time you saw an AT