Why product launches fail

The product defines a new category, so consumers or customers will need considerable education before it can be sold. Management has promised the board and stockholders an instant hit without considering how much time is needed to educate consumers about the product. The product is manufactured offshore; quality control issues result in negative consumer feedback and product returns.

The ad campaign is launched before the sales force is fully briefed, so customers know more than salespeople about the product. In we worked with American Biophysics on the launch of its Mosquito Magnet, which uses carbon dioxide to lure mosquitoes into a trap.

The timing was perfect: The West Nile virus scare had elevated mosquitoes from irritating nuisances to life-threatening disease carriers. Mosquito Magnet quickly became one of the top-selling products in the Frontgate catalog and at Home Depot. But American Biophysics proved more adept at killing mosquitoes than at running a fast-growing consumer products company.

When it expanded manufacturing from its low-volume Rhode Island facility to a mass-production plant in China, quality dropped. Consumers became angry, and a product that was saving lives almost went off the market.

Mosquito Magnet is making money for Woodstream today, but the shareholders who originally funded the device have little to show for its belated success. In , when Microsoft launched Windows Vista, the media and the public had high expectations. As social media and user-generated reviews proliferate, the power of negative feedback will only increase—making it even more imperative that products be ready before they hit the market.

For its biggest launch since Diet Coke, Coca-Cola identified a new market: to year-old men who liked the taste of Coke but not its calories and carbs and liked the no-calorie aspect of Diet Coke but not its taste or feminine image. Men rejected the hybrid drink; they wanted full flavor with no calories or carbs, not half the calories and carbs.

And the low-carb trend turned out to be short-lived. Positioning a product to leverage a fad is a common mistake. Sometimes market research is skewed by asking the wrong questions or rendered useless by failing to look objectively at the results. The company hired the singer Shania Twain for its launch commercials. This confused consumers, many of whom thought the device involved both music and scents, and the ambiguity caused Scentstories to fail.

Google neglected to properly research and define their audience, assuming the hype would be enough to appeal to a generic wide audience and sell a product with no real value proposition.

Search form Search. August 4, Login to rate this article 5. But remember, an error only becomes a mistake when you do it more than once. So learn from the above mistakes and how you can avoid them so your product launch has a better chance of survival. Did we miss anything? Got something to contribute from your firsthand experience?

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The biggest start-ups misconception These mistakes often stem from one fundamental misconception: young start-ups are used to thinking in product and technology terms. The first step to a successful go-to-market strategy Right before jumping through hoops trying to figure out what to do first and how — you need to reorganize your priorities: Rather than spending your time on what your company needs, you should be spending it on defining your market, your ideal customers, what their pain points are, and how your solution is solving them.

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