Don’t Be Like Kevin Costner.
How to avoid costly mistakes by only building when you absolutely know they are going to come.
“Build it and they will come” has been the bane of marketing ever since the phrase from Costner movie Field of Dreams was bastardized to suggest marketing is an afterthought to building a product. The original quote from the movie was, “If you build it, he will come,” and the “he” referred to baseball legend “Shoeless” Joe Jackson who would come back from the dead to play ball if Ray, the Kevin Costner character, built a baseball field in his corn. So that’s what Kevin did and Joe and other dead players from the 1919 Chicago Red Sox team dutifully turned up as promised.
It’s a metaphor for hope and belief and it makes for a mostly good movie. The problem is that the now more familiar version, “Build it and they will come,” has become a wholly different metaphor about the promise of commercial success: if you build a product or service people will realize how amazing it is and become loyal customers. The proof is legendary. Steve Jobs and his vision led to the creation of the iPhone and iPad and as soon as people experienced them for themselves they became converts. Henry Ford built the Model T without asking people whether or not they wanted one and famously said: “If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses.”
Putting marketing after product development is the way it’s been done for decades, but it’s completely screwy. Good marketing isn’t just about selling a product that’s already been built, it’s real value is to help shape the product in the first place by working out what people need before you build it. While I’d agree with Henry that people often don’t know what they want and so asking them might stifle big innovation, the “build it first” model is most often a stupid way to operate. It has led to countless product launches and failures because the person with the vision was just plain wrong. For every Henry Ford, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk out there, there are thousands of innovators who failed dismally. Some failed innovation are well known, like Microsoft’s Zune, Google Glass or New Coke, but most others we just never heard of and disappeared without anybody noticing. The innovators spent years building something because they thought everyone else would be as enthusiastic about their idea as they were, only to launch it and hear crickets.
I know, focus groups isn’t the answer. They’re just an expensive way to hand out free snacks to people with too much time on their hands. Better is to get out of the office into the real world and interact with people. See what they are doing and talk to them about what problems they are facing. The story about how P&G’s Swiffer mop was invented is that P&G started off by trying to find a better cleaning fluid for floors, but when they actually took the time to observe people mopping they saw that people were spending more time cleaning the mops than the floors. The Swiffer sped up the process with disposable wet towels that could be thrown away once soiled (don’t you just hate that word: “soiled”).
Add a bit of social listening to the mix and before you know it you’ll learn what people are saying about current products and what is the real problem worth solving. And cracking the problem involves asking better questions. When Albert Einstein as a kid got home from school his mother didn’t ask little Albert what grades he got, but whether he had asked any good questions. P&G reframed the problem they were trying to solve from: “How do we make a better floor cleaning soap? to “How do we make a better mop?” Now we have a better question to ask of ourselves we can spend some time and energy trying to come up with a solution. I’d argue that this part about understanding consumer needs to make products people actually want is marketing. The best marketing is always a great product, not the spin you give it, because if you already know it’s something they need you don’t need to sell it, you just need to tell it.
But even when we’ve satisfied ourselves our innovation solves a need it’s still not time to invest in building anything yet, not even a prototype or minimum viable product (MVP). We’re missing an important step that can provide evidence — actual hard data — that there is a market for what we hope to build, which is to create a bit of vaporware. Vaporware is often a label for style over substance, but in this context I’m talking about building the message before building the product. Elon Musk is a master at this. He has laid out visions for colonizing Mars, controlling computers with your brain and traveling from LA to SF by train in 30 mins and Elon has the ability to raise huge amounts of capital to build ventures around these ideas. Or look at Kickstarter: many of the products are yet to be built and use slick videos to sell a vision for what they will be. Whether the ideas get funded is a test of demand and so both provides capital and reassurance that there’s a market. The messages crafted to sell the idea of a product is marketing and these are skills that should not be only be brought to bear when it’s built.
A really easy way to test the desirability of a product before it’s built is to advertise it. It’s super cheap to create a landing page with an email signup box and use online ads to drive traffic to the landing page and measure the number of signups. It can be done for just a few hundred dollars. If there are enough signups then this is evidence there’s real product demand and you have what’s known as product-market fit (although “product-market” implies the product comes first, so more accurately it’s market-product fit), a well established metric in Silicon Valley. In the Valley, startups that haven’t shown they have good fit are unlikely to get funding and will need to pivot before they can. Sure, advertising something that doesn’t yet exist has its detractors. Usual arguments are it’s dishonest, we might put off potential consumers and the money spent on ads won’t lead to product sales and so is a waste. Let’s tackle these one by one.
