How to launch New Product Development: from idea to aisle 

Are you looking to drive revenue, grow loyalty, or respond to changing customer needs? A new product release can help with that.

To access an airtight step-by-step New Product Development (NPD) process, keep reading. 

Step 1. Setting your objectives  

What is the commercial objective behind your NPD? Try to distill this into a few sentences for maximum clarity. 

Each business will have a unique set of intentions driving them towards this venture.  

 Common objectives are:  

• Driving penetration   
• Expanding customer base   
• Stealing competitor share  
• Disrupting or growing a category  

Before settling on the pathway for your NPD, also consider how it fits into your company’s overarching business strategy. For your product to be successful, it needs to align with your business’ strategic goals. This could be things such as:  

• Geographic expansion: What is the geographic scope? Will your product be launched regionally or nationally? Will it be launched into a completely new market entirely? 
• Premiumization: Does your new product fit into an existing range or are you creating a new range or a new product at a different price tier?  
• Profitability: What is your financial goal? What will be the incremental impact of this project on your business?  

Once you have determined your strategic fit and defined your commercial objectives, you are now ready to craft a concept that will deliver against these measurables.

Step 2. Developing your concept  

Identify your target audience  

 For a new product to fly off the shelf, you need to define who you are targeting to ensure your messaging, product mix and communications strategy are sculpted, focused and able to cut through the noise of your category.   

 You can slice and dice your audience in many ways. How you divide your audience will depend on the objective of your NPD:  

• Location: You might decide for example that you are targeting people who live in London or New York. Or you might decide to layer a regional segmentation on top of a demographic segmentation, so that your target audience is women aged between 18 and 30 who live in urban areas of the US or UK.  
• Demographic: This is most typically done on the basis of age and / or gender segmentation. For example, you might decide that your target audience is going to be women who are between the ages of 30 and 55.   
• Life stage: You might decide to define your target audience by their household composition – for example families with two kids or more.   
• Behaviors: This ignores demographics and geography and looks at a mindset instead. If you are selling an energy drink, for example, then a target audience might be people who want to live life to the fullest.

Understand your opportunity space

Launching an NPD is a  worthwhile  venture,  that can have a huge impact on the commercial value of a business. But it’s also time-consuming and costly, so brands need to outline clearly why they want to create a new product before they embark on this process.   

It’s important to gather and analyze data on your brand, competition and category before you go all in. Take notice of gaps in your category that you could fill or try to detect any emerging trends you can capitalize on.  

If you see raspberries are popping off the shelves, releasing a raspberry flavored product would help to increase your relevancy in the market, for example. If consumer habits are changing as a result of COVID, how are people in your category looking for different formats, flavors or usage occasions?

Take a look at the other brands currently playing in your space to understand where the opportunity is for your brand to focus on. Consider which needs in your category are currently being met and unmet, and how can you use this information to form a competitive advantage.

Let’s take Fever-Tree as an example here. Before launching their beloved mixers, Fever-Tree capitalized on a gap in the market for an aspirational, premium and high quality mixer. When positioning their product in market, they focused their attention on this area, releasing a premium, aesthetically pleasing range of mixers to disrupt a stagnant category. The rest is history.  

There's no hard and fast rule on when is a good time to create a new product. It could depend on your business objectives for the year, your competitors' share or be influenced by movements in the category. If you have the time and resources to establish the product, go for it. An audience loves to see something new, so keep the momentum going to excite and delight your customers.  

Find a human truth  

 Every new product idea should be based on a fundamental human truth that gives meaning to a consumer's life, providing a new perspective on an old issue. 

What a fundamental human truth is: 

• A new way of looking at the world that gets us to re-examine and challenge the status quo.   
• A discovery about the underlying motivations that drive people’s actions.  

Human truth is at the core of every great idea. It is an undeniable truth that is shared between members of a group.  To  judge  whether you have a human truth, just wait for a reaction along the lines of 'No way, you do that too? I thought I was the only one'. The fundamental aim of a human truth is to unite a group of people in a shared belief. 

To find this human truth, speak to consumers in your category to discover what they have in common. Use open-ended questions and multi-sensorial activities to get your group talking. To really dig down into the human truth, continuously ask your consumers 'why' they have come to this conclusion, for more in-depth responses.

Another great way of identifying a human truth is through active observation.  Place  yourself into the midst of your target audience and observe their behavior in a natural setting. If your target audience was young men in college, for example, go to places where they congregate, like a fraternity. When people aren’t aware they’re being watched, you’re more likely to gain an accurate, unbiased human truth.

