Canadian Marketing Blog

Developing a Product? Enlist Your Influencers

Traditionally, product development has had a pretty standard approach – market research to uncover the key insight or consumer need, product development, concept testing, in-market testing and finally launch. Even then current stats show only 1 in 20 new products make it. That’s a lot of time and money for a low likelihood of success and yet it’s critical for brand growth.

Today, a more efficient and cost-effective trend is taking shape, thanks in large part to online forums and the advent of other social media tools – and one that’s right up the alley of influencers who want to be more engaged and share their thoughts and ideas. Some companies are pro-actively inviting influencers to be part of the early product development phase. Why? They’ve realized it’s a great opportunity to include the consumers most involved with the brand and the category, enlisting them to create ideas and rate them.

The concept is straightforward: get your most involved consumers to submit ideas and rate potential new products. Ideally, you get a couple of key benefits: (i) better ideas flow through as they’ve already been vetted by knowledgeable consumers; (ii) time to market can be much faster because you can get info quickly and react faster, especially if you’re working online; (iii) potentially the amount of data or feedback you get can be greater than a few focus groups, making it more reliable.

Plus, the earlier customers – and especially committed influencers – have their say, the more likely a launched product will resonate and succeed with a wider target audience.

Here are just two examples of companies doing this well:

My Starbucks Idea blog for instance, offers Starbucks lovers the chance to share their coffee culture ideas and vote thumbs up or down on the ideas of other customers.

And Dell’s hugely successful IdeaStorm, asks customers to share ideas on the kinds of products they’d like to see Dell develop – 10,000 ideas have been generated through the site in three years and nearly 400 have been implemented so far.

To put it simply, where once the product was the focus of product development, today customers (and their ideas) are. And, it turns out, when customers are given the wheel, they’re more engaged with the brand, respond more positively to the company and talk more about the product.

Or as Paul Rand, President of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) puts it:

“Brands that actively listen and engage, on a sustainable basis, with their customers, consumers and influencers – from product development through social media and customer service – have learned the power and return of being talkable.”

Getting influencers involved and talking early can make all the difference.

What have you heard about using influencers to drive product development? I’ve got to believe more brands are doing it, but few are publicizing it.

Gillian MacPherson

Gillian,

Great post, thank you! I work with a lot of entrepreneurs with great ideas - and no idea how to bring those ideas/new products to market. Of course market research is a great place to start but this is a great reminder that recruiting iinfluencers to learn what potential customers truly wants, need, feel and experience with the product is key to the success of any new product.

Thanks again,
Carolyn Higgins
Fortune Marketing Company

Gillian;
Thanks for an excellent article! We use a product called Pardot Prospect Insight (a marketing automation tool), and they run a similar forum on their website via which we have offered several suggestions for improvements and which they have implemented. And yes, we are more firmly committed to using them now as a result.

Having led many software product development teams, I marvel today at how "easy" it has become to actually do what you are suggesting

In the past, to achieve this same effect, I ran a team for each product called the Product Steering Committee. The PSC consisted of engineers, sales people, customer support people, and a very extensive defect/suggestion mechanism. Apart from the engineers, everyone in that meeting was there to try to bring the clients' views into the process. Sales and Support talked to the clients all the time, so they repeated what they heard, the defect/suggestion lists did that too. And once a year we held a User Group meeting to gather as much as possible from the attendees, especially in connection with the next major release's functionality.
But now you can do all of this with Twitter, Blogs and Discussion forums on a more less continuous basis, and in more or less real time. Still need the other inputs, of course, but this does make the whole approach more powerful.

Carolyn,

Glad you enjoyed and glad you find valuable. I think in our busy world it can be easy to overlook the obvious so it is great that we have forums like this that we can share and dialogue with one another!

Gillian

Eric,

So glad you enjoyed. I agree - product development used to be a much more difficult job - although I don't want to downplay the importance of combining the proven with the new - but certainly many of the new tools and the ability to reach and engage with your most influential customers makes it much more impactful and successful - which is great news for those of us in product development.

Gillian

Beyond product development, asking for ideas is also a great way to improve service based businesses. For instance in Toronto the TTC has set up a customer service advisory panel asking riders for ideas: http://ttcpanel.ca/