Can a Product Fail due to Innovation Overkill?
The fine line between “Innovative” and “Gimmicky”.
We all talk about innovation a lot. It is the major driving force behind new ideas and discoveries and is always considered as something of which more is always good. But that isn’t necessarily the case. I’ll use the smartphone industry to explain it because almost everyone owns a smartphone today and knows something about the market.
A not unheard of scenario
Company XYZ announces the launch of a smartphone with some over-the-top feature(s). You see the buzz about it flooding the internet for a while, but then fast forward a few weeks, and nobody could care less. It’s gone, you don’t see it on marketplace websites, you don’t see any reviews, no YouTube videos, nothing.
Why?
The best selling smartphone companies in the market have one thing in common. They build good phones. Revelation, right? Okay, so what I really mean is they build phones that are subtle, not crazy, but just well-defined solid devices. But it isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially for a new company. Even if a new company manages to do that, it could take them a considerable amount of time to get that exposure and publicity.
Can you over-innovate?
To take the short route to the limelight, many companies turn to the alternative idea — let’s build something that has never been done before, something out of the box.
- It could be a quadruple folding phone;
- a ten-camera setup or;
- a battery with an excessive capacity inside a phone;
- a built in dedicated gaming setup, or, if they’ve lost their minds;
- Everything
And if I’m being honest, I like hearing about this kind of experimentation. Same goes for most people, it’s exciting for consumers to look at as it is baffling and just crazy. Thus it’s kind of natural that the media and the YouTube reviewers would want ,to cover it. It generates just enough social media buzz to make the company think they’ve made it into the big leagues. A company can shoot straight to the top of the news just by being different, if only for a few days.
I saw a video on YouTube about the massive ‘Energizer’ smartphone which has an 18000 mAh battery and it’s thick as a brick.
That video has more than 5 million views. On that same channel, Samsung flagship devices and even iPhones are reviewed, but none of them got this much exposure.
But when it came to getting the funding it had hoped for, the Energizer didn’t even come close to its target, which is precisely the problem. Whilst people like talking about crazy features and even imagine themselves using such devices, in reality they don’t actually buy crazy devices. They buy safe.
Something becomes eligible to be called innovative, if it has/does something that ‘nobody’ else is, and just so you know, there’s a reason that ‘nobody’ else is doing it. Smartphones with ‘a lot of’ innovation have a probability of going wrong and running into completely unanticipated issues than if they just took the last year’s offering and made it better.
Drawing an analogy
Let’s say you went out with some friends to grab a bite. You’re someone who isn’t afraid to experiment with food. You ordered a burger with buns made up of chickpea flour. Now there’s only one of these things that can happen. You might have a really good experience or not. The good thing is now you know whether or not to order that burger again.
And that’s where the obvious difference when a buying a smartphone comes in. Most of can’t just go around experimenting with smartphones. They are not only far more pricier than food but an average consumer is going to buy one phone and it should ideally last them at least 2–3 years. And in that time it’s going to be a central part of their life. As it becomes such an important decision, it’s always better for consumers to take the safe route and be risk averse.
The Balance
The problem with innovation starts when the companies get a bit carried away with how they are going to make themselves stand out. They forget the bigger questions that the buyers are worried about.Whether or not the phone will get timely updates? Is it going to be easily repairable? Is it gonna last them a year or two? And most importantly,
“Will it run PUBG?”
I jest, but you get my point. 😉
I personally would be willing to have a slightly less exciting smartphone if it meant that I had peace of mind, and this is the general attitude of most consumers. Of course we all have preferences regarding camera quality, battery backup, build, processing power, and a lot of other things. But most people prefer to buy a safe combination of these factors.
Risk Aversion
Like I stated earlier that most of the consumers prefer to be risk averse, the same holds true for most smartphone companies too.
You might have noticed with these crazy innovative smartphones that they’ll either be made by a company that is a new entrant and so it has less to lose, or it will be produced by one of the big smartphone makers but under a not very well known sub-brand.
OnePlus: Balanced Innovation done right
When OnePlus came to the market, it was completely new and unheard of. Just like any new entrant, they needed attention and buzz. The wrong way of doing it would have been to allocate all its resources into one killer feature to make something that would really stand out; something that really grabbed headlines. But they didn’t go that way, they didn’t build a crazy phone.
They made a standard flagship phone and they got that media coverage by pricing their phone extremely reasonably mixed with some good marketing. That was the remarkable thing. No crazy features, just crazy value for money. Now that the media was paying them attention, all they had to do was just keep making better versions of it and we all know where the brand stands now.
Conclusion
In no way do I mean to imply that innovation should be held back or overlooked, but rather there should be an element of subtlety and feasibility to it. Those really crazy devices — you could call them cutting edge, you could also call them gimmicky — do not succeed. And as far as useless innovations go, they automatically get flushed out given how the smartphone market works.
So even with innovation, subtlety, balance and viability have to be taken care of to bring about the best results from the productivity that goes into it.
Now that we know that we don’t have to stretch innovation beyond a reasonable limit, we should still be able to convert our innovative ideas into something a little more tangible. It can be a website, an application, a multi-platform utility or just about anything. The key idea should always be to solve a problem for your customers. Innovation for the sake of innovation doesn’t get you anywhere.
Keep the customer in mind. Every idea can be materialized to create utility for people. With people who have the right set of skills to develop an idea into a viable product, you can take your innovation to the next level. 👇⬇️
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