Creating a new product is an exciting venture, especially if market and consumer research has revealed a need, but comprehensive solutions aren’t available yet. Customers want solutions for their problems, but they can’t quite identify what they need. This is where you come in.
If you launch a product and market it well, you’ll have an initial “aha!” moment with some of your audience. The rest of the crowd won’t immediately see it because they don’t know your product is the key to solving their problems. That, or they’re just generally indifferent.
It’s tough to break through the crowd’s buying habits as well, since most American consumers repeatedly buy the same 150 items that fill more than 85% of their needs.
To get on your target customer’s radar, trying out some creative marketing techniques could be your best bet. Here are seven great ways to generate buzz and address the audience’s most pressing needs with the product you’ve created.
Scarcity is often used to bolster sales, but it can also be used to create massive brand lift. It plays on the customer’s fear of missing out. Marketers use limited-time offers like daily deals, limitations on quantities, or one-time only promotions to create a sense of urgency and leverage scarcity.
Promoting “out of stock” items is another effective approach to developing product scarcity, as it shows potential customers that your product was so popular that your inventory is temporarily depleted. This strategy has been leveraged by a number of manufacturers in recent years:
- Amazon Fire TVs ran out of stock just a week after launch
- Nintendo shorted the production of the Wii game console
- Apple delayed shipping by two weeks or more on the iPhone 5 just minutes after it launched
You could shrug it off as a supply and demand issue, but these companies certainly didn’t refuse the heightened media coverage and consumer demand that resulted from supply shortages.
2. Information Scarcity
If you really understand your target audience, then you already know what will get their attention. If you leak just enough information before launch, you can generate tremendous buzz as your audience searches everywhere for more information.
In 2013, Hello Games announced No Man’s Sky, which was marketed as a revolutionary new game unlike anything seen before. Leading up to its release in 2016, Hello Games director Sean Murray teased out small tidbits of game footage and information. As press coverage and word-of-mouth grew, No Man’s Sky quickly became one of the most hyped and heavily-discussed games in years.
3. Leverage User-Generated Content
Sometimes creating demand for a product is as simple as letting your customers sell the experience for you. There’s no better example than GoPro. The company doesn’t have to put in much effort to market the brand other than leveraging content created by customers actively using their products. Rather than relying on expensive marketing campaigns, GoPro instead lets their customers’ experiences do the talking and selling.
You can take the same approach to user-generated content by promoting your good reviews, highlighting your best customers, and using images and video of real customers using your products across your social channels.
4. Make It Exclusive
People generally want something more when they can’t have it. They demand to know why they can’t have it, what factor excludes them, and how they can possibly get access to it. Exclusivity plays on the scarcity mindset and fears of missing out, except there are plenty of products to go around.
In an article for Forbes, Siimon Reynolds shared a story about a friend’s trip to Paris, where he visited a luxury watch dealer, Patek Philippe. In the store, his friend discovered a single watch in a glass display case with the price tag of $1 million.
“In order to buy this watch you must write to the CEO of Patek Philippe and tell him why you deserve it,” said Reynolds, founder of Photon Group. “Can you believe that? They have the gall to charge a million for a watch and then you have to pass a test to see if you are worthy of it? Amazing.”
That’s enough to make some want that watch, but it also goes a step beyond that specific watch. The exclusivity of that single piece elevates the perceived value of every other watch sold by Patek Philippe.
5. Focus on the Biggest Problem
Once you’ve identified a major issue facing an audience and you know your product is the perfect fit, you can then take the market by storm with a comprehensive content marketing strategy. Find how they’re currently searching for solutions and develop a your strategy based on those searches.
This is something we do for clients at my content marketing agency. We research the audience’s biggest issues, create a ton of useful content, then distribute and promote it extensively across every channel where the audience might be.
To ramp up your strategy, create a high-value offer that is completely free for anyone interested in it. This offer should consist of your best work that gives away information that is both relevant and helpful for your audience. While it might initially seem counterintuitive, educating your audience with high-value content can help you generate a lot of buzz around your brand and featured product.
“Firstly, it creates a sense of trust between your audience and your brand, which means they’re more likely to come back to your content or your website,” writes content marketer Dan Shewan. “Secondly, it reflects well on your brand – so much so that enthusiastic prospects may take things one step further and advocate for your brand on your behalf, becoming the elusive ‘brand ambassadors’ companies are always talking about.”
A key benefit to this approach is that you’ll capture their attention with the value in your free content. Once you pique their interest, you can draw the connection to your solution. Rather than selling and promoting the product and its features, concentrate on selling the experience and solution.
6. Partner with Rockstars
Influencers hold a lot of sway over their followers. Their audience respects them, trusts their ideas and opinions, and are willingly persuaded by their interactions and content. When you’re launching a new product, incorporating influencers into your marketing strategy can really give your product the boost it needs to get off the ground.
Find influencers in your market who are most relevant to your audience and connect with them to promote your upcoming product launch. Lyfe Kitchen went this route by working with influencers in the sports, health, fitness, and fashion worlds, as well as influential moms, to promote their new food products. The influencer promotions helped them expand from 400 to 1,400 stores in a matter of months.
7. Constantly Innovate
The first version of your product might’ve been revolutionary for your industry or market, but don’t stop there. That first launch was just a first strike on the indifference of the market. After launching the original version of your product, immediately switch your focus to improving on it with the help of customer feedback. Figure out how you can make it better and complete it faster, then launch a new version to capture more of your audience.
