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New Product Marketing Playbook (in other words, they won’t come just because you built it)

Let’s face it- given the poor performance of most innovations, that new product you are working on doesn’t have the averages in its favor. Most innovations are going to be mediocre at best- an HBR article quotes “Less than 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed first-year sales of $50 million”. That means marketers and product managers that place a bet on an innovation are more likely to be “explaining” its performance than have it be an accolade on their annual performance review.
And yet every successful marketer or company will unanimously agree that innovation is the lifeblood of growth. Innovation is vital to offering a better product or service, managing your business more efficiently and/or effectively and as a safeguard against competitive share losses. Unless of course you are the only game in town- if you are, then congrats, you may stop reading right now. If you are like the rest of us and not running a monopoly operation then hopefully some of this post will be of relevance.
There are really only 3 major ingredients to orchestrating a successful innovation agenda- a good product, one that is relevantly differentiated, a Marketing strategy that engages your target market with the right message at the right place and time and a consumer intelligence apparatus that allows you to course-correct rapidly. Note I said “successful innovation agenda” not “successful innovation”. Secret to innovation sanity is not betting all your money on a single idea but beating the average through a portfolio of innovations (unless you are a startup, then its OK to be all in on the one big bet).
Check the full article out on LinkedIn:

3 under-appreciated trends in consumer behavior (and resultant imperatives for marketers)

The US economy is heavily consumer dependent- that is pretty much stating the obvious. What we seem to be oblivious to is how much the consumer that drives the economy has changed since the Great Recession. We do however feel the symptoms- the tried and tested remedies of the past struggle to drive momentum. Profits stagnate- data from the Bureau of Economics indicate corporate earnings have been in decline since 2012 after staging a recovery following the recession. 
Many marketers are opting to simply take price up as demand stagnates without truly understanding the shift in consumer behavior that is making past playbooks irrelevant. Below LinkedIn in post hones in on 3 familiar yet often underestimated trends that are directly shaping the interplay between consumer behavior and marketing strategy.