![\"Cover](\"https:\/\/berkonomics.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/CLS-BottomLine-Yield-cover.jpg\")
<\/a>Cover story for industry magazine. Best possible press: too early to market.<\/p><\/div>\n
These and other efforts to be first over the years have led me to ask my current crop of CEOs as I serve on various boards, \u201cDo you have the resources to evangelize the market, educate your potential customers, AND sell your product?\u201d The answer is invariably \u2018no,\u2019 because the cost of evangelizing a new product is completely unknown. A marketing professional or the marketing department certainly can work to obtain good press, appealing to curious journalists and early adapters. Early meetings with potential customers will yield enthusiasm for a \u201cfree test\u201d of the new product. But if it is a radical departure from the comfort zone, the cost of promoting and marketing the new product will be beyond the capability of most small or medium sized companies.<\/p>\n
Even Apple rarely attempts this, with all its resources. Apple is well known for building upon the work of early adapters. After failing with its early Newton tablet, Apple waited for fifteen years before reinventing and repositioning the tablet as a much friendlier consumer device. The same occurred with the iPod. Apple was not first or second. They just added the infrastructure needed to seamlessly purchase and download content to their offering, and produced a friendly way to use a product that previously required early adapters to manually download songs to their devices.<\/p>\n
I will readily admit that the half million I spent on the artificial intelligence system that failed generated the greatest positive press we ever had. As a corporate promotion, it was a hit. As a product marketing effort, it was a failure.<\/p>\n
If you are going to be first in a market, plan on a very long time from introduction to acceptance. Triple the time you estimate for the effort, and add four times the cost you estimated for marketing.<\/p>\n
Does anyone know how much Toshiba lost with its HD DVD format marketing effort? First to market over blue ray with what some say was a better product, Toshiba dropped over a billion dollars into that one and lost it all. There are numerous examples like that one.<\/p>\n
You might be an exception. Chances are that you\u2019d do much better by inventing a better mouse trap, and marketing it for its advantages over a product that the consumer already understands. But there is always a winner at a table with the odds stacked against the player. It just doesn\u2019t happen often enough to expect success.<\/p>\n
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Over the years, as I managed my several computer companies as CEO or executive chairman, I made the decision to go to market with a brand new product that had never before been exposed to my customer\u2019s marketplace. In each … Continue reading