This is what Amazon did when it launched the first Kindle reading device. Every version since the initial launch has added functionality, more content, and more affordable price points. In addition to innovating products that supercharge demand with each new version, Amazon also sells the lifestyle benefit to its target audience: enjoying the best of your favorite books, shows, movies, and mobile games, no matter where you are.
Have you taken any creative approaches to generating demand for a product before launch? Share your tips with me in the comments below:
An economy of scope means that the production of one good reduces the cost of producing another related good. Economies of scope occur when producing a wider variety of goods or services in tandem is more cost effective for a firm than producing less of a variety, or producing each good independently. In such a case, the long-run average and marginal cost of a company, organization, or economy decreases due to the production of complementary goods and services.
While economies of scope are characterized by efficiencies formed by variety, economies of scale are instead characterized by volume. The latter refers to a reduction in marginal cost by producing additional units. Economies of scale, for instance, helped drive corporate growth in the 20th century through assembly line production.
- Economies of scope describe situations where producing two or more goods together results in a lower marginal cost than producing them separately.
- Economies of scope differ from economies of scale, in that the former means producing a variety of different products together to reduce costs while the latter means producing more of the same good in order to reduce costs by increasing efficiency.
- Economies of scope can result from goods that are co-products or complements in production, goods that have complementary production processes, or goods that share inputs to production.
Economies of scope are economic factors that make the simultaneous manufacturing of different products more cost-effective than manufacturing them on their own. A simple way to illustrate the contrast is to use the example of a train: A single train can carry both passengers and freight more cheaply than having two separate trains, one only for passengers and another for freight. In this case, a single train that has cars dedicated to both categories is far more cost effective, and may also result in lower ticket or tonnage costs for the train's users as well.
Economies of scope can occur because the products are co-produced by the same process, the production processes are complementary, or the inputs to production are shared by the products.
Economies of scope can arise from co-production relationships between final products. In economic terms these goods are called complements in production. This occurs when the production of one good automatically produces another good as a byproduct or a kind of side-effect of the production process. Sometimes one product might be a byproduct of another, but have value for use by the producer or for sale. Finding a productive use or market for the co-products can reduce both waste and costs and increase revenues.
For example, dairy farmers separate raw milk from cows into whey and curds, with the curds going on to become cheese. In the process they also end up with a lot of whey, which they can then use as a high-protein feed for livestock to reduce their overall feed costs or sell as a nutritional product to fitness enthusiasts and weightlifters for additional revenue. Another example of this is the so-called black liquor produced when processing wood into paper pulp. Instead of being merely a waste product that might be costly to dispose of, black liquor can be burned as an energy source to fuel and heat the plant, saving money on other fuels, or can even be processed into more advanced biofuels for use on-site or for sale. Producing and using the black liquor thus saves costs on producing the paper.
Economies of scope can also result from the direct interaction of two or more production processes. Companion planting in agriculture is a classic example here, such as the "Three Sisters" crops historically cultivated by Native Americans. By planting corn, pole beans, and ground trailing squash together, the Three Sisters method actually increases the yield of each crop, while also improving the soil. The tall corn stalks provide a structure for the bean vines to climb up; the beans fertilize the corn and the squash by fixing nitrogen in the soil; and the squash shades out weeds among the crops with its broad leaves. All three plants benefit from being produced together, so the farmer can grow more crops at lower cost.
A modern example would be a co-operative training program between an aerospace manufacturer and an engineering school, where students at the school also work part time or intern at the business. The manufacturer can reduce its overall costs by obtaining low cost access to skilled labor, and the engineering school can reduce its instructional costs by effectively outsourcing some instructional time to the manufacturer's training managers. The final goods being produced (airplanes and engineering degrees) might not seem to be direct complements or share many inputs, but producing them together reduces the cost of both.
Because productive inputs (i.e. land, labor, and capital) usually have more than one use, economies of scope can often come from common inputs to the production of two or more different goods. For example, a restaurant can produce both chicken fingers and French fries at a lower average expense than what it would cost two separate firms to produce each of the goods separately. This is because chicken fingers and french fries can share use of the same cold storage, fryers, and cooks during production.
Proctor & Gamble is an excellent example of a company that efficiently realizes economies of scope from common inputs since it produces hundreds of hygiene-related products from razors to toothpaste. The company can afford to hire expensive graphic designers and marketing experts who can use their skills across all of the company's product lines, adding value to each one. If these team members are salaried, each additional product they work on increases the company's economies of scope, because of the average cost per unit decreases.
Real-world examples of the economy of scope can be seen in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), newly discovered uses of resource byproducts (such as crude petroleum), and when two producers agree to share the same factors of production.
Economies of scope are essential for any large business, and a firm can go about achieving such scope in a variety of ways. First, and most common, is the idea that efficiency is gained through related diversification. Products that share the same inputs or that have complementary productive processes offer great opportunities for economies of scope through diversification.
Horizontally merging with or acquiring another company is another a way to achieve economies of scope. Two regional retail chains, for example, may merge with each other to combine different product lines and reduce average warehouse costs. Goods that can share common inputs like this are very suitable for generating economies of scope through horizontal acquisitions.
As one last example, assume that company ABC is the leading desktop computer producer in the industry. Company ABC wants to increase its product line and remodels its manufacturing building to produce a variety of electronic devices, such as laptops, tablets, and phones. Since the cost of operating the manufacturing building is spread out across a variety of products, the average total cost of production decreases. The costs of producing each electronic device in another building would be greater than just using a single manufacturing building to produce multiple products.