Products don't sell themselves. And don't stand on their own merits.

Products don't sell themselves. 

As has been joked about since the movie 'Field of Dreams' came out, and to paraphrase its most famous line ‘If you build it they will NOT come’

I recently sat in a meeting about a new offering where it was stated that the new offering would have to stand ‘on its own merits’. 

That's like saying a 1-year old infant should stand on its own merits compared to a fully formed, mature, educated person at say, as old as 69-year-old or as young as 14 years old. 

As I teach my MBA students, products are more than an assemblage of their features. 

If that were true we could sell Kentucky Fried Chicken as ‘Come and enjoy our fried, dead chicken parts!’

New products cannot "stand or fall on its own merit”. 

What does ‘on its own merit’ mean? It means that the idea must be judged without taking other issues into consideration. 

Unfortunately those 'other issues' and taking them 'into consideration' is what we call today as the customer journey. They are essential to a purchasing decision by a prospect.

The marketplace is never that objective to not take into consideration 'other issues', especially in new markets. The best product doesn't always win. In short there are always ‘other issues in consideration’. And that the best product doesn’t always win—that’s a good thing.

As we know it does start with product market fit. Are you actually solving a problem that someone cares about? Sometimes 'best' isn't what your customers really want. Sometimes they want cheap. Or good enough. Sometimes they want available now, or according to my ‘available time’. Then as Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas nicely describes, there are five other boxes that a business needs to define and get right if they want to have a chance of being successful. Little things like ‘Key Resources’, ‘Channels’ and ‘Partners’ (You mean we need to sell these things? Not just put up a web site and tell people what’s in the product?). 

If it were easy as defining the content and telling people, and they would come buying it, anyone could do it. 

Underscoring proof of how difficult meeting customer needs the rapid change in all markets and the turbulence of even traditional market leaders to meet the needs of their customers and prospects. The average Fortune 500 company today only exists for 18 years. 50 years ago, it was for 60 years. Companies are coming in and moving out, incumbents are getting ousted by startups.  The world has moved from a seller driven world to a buyer driven world and the incumbents that held power and control of customers are being driven out by more choices and the availability of those choices for customers. 

What are the merits of a new product?

• Its large customer base?
• Its hundreds of references?
• Its tested pricing model?
• Its ease of purchasing?
• Its time-tested partner eco system?
• The strong and well-informed distribution channel?

This is an essential and basic idea and concept in product marketing. 

In marketing, a whole product is a generic product (or core product) augmented by everything that is needed for the customer to have a compelling reason to buy. The core product is the tangible product that the customer experiences. The whole product typically augments the core product with additional elements required for the product to have compelling value to a customer. For example, if a personal computer is the core product, then whole product would include software applications, training classes, peripheral devices (mouse, keyboard, printer, etc.), and internet service. Without these additional product components, the core product would not be very useful.

The concept of the whole product was first introduced by Regis McKenna many years ago. Geoffrey Moore helped popularize the term in his bestseller "Crossing the Chasm". 

In a world we live in where products and companies are launched, and the word ‘pivot’ has become a part of the business lexicon and the understanding of agility and iteration is essential to meet the needs of a market, defining a product and hoping it will stand on its own merits is na?ve at best. So it not only doesn't address the whole product , it doesn’t address the pace of change and the market tempo we live in. 

I recently advised a fast growing small business as they are preparing to launch their second and third significant products after years of being a one product company. I really appreciated that they asked me for advice on how best to do this. They asked me for some templates for launching these new products. One I found form 1999 included a 10-week planning process with over 50 elements that needed to be accomplished. Another popular one that is available for download from a credible analyst created earlier in 2018 had over 27 key areas. Neither document stated that the new product needed to ‘stand on its own merits’.  Because any product, especially new products, can’t.