Let’s go back to Fever-Tree. They found their human truth after they decided to focus on the mechanics of  how  a  drink  is  constructed. They understood making a drink was a very personal decision, and there was huge amount of debate on the quantity of mixer users chose to put into their drinks, compared to spirit. They leveraged this human truth to create a springboard for their campaign idea, “If ¾ of your drink is a mixer, why not mix it with the best?”  Previously, tonic had been considered an afterthought,  and not as important as the gin in the drink. That was until Fever-Tree came along, launching an irresistibly tasty and aspirational mixer that would forever change the course of the conversation, skewing it away from gin and towards tonic.

Land a benefit  

 For a product to have good market value, there needs to be some benefit to it.  Consumers should believe that by using the product, their life will in some way be enhanced.   

Product benefits are built off core consumer needs. There are two types of product benefits:

• Emotional Benefits – The intangible benefits a consumer experiences when using the product. When rooted in real tension, these are a great way of showing you understand your consumers on a deeper level.  
• Functional Benefits – The tangible benefits a consumer gets when using your product. When based on real consumer needs, these are a sure-fire way of showing people you ‘get them’. 

For Fever-Tree, a functional benefit is the improved taste of their mixer, compared to more traditional brands. An emotional benefit is how the product makes its audience feel. When drinking a Fever-Tree it's an experience and customers are made to feel special, decadent and aspirational. This is something that's reflected through the packaging of the brand which is both premium and exclusive.

Determine a reason to believe   

 A reason to believe is a statement or proof-point that gives an audience cause to believe in your idea.     

To establish your RTB, consider your product benefits. Is your product supported by science? Or are you creating something entirely new that will shake up your category?   

If there are any claims you can make about your product to distinguish it from competitors, these are useful to include and there are a huge variety to choose from.     

• Superiority Claims – When a brand conveys their product as better than others e.g. ‘UK’s #1’  

• Top Parity – When a brand conveys their product as equivalent to other brands e.g. “Nothing is better”  

• Comparative Claims – When a brand directly compares their product to another brand or company e.g. 2x better than Competitor A  

• Improvement Claims – When a brand compares themselves to their previous products to show improvement e.g. 35% more coverage  

• Consumer Reviews – When a brand uses feedback from customers to elevate its product e.g. using 5 stars or testimonials

Claims are crucial for new products as they provide context for customers. They are a starting point in your communication story and should aim to educate and reassure customers about the quality of your product.

When using claims, be careful not to exaggerate and to remain authentic. A claim should remind customers of the credibility and value of your service, to drive the selling point of your product.

Optimize your concept   

 At this stage in the process, you may have a fully-fledged idea, a mock-up of your NPD, or somewhere between the two. However far you’ve gotten, it’s important to take a step back and understand if what you are trying to build has the capacity to deliver your intended results.   

 Revert back to the opportunity you outlined at the beginning of the NPD process, your core objective for launching the project. Was your opportunity to drive penetration, increase your customer base or steal market share? Whichever goal you had in mind, focus on it to determine whether your idea is feasible and if it will lead to your desired objective.

To understand whether your concept is based on a solid foundation of truth, connect with your customers. Conducting 1-2-1 interviews and further conversations with your target audience are good ways to do this, but for a more exact approach, you’ll need CreativeLab.

CreativeLab is ProQuo’s instant creative optimization system, giving you guidance, in hours, on how to improve your ideas before they launch. Simply add your assets into the platform – at any stage of development - and in a few hours you'll receive feedback from over 300 people, with actionable guidance on what to do to improve it.

This access will be crucial to the development of your NPD, as it will help you to see if your concept is landing amongst your target audience, and which areas you need to tweak before going into full-blown production. If you are struggling to choose between a few different concepts, it can also help you to see which idea will have the strongest impact on your target audience.

Step 3.  Developing your go-to-market strategy 

It's time to put together your tactical plan to take your new product to market. 

To guarantee the success of your product,  you’ll need a go-to-market (GTM) strategy. A solid GTM strategy takes into consideration multiple Marketing Levers and defines how you will launch your NPD. These Levers range from Communication right through to Merchandising and Customer Experience.

Here are some thought starters to enable you to craft a GTM strategy that ensures your product flies off the shelf: 

Step 4. Launching your product  

So far, you have:    

• Outlined objectives for your NPD 
• Developed a concept 
• Optimized your concept 
• Created a go-to-market strategy 

 Now, the only thing left to do is to launch your new product.   

 How you choose to launch your product will depend on the size of your budget, and the channels best suited to your objectives. For large-scale projects, creating a big-bang launch moment through television and outdoor advertising can help you build awareness and reach quickly. Coupling that with immersive experiences and events can help to draw in a crowd and get people to try your product at the same time. For smaller  projects, digital campaigns are equally impactful when executed well for a closely targeted audience.  

Whether you choose to go big or small when launching your product, read our guide on How to Develop and Optimize Creative to Grow Your Brand which outlines the steps to take in building a campaign to launch your product.