Why Bad Things Happen to Good New Products
Source: http://www.allianceperformance.com/White%20Papers/Why_Bad_Things_Happen_to_Good_New_Products.pdf
In this article, the author describes a phenomenon that once a new product is introduced to the market, after the initial success, customers’ enthusiasm usually evaporates then, though this new product is innovative, meets a clear market need and has a great feedback from test placements. Some people may suspect that it is the product itself that is not that good as they said. But the author also gives examples of some of the best products that also have gone through the same tough start.
Then the author finds the problem mainly rest on the sales mode and start to analyze the approaches of the salesforce. Besides this aspect, from the theory of cascading behavior in networks, we may tell that this is actually a common phenomenon in a market.
While spreading in the market, news and adoption of a certain product are totally different. Opinions or evaluations, no meter positive or negative, are information that only requires awareness. This information spreads very fast throw any kind of connection. Especially in the age of the internet, our society is a whole connected graph or even a complete graph in words of graph theory. On the other hand, buying the product is an action of adoption. Buying means spending money, learning new techs, abandoning old devices, and coordinating with partners, which is risky or costly to adopt, and obviously have a threshold. Besides the initial customers, the following customers make their decisions mainly based on their “strong connected” neighbors’ behaviors. Starting from those initial customers, the product spreads like slow water waves, which needs a lot of time. Even though we are talking about a great invention that would spread all over the world, the spread of it still would take a long time.