True, when people see the ads they might initially think they can buy what you’re advertising and there’s a good chance they won’t be able to, so yeah to that extent it’s misleading. But when you create the landing page you have to make it clear in the copy you’re still building the product and not yet selling it. How you craft the messaging is very important, not only because you don’t want to deceive people, but also so the data you collect accurately reflects their interest. More on how to create good ads and landing pages further down. Second, will it put off potential customers? You’re only testing among a few hundred people and so in the grand scheme of things the numbers are relatively small, so who cares. Third, it’s true money spent on ads won’t lead to sales in the short term, but they will give you really useful data about whether your product idea’s got merit. And along the way you’ll collect email addresses of future customers who’ve expressed an interest in what you’re doing. On balance, I’d argue a vaporware ad campaign to test a product before you’ve built it is a great investment and will give you invaluable data about the potential demand.
Building a vaporware ad campaign involves three main steps: coming up with a wide variety of product pitches to potential consumers; creating different landing pages and ads for each pitch; running the ads to drive very targeted traffic to your landing pages and measuring the results. Here we go, step by step:
- Creating the Product Pitches. Assuming you’ve already done your research and know what big problem you’re trying to solve, and assuming you’ve come up with what you believe is a product that solves the problem, you now need to create 5–10 different ways to describe the solution. Think big and think wide so each pitch is different and distinctive, rather than just using different words to describe the same thing. Each pitch should be based on a different consumer insight that you gathered from your initial research. Let’s take an example: you think there’s a market for a subscription-based home delivery fresh-pressed juice service in your area. Hey, I like that idea, sounds like a winner to me! But do other people agree and would they pay enough for the product to turn it into a viable business? The different products pitches might be: the benefits of fresh-pressed juice; how your particular fresh-pressed juice is made from locally farmed vegetables; the price of your juice compared to your competitors; how subscription to the service gives a no-hassle regular supply of the nutritious juice; or the convenient home delivery aspect of the service. That’s five very different pitches, which all seem relevant. The question is which one is the idea that attracts potential customers?
- Landing pages and ads. Each pitch needs its own landing page and ad that focuses on the one message you’re trying to convey. The ads you’ll be running are probably going to be Facebook Ads or Google Adwords because, well, these guys have sort of cracked it and have made it very easy and cheap to do highly targeted ad buys. On the ad you’ll have room for a short headline and short description, maybe a visual and and a link to your landing page. The headline needs to convey the main thought immediately and the description adds a little bit more info. Pick one visual that works for every ad so when you run them and compare the results, you know it’s the idea in the headline and not the image that led to different click-through rates. There’s lots of landing page software available that allow you to build multiple landing pages very quickly. Launchrock is free and good for Facebook campaigns, although can be glitchy and rejected by Google Adwords because there isn’t enough content on the landing page for Google’s search engine. So you might want to take a look at one like Unbounce that costs money but seem to work better with Adwords. The landing pages you build should expand on the message of the ad but in more depth and have a strong call to action and sign up form. The whole point of the page is to get people to indicate interest by leaving their details.
- Running the ads and measuring results. Goole Adwords and Facebook Ads allow you to target large numbers of people by demographics and interests and for almost every business you should be able to do a laser-focused ad buy to get data on what message is resonating best. Pick just one ad platform to use for the whole campaign so you’re comparing like with like. Google Adwords is great for products that people might be actively searching for (e.g. search term “fresh-pressed juice”) whereas Facebook Ads are great if you think you can work out who are your potential users based on their interests (e.g. people who like yoga). Run each ad campaign for a few days and see how many signups you get for each one. In total you shouldn’t need to spend more than a few hundred dollars per ad, but there’s no magic number and it’ll ultimately depend on what it takes to get results. You’re looking for the pitch that brings in the most signups all other things being equal. If you get to 100 signups for any campaign you’re doing pretty well and that’s a winning idea. If you’re not getting any love from any of your tests, then you can either try some new pitches or try a different audience. Maybe you haven’t yet found that compelling hook, or the people you assumed would be your potential customers just aren’t interested. Keep trying until you see people responding to your message and only then will you know you’ve got a product worth building.
Follow these three steps and you’ll have solid data that will tell you which message resonates with what type of people. You can also contact them and ask them more in depth questions about what it was they liked about your product idea and whether they have thoughts on how to make it better. Explain you’re at very early stages and offer to reward them for their time. Creating a vaporware campaign like this is all pretty straightforward but at each stage you’ll need to get into the mindset of the consumer and be prepared to shift from your own biased opinions about what you think should work to what the data shows is or isn’t working in reality. It’s sometimes difficult to step back and be truly objective when you have such a strong belief in your product vision — the bias towards a belief we want to be true is what psychologists call “desirability bias” — but keeping an open mind is a necessary part of this whole approach.
A final thought: I often think that the skills we learn in advertising are wasted on advertising. In advertising we become very skilled in how to uncover consumer insights, how to reduce complexity to a single focused thought and how to create and craft messages that will move people to act and feel. These same skills are the very ones needed when conceiving a product in the first place. Perhaps there’s life in the old dog yet.
Mark Simmons is a branding and marketing strategist based in Los Angeles and can be reached at mark@punkbranding.com
