Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside marketing departments on brand and new product strategies in Poland, as well as in the U.S., Spain, and Brazil.
Even when products had features that clearly differentiated them from those already on the market, one of the toughest tasks was always determining the marketing positioning of the product—its marketing communication strategy.
I should note that the situation was similar to what most companies face: the brand itself was still too weak to drive sales for new products. Instead, those new products were actually supposed to help build the brand.
The biggest challenges revolved around defining the main value proposition—the one that would generate interest in the product and ultimately serve as the key factor in purchase decisions.
The difficulty lay in the fact that most products offer more than one benefit, which led to numerous discussions with product development, sales, or senior management.
The issue was that the more we expanded the product’s marketing communications, the more the product began to resemble what was already on the market in the eyes of target buyers.
Moreover, a larger number of messages reduced the chance of any single one being noticed, given that a consumer scanning a store shelf typically spends no more than one second on each package—and only if something initially piques their interest.
On the other hand, if we attempted to truly stand out from the competition by focusing on one key benefit, we were faced with the dilemma of which benefit to choose.
Usually, the most distinctive benefits provoked the greatest doubts about business potential. Typical questions included: “For how many target consumers is this benefit actually valuable?” and “For how many will this benefit be the deciding factor in making a purchase?”
One practical solution we began to implement involved simple quantitative testing with representatives of the target groups, testing several prototype packaging options along with different price points.
However, the problem remains that many companies want to introduce multiple new products each year, do it quickly, and don’t include such testing in their plans.
The cost of this approach is high, although it often goes unrecognized, because the market failures of new products are simply not directly linked to the decision-making processes that took place before they were launched.
