Know if you’ll hit your targets before pulling the trigger on any marketing plan
More than sixty five percent of new products are commercial failures, and if you compound this with a recession, now more than ever you can’t afford to be wrong. In If You Build It Will They Come, business professor and strategy consultant Rob Adams shows you how to make sure you hit your target market before you spend a lot of money. He shows you the fast, systematic and proven approach of performing Market Validation in advance of making a large product investment.
Adams outlines a simple and effective market validation and testing strategy that is proven, giving entrepreneurs and managers the ability to dramatically improve the prospect of product success. He explains how to quickly gather information on competitors, directly interview members of your target market, and figure out what the market really wants to buy, versus what customers say they want.
- The steps to quickly understanding the viability of your market
- Where to go to gather the information needed to hit the market requirements
- How to follow through with the right product launched in the right way
- Adams cuts through the fancy terms and expensive market research that gives lots of data but no real product oriented information about usage, pricing, features and competitive forces. In the end you’ll produce results on your first release of a far more mature product, shipped in a faster timeframe with features customers will actually use.
- This book is for anyone involved with designing, developing and launching new products. Its examples and advice cover everything from the fledgling start-up that needs their first product to work just to survive to the successful Fortune Class company establishing new worldwide markets. Examples cut across all major industrial sectors including consumer, retail, manufacturing, technology, life sciences and services. This book offers the step-based guidance you need to make sure failure is not an option.
Table of Content
Introduction Market Validation: Why Ready, Aim, Fire Beats Ready, Fire, Fire, Fire, Aim 1
Step 1 Ready—Could This Idea Fly?
Chapter One Ready: The Overview 35
Chapter Two Domain Knowledge: Where Did You Get Your Idea? 39
Chapter Three The Market: How Big is It, and How Fast is It Growing? 45
Chapter Four Lifecycles and Trends: How are These Affecting Your Market? 51
Chapter Five Your Competitors: What are They Doing? 71
Chapter Six The Experts: What Do They Say? 81
Chapter Seven The Ready Checklist 89
Step 2 Aim—What Do Your Future Customers Think?
Chapter Eight Aim: The Overview 95
Chapter Nine Research: Learning What You Really Need to Know 99
Chapter Ten Interviews: Getting to the Market Pain 113
Chapter Eleven Who are You After? Finding Your Target Audience 127
Chapter Twelve Turning Data into Results: How to Practically Apply All That You’ve Learned 137
Chapter Thirteen Outside Help: Using Research Professionals 143
Chapter Fourteen Countdown: Preparing the Market for Your Product 145
Chapter Fifteen The Aim Checklist 147
Step 3 Fire—Blasting into the Market
Chapter Sixteen Fire: The Overview 153
Chapter Seventeen Sales and Marketing: Budget for It 159
Chapter Eighteen The Details: Write Product Specs and Schedules 163
Chapter Nineteen Fast to Market: Get a Market-Oriented Product Out Quickly 171
Chapter Twenty Early Customers: Recruit Design Partners and Advisory Boards 179
Chapter Twenty-One Showtime: Launch, Market, and Sell the Product 189
Chapter Twenty-Two The Fire Checklist 195
About the Author 199
Index 201
About the author
Rob Adams is a strategy consultant and venture capitalist, and on the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin’s Mc Combs School of Business. He has been a founder, founding investor, or involved with the IPO or merger and acquisition of more than forty companies, involving the launch of more than 100 new products, representing more than a billion dollars of investment. He is the author of A Good Hard Kick in the Ass: Basic Training for Entrepreneurs. He has been covered in Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, Money, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, as well as on Bloomberg Radio, Public Television, and National Public Radio’s Marketplace program. For more information, please visit www.drrobadams.com
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