Chasers, by their nature, read about news biz disappointments and want to know how they can move faster, compete better and nurture the information landscape for a stronger future.
Here’s one idea to get you thinking, agree or not.
Anytime
you have a new product or service idea for which you believe the best
introduction to customers is a “soft launch” — meaning little or no
marketing, a.k.a. dipping toes in the water — kill it!
Not the launch. The product.
Does
this approach sound extreme? What about the investment of time and
resources it takes to get a product ready for launch? Isn’t it a waste?
Yes,
and that’s the point. A soft launch is like advertising a car as just a
place to sit — maybe customers will realize it does other things very
well at some point, maybe they won’t. The problems abound:
- Soft launches generally rely on existing customers to find
the new product or service through passing references in existing
products or services. That tendency leaves almost no opportunity for
acquiring new customers. - Soft launches assume incorrectly that people are actively watching and waiting for new products and services from you. If you’re Google, yes, they are — so everything can be a “beta”
and a crowd will form around it. The news biz? We hate to break it to
you, but prospective customers aren’t exactly camped out to get tickets
to our laboratories. - Worst, soft launches indicate a lack of confidence in our
ability to scope, develop and manage new products and services. That’s
a shame. There are enough Chasers in this business to go around, to
have great ideas and to build on them. If mainstream media don’t show
enough confidence in the ideas they grow from the inside, the brightest
minds on the inside will soon be on the outside.
What to do? The answers lie in common business practices for companies that maintain pipelines of new products and services.
- Cultivate at least some lightweight processes for taking
great ideas and turning them into finished products and services. That
doesn’t mean you have to build a huge team of technologists and
creatives; in fact, you can do very well by staying deliberately smaller than the competition. It just means that you should have a plan, a way, a culture for building new stuff. - Learn the customer (as opposed to the time-worn,
overconfident “know the customer”). Research money spent on consumer
audience segmentation, for example, probably serves media better than
money spent on technology sciences. - Remember that media businesses are more services than products.
We talk a lot about “product development” (including in this post) when
what we’re providing are services to consumers and advertisers. It’s a
different mindset. Introductions of new services must, for one, be
perceived as distinctly more human, more personal than selling some new
widget. - Plan for success. That means bake marketing and promotion
money into the product or service development budget. And it means,
given the fact that we’re talking about services rather than products,
planning for an uptick in requests for customer support, even if we
perceive our new idea to be perfectly executed.
If that’s what
we believe, there’s no excuse for a soft launch, right? The biggest
difference between great innovations we know about and great
innovations we’ve never heard of is the confidence with which they were
put forth.
