New with a capital "D"
A LinkedIn group question posed, "why do 80% of all new products fail. What's wrong here?" Many balanced and serious replies from all over the world explored lots of different reasons - all probably correct to one extent or another. Many were complex with clever and detailed analyses. (The group is MRB, Market Research Bulletin.)
My reply was briefer. "Actually, nothing's wrong. To the extent that many - if not most - new (consumer products) are designed backwards, i.e. not responding to a consumer need or providing a salient consumer benefit, we should feel pretty good about batting .200. Which helps separate industrial products of which most - if not all - wouldn't survive the printer head without a differentiable, salient benefit. The literature also indicates that, over the long term, relatively high failure rates are correlated with "success" in new product results, giving rise to the maxim, "If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough."
What we call new of course has many variations, but to my thinking, the one thing that is common to all is the differentiable portion, thus the capital "D." Whether we're talking about new to the world, say ipods, or extensions like ipod touches; whether its cheese filled, extruded pretzels or Life with cinnamon; whether it's a Volt or a turbo version of a Camaro, the single unifying element is always the same: some differentiable performance.
Obviously needing to be beneficial, performance also has to generate some premium, again coming in many forms, but that's a separate post. So if the premium is the successful result, the performance is the means to get there, and the differentiable nature is the common element, it provides a handy recipe for what new product ought to look like at their core.
Returning to the original question, there will never be a lack of discussion about why products fail, new or otherwise. But the question might be better posed in the context of the item's product environment rather than some discrete measure of newness. That is, what newness does the product bring to that environment that may be relevant, may even be differentiable? Or, as is often the case, may also be completely irrelevant, regardless of its newness.
