I had an interesting experience at a recent marketing event where a company I know well was presenting a broad suite of new products to the market, about 10 products in all.
The interesting part of that experience was based on some insider knowledge – at least half of those products don’t work.
There’s a concept in marketing known as the minimum viable product (MVP), or the minimally acceptable product (MAP). It’s a product with just enough features and functionality to be accepted by early adopters in the market. Once you’ve sold a few of those, you use user feedback to add additional features or functions. If you’re trying to have an active product pipeline, it’s a great way to continually introduce products quickly while enhancing your existing products – sort of a paid beta test.
Occasionally you’ll see companies forget the middle words in those phrases. They’ll pop out some half-baked product and expect early adopters to buy it even though it doesn’t work. Most often that’s due to the company putting out a whole bunch of ideas at once based on a concept or piece of intellectual property, and not fully realizing any of them to the point that they’re truly viable.
When considering the viability of a product, consider function, value proposition, and core message. Click To TweetWhen you’re considering the viability of a product, I’d suggest the following considerations:
- Function – the product needs to function in such a way that it fulfills the value proposition reasonably and consistently in a way a customer would expect. If you miss out on this point, you lose market credibility before you’ve gained significant share.
- Value proposition – what customer problem are you solving? Unless you believe you’re creating a completely new market, you need to be solving an existing problem for a customer.
- Core message – how are you going to explain the value proposition of this product to the market? If you know there’s value, but you can’t tell me about it, there’s no value.