INNOVATE – How to Create Successful Product

INNOVATE

 

Usually at this stage, you have gathered substantial information of how your BASIC product work in the real customer’s setting. You have passed your moment of truth and a critical mass has been achieved. You have a long list of customers and you have stable sales monthly and you have repeat orders. Until you have all these, you shouldn’t INNOVATE your product yet. Unless your product has safety, security or life-threatening problems or severely malfunction, you need to come out with revised BASIC product.

From the information you gathered in your BASIC product, you identify additional features and benefits demanded by your customers. Its time to INNOVATE. Make some charts and graphs. Dig all the feedback forms, data and competing product information. Analyze all this information. Talking about competition, there is about 90% chance your product has been invented by someone else somewhere else in other part of the world. So what to do next? Google it.

One example that proven to be successful the last 10 years was a Malaysian example; did by Perodua Manufacturing. This company is the 2nd national car manufacturer in Malaysia. You see, when they first introduced Kancil, they still haven’t found the perfect sauce. They just came up with the product and sell. It was very traditional way of selling cars. They failed to look at the customers and not sensitive about other car markets around the world. After some years, they launched Kelisa and MyVi. After more than 15 years, now Perodua is the market leader, overtaken Proton the former incumbent and Perodua never look back, Proton is playing catch up now. Perodua keeps launching new product and INNOVATE. Products such as Viva, Alza and a lot more. What Perodua did? INNOVATE.

Kelisa and MyVi comes in multiple, significant and different variants. Different colors, special edition, additional features, sporty bodykit, limited color variants, thematic edition, fan club and also creative advertising. As you can see there is no mention “heavy discount”, “rock bottom price”, “price slash” or “year end sale”. In fact in every edition, the price is increased by few hundreds or thousands. No wonder now MyVi can cost up to RM 50, 000! But surely worth it. 🙂  INNOVATE is key.

When you INNOVATE, not only you innovate product because you can also do it in terms of manufacturing costs, structural design and process improvements. For example in India a guy named David Green has done it differently. This guy involved in a company called Aurolab whereby this company is currently producing 1.5 million intraocular lenses and export it to 109 countries. Intraocular lenses are used to restore eyesight to cataract patients. These lenses used to cost $300 dollars, but by using emerging technology and restructuring manufacturing costs, David Green was able to bring it down to $10 or less! More people definitely benefited from this and especially in India where cataract disease is common. Currently his company captured 8% of the intraocular lenses market and there is still a lot of room to grow.

Only when you INNOVATE the BASIC product or processes you can witness monumental change in your sales or revenues. The reason is because your BASIC product is stable and has reach maturity. That’s why it is very important to keep looking for BASIC product that can achieve minimum customer’s requirement.

Similarly when you run your consulting services. When you already have good testimonials, outcomes to your clients are stunning, repeat business is norm and demand of your BASIC product increases, its time for you to INNOVATE. Some examples of INNOVATE in consulting services is they published related books to core programs, create tools to support your program, provide online consulting services, recruit channel partners to increase reach and hire other consultant to preach your products.

When you are ready with INNOVATE, you are likely to have a series of solid products under your company. Now it’s time to DUPLICATE.

I will explain the remaining 3 steps in my next post.

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