Why Better Products Don’t Always Win

May 15, 2013 By Karl Stark and Bill Stewart

You may have superior technology or a great feature set, but if your product doesn’t create value for the customer, its chance of success is slim.

What’s the lesson for entrepreneurs here?

Entrepreneurs building a new business often falsely assume that their novel product will succeed based on its great new feature set or superior technology. While the next great technology may in fact sell regardless of the competition, few products are so lucky. In most cases we need to shed our rose-colored glasses and instead focus on building what the customer wants.

How can an entrepreneur build a great business around an average product?

1. Only build the features that customers want and are willing to buy.
2. Make your product’s value proposition a clear comparison to the market alternatives, and work to lower barriers to acceptance.
3. Build a complete business model, including sales channels and distribution partners that allow you to deliver on the value you aim to create.
4. Understand the underlying economics of your business model, and build them to scale up as your business grows.
5. Build an investment plan that will fund your business growth and allow you to drive customer awareness, trial and adoption.

You Don’t Have to Be a Product Visionary to Create a Great Product

According to Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, most start-ups fail because they built something that nobody wanted.

Check out how Lean Startup Machine is helping entrepreneurs test the riskiest assumptions about their businesses with their Lean process!

Click here for the Huffington Post article!

They Don’t Want Your Product!

(Customers Want the Benefits of Your Product)

Creating and developing a lucrative brand via an online-only presence, with Airtasker’s CEO and Co-Founder of Joe Button, Tim Fung.

Why focus on brand creation?

• Brands create an additional point of difference.  If people want your brand, they will pay higher prices (higher margins) and tend to be more ‘sticky’.
• Internet shopping is becoming more experiential, so buyers don’t always buy product on a rationale basis but rather an emotive brand benefit.
• Brands create loyalty, but price deals don’t. Incentives and discounts tend to create spikes, but you may have to keep re-acquiring customers.

How can an internet-only e-commerce business create a brand?

• Use social media to create an online personality – cool social apps like Pinterest and Instagram provide a great platform to express your brand through images, video and social interaction.  Leverage this content on ubiquitous channels like Facebook and Twitter.
• Use every brand touch point as an opportunity to express your brand – whether it’s your confirmation email template design, delivery packaging or product swing tags, think about every instance that your customer interacts with you and make sure that it’s part of a branded experience. Tangible touch points are critical.
• Design your customer experience around an emotive brand benefit, not just a logic flow – at Joe Button, we don’t offer 10,000 fabrics, we curate our product down to just 30 fabrics per season to ensure that every shirt fits our brand.  We also name the shirts in our Sartorial Collection based on aspirational characters that inspired their design (like Don Draper or Patrick Bateman) to express our brand character and engage the customer with the emotive benefits of buying our products.

Read More on PowerRetail.com!

Competition Time! Email Entrepreneurs@fitnyc.edu for more info!!

Big Marketers on Campus

_

Tech start-ups enlist undergrads as “ambassadors” to network

Tech companies in their start-up phase have little cash and big need for word-of-mouth marketing so they’re creating “ambassador programs” involving socially connected college students. Katherine Rosman has details on Lunch Break.”

Image via WSJ.com, Zach Davis, far left, and Rohan Deuskar conceived of Stylitics.com in 2010, modeling their ambassador program on a similar practice in the music business.