You Have the License to Kill?

“Great companies are built on great products,” — Elon Musk

A doctor told the relatives that the patient is dead. The patient, hearing what the doctor just said, mustered all his strength and stuttered: “Doc-tor, I..I am aa..alive.” The doctor shot back: “Just shut up. Am I the doctor or are you the doctor?”

Of course, it is the doctor who knows so much about the human body, while the poor patient only knows that he is still alive. Still the doctor has to consult with the patient.

In business, brands may know a lot about their products that sometimes they declare that the life of a product is over. They would stop producing or supporting it. This happens even when the product has a customer base — however, small it may be.

I have a long list of products — from automobiles (Luna, Hero Puch) to social media products (Google Buzz, Aardvark) — I wish their owners continued producing them. They might have killed these products out of some necessity. But all I know is I loved using those products, and would have continued to use them.

By checking with the customers, brands can avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Here is a newspaper report that credits India’s Wipro with introducing the tablet (“a laptop computer with a screen that can be turned 360 degrees”). The launch (in 2010) was ahead of the ones by the current market leader Samsung! Wipro called it e.Go Sense. We do not have data on how the response for the product was from the market but the company thought that the product did not make business sense and hence, lost interest in it. Eventually, e.Go Sense was not be seen in the market.

Looking at the booming market for tablets now, it looks like Wipro had made a costly mistake. Maybe people were just started showing interest, and the market was just growing for the product. Whatever it was, the Wipro’s decision may well serve as a yet another case for treating customers as co-owners and checking with them before taking any significant brand/product decisions.