Designing a Product Launch

Or : how to design tiny habits

In a previous post I introduced a grammar I’m finding useful in the practice of designing interventions. I call it the Moment of Mediation. In this post I explain how this can be used to design your product launch.

Update: Robert Brunner talks about Beats headphones and Making it Big — 19:40–21:20. Excellent insights into the moment of mediation and what goes into desgining the introduction channel. See here

Setting

You are :

1. A startup, with a product or service you believe in. Initial consumer feedback is telling you that if you make your offering available through the right channels, the market will pull it. You need to determine how to find this channel OR
2. An established company entering a crowded market, with a differentiated product or service . You need to determine the right channel to introduce your offering to let the consumers experience the difference. You’re certain that once they do, they will switch.

Adjusting the Canvas

To keep it together, you need to know how does this fit into your business model ? — so you know which parts of your business system you are tweaking.

In business model canvas terms, you’re trying to discover the right channel — with a little refinement.

Refining the Channels on the Business Model Canvas

There are in fact two distinct channels you need to introduce to support your offering ( product or service ).

1. The Introduction Channel : This is where your consumer is first exposed to your offering. This is a temporary system. The goal here is to help your consumer create a tiny habit using your offering and lead them to your consumption channel.
   Current examples include bundling an app with a service provider or a phone manufacturer for digital products, and launching campaigns for physical products. I propose a more precise alternative here.
2. The Consumption Channel : This is where they purchase your product from once they’ve been exposed to it — usually a physical or digital store. Current examples include— app store for your platform, click and brick stores for physical products.

The Introduction Channel is the foundation for the Consumption Channel. The rest of this post talks about designing your introduction channel.

Obvious Strategy

1. If you’re a large established company, you have deep pockets you launch a advertising campaign — the expensive, brute force approach — in an attempt to overwhelm the mind of your consumer base with repetition and hope that when s.he is at the point of purchase the next time, the sheer force of this approach will force a recall of your brand.
2. If you’re a startup and do not have the luxury of deep pockets, you launch a viral campaign — the inexpensive, hope-for-the-best approach — get your first users to be your free advertising and get them excited enough to talk to a few of their friends who in turn talk to a few of their friends, and hopefully very soon everyone is talking about this new offering that is really cool.

Alternative Strategy

Both strategies have a basic flaw: the fact that “go to market” comes as an afterthought. This leads to situations where the “market” did not accept your product. It’s not the market, it your consumer that did not accept your product — it’s just less painful to think of it the other way.

The flaw is the abstracted notion of a “Market”

Instead, consider this : to be successful, your product needs to integrate into the lives of your consumer. To the extent that this integration is effortless for your consumer, you experience a pull or a product/market fit. To the extent it is not, you experience a rejection.

Instead of Product/Market Fit, think Product/Moment Integration.

Since our lives are made up of moments, a more useful approach would be to determine the moment into which you are attempting to integrate your offering ( product or service ). This has two advantages :

1. It keeps the conversation grounded in reality — you’re not “taking it to the market” but integrating into the moment. You have to get specific about the context of this moment — essential when you’re thinking of launching your offering.
2. It’s easier to recover in case of rejection — its not the market that rejected you, which seems overwhelming and hard to recover from, but that you got the moment wrong. Recovery is simply finding the next moment where you may integrate or surfacing assumption you missed about the current moment and trying again.

Failure feels less fatal when you’re thinking in moments.

So what is the moment you’re looking for ?

The Moment of Mediation

Briefly, your offering mediates the experience for the consumer. Thats the job it is tasked to do. For maximum effect, you want to mediate those moments where they feel the most pain without your offering. A useful way to find your moments is to ask, for a given situation:

At which moment does my consumer feel the most helpless or powerless ?

This feeling can cover a wide range — from something as mild as irritation to full blown feelings of helplessness. Your offering will aim to meet the consumer need at a particular intensity of helplessness.

Figure out the feeling you’re looking for.

Once you’ve figured out your moment and your feeling, brainstorm to find ways to be present in that moment. The answer will give you the introduction channel you need to approach to build a partnership with.

Example

Here’s an example from real life.

Note : I have no association with the product, although I admire how well their campaign was executed. I’m simply using their example to illustrate the approach

Say you’re a large tissue paper manufacturer and are deciding to launch a new product into a local market. You know this product has sold well in other parts of the world. The product is solid.

