Market Engineering Helps You Accelerate the Acceptance of Your New Technology, Product, or Innovation
An innovation is an idea, behavior, or product that is perceived as new by its audience. Unfortunately that audience doesn’t automatically or simultaneously accept even the best ideas or most useful innovations. The solution to this problem is called market engineering.
The success of a new product or innovation is governed by the evolution or “reinvention” of a business and its disciplines, so they constantly maintain full alignment with the needs of individuals and groups.
Most unsuccessful products and innovations are the result of incorrectly defining the characteristics of your target customer, and failing to align your company with that definition.
The Market Engineering Process
Market Engineering is a five-part process that begins with defining a market around its category. Here, the category definition must include a specific description of customer motivation.
The process continues with profiling of the target customer and defining a product that matches the customer’s product-selection criteria. With insight into the criteria customers use to evaluate competing products and services, companies are able to focus their attention on aligning their business disciplines with the motivations of customers who are currently buying.
Successful market engineering aligns the following disciplines with the target customer: product management, channels of distribution, positioning and messaging, cost-benefit or value, and the skillset of the management team.
Alignment is made possible by knowing the psychographic profile and motivational characteristics of each segment in the adoption lifecycle.
An Evolutionary Mindset
Instead of trying to persuade individuals to change, market engineering is primarily about the evolution of both products and business activities, so that commercial transactions with customers become a better fit for the changing needs of both individuals and groups.
Evolution is a key principle in Market Engineering. The success of a new product depends on how well it evolves to meet the needs of more and more demanding and risk-averse individuals in a population. And the benefits to society depend on how people change their behavior to accommodate and integrate the use of a new product.
The concept of product evolution is important because it tells us that no product or innovation can appeal to all end users throughout the product lifecycle. Continuous evolution through the addition of intangible attributes is the key to spreading an innovation. A good way to achieve this is to make end users into partners and create a continuous process of product evolution.
For a company to create successful new products and innovations, it must be in alignment with the target customer throughout the lifecycle of product adoption. And without this focus on external alignment, innovation remains a game of chance. With focused market engineering, you are able to see what business requirements are coming and prepare for them, making new-product innovation becomes a highly successful and predictable practice.
The benefits of Market Engineering are wide-ranging. The process helps a company:
– Understand the true meaning of customer motivation.
– See how risk avoidance drives decision making in all purchase decisions.
– Establish a cradle-to-grave vision for new products and innovations.
– Align your teams, departments and disciplines with the motivations the customer.
– Reduce time to market by avoiding trendy techniques that lead to early failure.
– Conceptualize and predict which product attributes will accelerate mainstream adoption.
– Make the right hiring decisions and avoid unnecessary employee learning curves.
The reason businesses should explore market engineering before rushing into a launch is that it will help them structure the business so that it fits the requirements of the market. This process answers questions about how transactions will be enabled and how various business disciplines must work together.
If you would like to receive detailed information about how market engineering would be applied to your situation, please contact Warren Schirtzinger.
