When all channels were brick and mortar, all communications print and even electronic media had a cardboard package, there was this marketing thing called a ‘launch’.
I spent two years of my early career on the road doing launches–over and over, city by city, by country by channel rolling out tech and computer game products across the globe.
I had online communities of enthusiasts and developers who fed a hybrid model, but offline distribution was king and set the rules and schedules.
This was the rolling ‘big bang’ theory of marketing in its heyday.
Companies today still fabricate availability, date and time scarcity models. And if you sell flowers, Valentine’s Day is still your season for roses. But for the most part, the ties to the physical channel are gone.
Consumer status quo today is all about democratized distribution and customer choice. Online is the new norm and niche marketplaces are steadily becoming ubiquitous.
Yet somehow this idea of a ‘formal launch’ trapped in time and space has a resiliency against change. It’s a misunderstood idea misapplied to today’s market realities.
Every day, smart innovative companies with amazing social pedigree or game changing products ‘launch’. They formally come out of Beta and push frantically for coverage in the handful of tech publications. They may have a product but they are missing the point mostly. It’s not just about the product. It never really has been.
Something is out of whack and most of the sense is getting lost.
My takeaway from hundreds of launches, and why I still love orchestrating them, is that they are a focused, collaborative effort between sales, marketing and product . Integrated at their core. It’s a runway for market discovery.
This was true whether the event was a folding table at the Kansas City Marriot or two double-trailers full of booth paraphernalia rolling across the country from one convention hall to the next.
Sales, marketing, distribution and product were all part of a selling effort to build brand, communicate value and pound a hole in the din of the convention hall to get heard.
And online today, with a serious consumer attention deficit syndrome running unchecked and the one-click power of buying anything most everywhere, this integration and iteration is more critical than ever.
But somehow the popular (and quite brilliant) idea of a minimum viable product usually stops at product alone. Collaboration with marketing, sales and even customers is often a second thought. Launch is a baton handoff from product to market building with seemingly little foresight.
It just doesn’t work that way.
Real world, brick and mortar analogs of doing this right.
This idea of ‘always at launch’ is not a hothouse, online, techy fabrication. I keep running into gyms, restaurants and even food trucks that seem to get this idea of iterative product and community development innately.
A friend of mine opened up a new restaurant a few years ago. I got to watch this non-tech, brick and mortar example of always at launch up close and it exemplified brilliantly to me the dna of this idea.
The restaurant rolled out slowly to enthusiast groups. The first were closed, friends and family. Free meals. Limited choices. Restricted serving times. The goal was to iterate and build a community base of customers and get the menu and service right. Then expand the groups to an ever-larger public over time and test new menu assumptions.
Social media loops were opened up and expanded naturally as the fan base grew. The menu was finalized and data gathered to figure out the margin nits of whether lower mark ups on wines lists drew more revenue per plate with less turns. Lots of market data gathered and tested out a little at a time. There wasn’t so much a formula to follow but a trend to discover.
And oh…the restaurant while open and a huge success is still not officially launched.
Or rather, it is still at launch every day, changing, getting more focused and better with each iteration.
What struck me was that in the brick and mortar world it was doing such a great job of iterating product, building community groups and exemplifying the reality that great food is in the mind of the customer not just the pots of the cook.
This is a telling example of ‘always at launch’ and relevant whether you are selling ribs on the corner or job referrals or artisanal wares online.
Why does this matter to web-based businesses?
The greatest scarcity on the web is customer attention. It’s without a doubt the new currency as it is in short demand.
Success is always just a click away and failure to engage, a click to leave. You have a second to capture that attention and create value and lay the seed for customer belief and eventual loyalty.
The idea of always at launch today needs to start with this respect for the scarcity of consumer’s attention. And the understanding that getting traffic is a lot easier than getting engagement and usage. In fact, traffic with a bounce doesn’t’ matter at all.
A focused complete response to a customer’s interest is as germane to a startup slowly moving out to the public from a base of loyal enthusiasms, as to a campaign for larger companies leveraging their existing customer base.
What works for me?
I’m asked everyday to try new products and participate early in product tests. I’m a tough Beta guy as my attention span and tolerance for boring are both very low.
Certain general ideas though are just ‘Must Haves’ for me and generally, I think, for any mass market.
Launch Must Haves:
1. Make every day, launch day, for every new person who hits your site.
Engagement is an earned vote of confidence at that moment. Whenever I show up I want it to be special, interesting and all about me.
2. Connect your customers to each other, not just the company, as key to building community.
Your job is to connect me to likeminded others. Opening up a site publically until you have the kernel of a community is a certain recipe for a very slow climb, if not failure. In restaurants that may be friends and family. Online the idea still holds.
There’s nothing cosy about an empty room.
3. Inspire me.
Sell me on your promise and the excitement of the future. Your product is early and incomplete. It’s a mini version of your big vision. Get me to see and feel it.
Don’t ask me what I want. Show me what makes a difference.
4. Be there and lead.
If there is no new content. No connections. Not an intuitive next step for me. Or a blog post with an active comment stream that hasn’t been updated in a week, ask yourself, “Why should I be there?”
If you can’t answer that you don’t deserve my attention.
5. Understand why I should care and why I should share with my friends?
You don’t ask the customer what they want. You learn by making the leap, providing something and interpreting their response. You need to sell value. That’s what companies do at launch and every day onward. I posted on this a while back: “Why care? Why share?”.
This is not easy.
It’s part aspirational, part reality.
From a customer view, if you were the customer, there’s no argument. This is what they need. If you want their time, make it so.
From a company view, it means a refusal to accept putting outmoded and misconstrued modes of market building for a new market and new consumer behaviors. And an insistence that you put yourself in your customer’s shoes and understand their point of view, every day.
Everybody loves the idea of big bang. Of your logo on seat cushions at the Super Bowl. Or the wacko idea that somehow you just do this one thing and it all falls into place and starts a chain of events that ends up in success.
It’s just not so. We earn our customer’s attention, one engagement at a time.