You need to figure out how to introduce it to this local market.

Ask two questions :

1. In which situations do my consumers typically need to have a pack of tissues at hand ?
2. In which situation is the degree of helplessness or powerlessness experience high enough for consumers to pull this offering and how easily can we access this situation ?

Find Moments

Facilitate a brainstorm with your team for question one, and come up at a bunch of situations.

For example : snacking in movie halls, after street food, after messy fast food, private parties with finger food .

Analyse Pain

Analyse the degree of pain intrinsic to each situation, and balance it with the viability of accessing this situation. Rank your situations accordingly.

For example :

1. Snacking in movie halls — low. It’s dark, hardly the place to put your brand, even if the pain is high.
2. After street food — high. But its a disorganised system, hard to access and you don’t want your brand to be associated with this image.
3. After messy fast food — high. It’s an organised system and you need to find a partner who will give you the largest number of moments where your offering will get noticed.
4. Private parties — low. Paper napkins don’t fit into this environment and its a disorganised system making it hard to access.

So mediating the moment after a messy fast food experience seems like the best situation to introduce this offering.

Choose Partners

Now find the partner that gives your introduction the best chance of product-moment integration. Here’s how :

Let’s say you to have to choose between burgers, pizza’s, burritos.

Thinking simply about the messiness involved, the messier the better — so pizza’s and burritos would seem like a good choice.

But you also need to consider exposure. You want your offering to be exposed to the largest number of people, given this channel will be dismantled eventually. So a partner with high throughput is preferable. Burger’s are the winner here.

I’m assuming an equal fit with the brand image with all the partners. Else I would choose brand image over other criteria.

Introduce The Offering

All that’s left is designing the exact moments where the offering is introduced. For this you look at the existing work flow and determine where your brand can be reinforced.

You want your offering to be noticed at least thrice : Before, During and After the moment of mediation.

Translated to the burger experience it means :

1. Before : When placing the order at the counter — to introduce the offering
2. During : While consuming your order — to mediate the moment
3. After : After consuming your order — to reinforce the moment

Introducing your offering at the moment of mediation : Before, During and After

Create A Tiny Habit

Now let the engine run. In this case, every visit to the fast food restaurant leads to a reinforcement of the experience. Nicely enough, its reinforcement for which the consumer is grateful — it mediates a moment of helplessness and integrating itself into her life routine as a tiny habit. ( Thank youfor introducing me to the term Poonacha )

Create Triggers in her environment

Run the campaign long enough for there to be sufficient reminders in her environment to trigger memories of the experience.

Note: It works because you found a genuine moment of helplessness and choose to mediate it. Consumers are extremely perceptive and can sense when your intent is manipulative. Even if you give stuff away for free.

Activate the tiny habit. Touchdown !

If you designed the introduction channel right, the consumer would have created a tiny habit which integrates your offering into her life routine.

In her head it would sound like :

“ The next time I ( action ) I will reach for ( your offering )”.

Congratulations : you’ve achieved product-moment integration ☺

Finding stories worth telling.

With a little luck, you will have heartwarming stories where your offering was used in ways never designed for, or by people never designed for. Put these out into the world, rather than pounding her with advertisements.

With a tiny habit in place, you’ve made it to the hardest place of all — her shopping list. A slight reinforcement at your consumption channel — an offer or standee at the checkout counter and done.

Learn

If you failed to achieve product-moment integration or achieved product-moment rejection it will tell you one of two things:

1. You picked the wrong moment to mediate — meaning for the moment you choose — the pain was not sufficiently high for the consumer to want to integrate your offering into her existing routine. If so, brainstorm and come up with a few more moments and test again.
2. You got the need wrong — meaning you consistently experience product-moment rejection. This means the attributes your offering has are not the ones your consumer needs. You may have designed for yourself. If so, you need to determine which attribute is troublesome and reshape your offering. This could be minor or major depending on how self-referential the team has been earlier.

Your offering is a combination of qualifying and differentiating attributes — More on this in another post.

I’ve taken an example of a large company, but the approach is equally valid for an offering from a startup. Happy to hear from you.

Photo credit : Phil King / Flickr