Contronics Blog

Welcome to part 2 of our 7 part Failed Marketing series. Last week I talked about "creating your market" that leads us onto this weeks article of "basic delivery".

Without a product or service to deliver to a customer no business can exist, proof of this came in 2000 with the "dot com crash" that shattered the US markets. What caused this was a number of companies that "went public" to raise capital but didn't have any actual product or service that generated revenue. Many of these companies only had a website that failed to deliver anything valuable to the end user or investors.

Now we have learned from this multi-billion-dollar lesson, companies around the world have gone back to real product and service offerings - regardless if they are virtual, real or a combination.

Whole Point of Your Existence FAIL shows a real-world example of not delivering what you promise to your customers. I'm not going to point out the flaw in this image as I think it is pretty self explanatory.

Common in the IT industry is to release products before they are completed to judge customer feedback and evaluate if the product is good, has potential or should be shelved. This often saves millions of dollars in future development.

There is nothing particularly wrong with releasing a product that is not completed to the best world scenario, as long as it performs it's basic function and it isn't being falsely sold. In fact, it happens every day and we don't even realize it most of the time. What this allows for is a few things:

1.       Get feedback from customers early, this allows improvements to be made that the company thought were not needed or even remove features that customers generally don't want

2.       Generates revenue on the product line early allowing better and more development

3.       Provides overall information to the company on if the product is viable in the market before full investment has been made

Google provides a good example of early product release and in fact out of all products they release they withdraw around half from market. In the case of Google (and many other IT companies) they call these releases 'beta' releases.

The key here is to ensure your basic product or service delivery is taken care of, for example if you make calculators you need to ensure they can accurately add, subtract, multiply and divide. You also need to make sure they have all numbers from 0 to 9 in addition to having a screen and clear key. Finally you need to make sure they turn on when the "on" button is pushed. It doesn't matter if you don't have all the scientific features as long as your calculator does the basics of what you claim it does.

If you have a range of calculators that cannot turn on you and therefore cannot be used, you have just failed on basic delivery because effectively, you have now sold your paper weight as a calculator. How do you think your customers who just paid $5 feel? Ripped off I bet.

And how does a production and development matter relate to marketing? Simple, who makes the promises of what the products do to the customers? I will tell you now it is not development or production departments - they tell marketing and sale what the product should do, marketing makes the promises to the customers  of what the product should do at the end of the day.

So when you're looking to release a new product to market make sure it does what you claim it does before it's too late. Get involved and test the product before it goes to production as well as testing the first few units so you can see that it lives up to the development claims.

Once again we would like to that FailBlog.org for the inspiration for this article.