Launching a New Product, Service or Technology Brand

Launching a New Product, Service or Technology Successfully Takes More Than a Brilliant Name and a Beautiful Logo.

Launching a new product, service or technology is hard work. Done right, it’s one of the most exciting and rewarding milestones in business.

This document is a guide to get you started. That said, the launch (at the risk of stating the obvious), is just the beginning. But preparing and executing effectively builds the momentum every new brand needs to achieve outsized market success.

Strategic positioning, tailored audience messaging, resource-efficient marketing and a groundswell of internal support are vital factors that determine why some new products, services and technologies thrive in the marketplace while others wither and die.

Here are some of the strategic and tactical issues that product managers and business owners should consider to launch new brands that generate interest, create preference and deliver real results.

Don’t Just Launch a Brand—Start a Sales Engine

First and foremost, let’s get one thing clear: the reason why you’re launching a new brand is to drive new sales. You won’t hear this from many branding firms, but a brand is only a means to an end, and that end is profit. New brands are only great if they help produce greater amounts of revenue. Keeping that perspective in mind before, during and after the launch of a new product, service or technology informs a broad range of important decisions. It makes the launch process more efficient and it ensures more successful outcomes.

So how do you generate sales?

It’s simple, though it isn’t easy. You sell by getting buyers to pay for a brand that solves a problem. The problem may be technological, operational, financial, strategic or even emotional. Sometimes the market may not even be aware the problem exists. Potential customers don’t know about your proposed solution, and they certainly don’t know why they should pay for it.

A strong brand will help drive sales and margins if the value conveyed to prospects is:

If the brand you build ticks these boxes, it will pinpoint your prospects’ pain in terms they understand, cut through the competitive clutter in the marketplace and help salespeople give customers reasons not just to buy but to
pay a premium.

The Essence of Brand Is Strategy; the Essence of Strategy Is Decisiveness

Positioning

To develop a new brand that connects with customers and helps salespeople close deals, the first thing you need to do is define a clear brand positioning. It doesn’t need to be a complex model or follow any specific formula. It does need to provide meaningful answers to these essential questions:

When you can boil the answers to each of these questions down to one sentence—and when you can’t use those answers to describe every other competing offering—that’s when you’re starting to create the foundation for a breakthrough brand.

Architecture

In addition, creators of a new brand will often need to take existing corporate, product and ingredient brands or companion technologies into account.

Decisions you make now will have a far-reaching impact on what kind of equity your new brand creates and on its prospects for future growth and extension.

When It Comes to Creative, Your Opinion Matters Less than You Think

So far, it’s been an intellectual process informed by fact-based knowledge. Now comes the fun and creative part, right? Wrong.

Creating a name and developing an identity is where personal opinion starts to creep into the process. But your opinions and preferences on language and logos can be counterproductive. Your customers may not share your creative opinions or even care about them. What they want are clues signaling that your brand is a solution to their problem.

Here’s how to create an effective name and identity:

If the process results in a name or identity you don’t love at first sight, take comfort in the fact that it will help drive sales. And when it does, you will learn to love it—quickly and unconditionally.

Don’t Bother Getting the Word Out Until You’ve Gotten the Word In

You’ve decided on a name, secured the URL, designed the logo and put the finishing touches on messaging. The time is finally here to sell your brand to your salesforce. In the long history of commerce, no product, service or technology or brand has ever sold itself. Whatever it is you’ve created and no matter how elegant the solution, if you want it to generate revenue you must convince an extremely busy team of salespeople that it’s worth their time and effort to change their routine in order to learn about and start promoting something new.

The dollars have to add up, but your argument can’t be purely financial. In order to align salespeople around your new brand, they need to see its potential to pique the interest of their prospects. So before you even think about launching a new brand to the marketplace, it’s essential that you develop, present and arm salespeople with:

It’s Time to Go Berserk—on a Budget

Every product, service, technology and industry is different. The right marketing strategy and tactics vary wildly depending on competitive dynamics, buying cycles and prospect psychographics. One thing, however, is constant: ROI is king. Here are some of the promotional methods available and some initial considerations about each one’s usefulness:

Launch Event

If you can make it informative, enjoyable and well attended, it can generate buzz and build sales momentum. If you can’t do all of the above, a good email campaign or a webinar is a better use of resources.

Newsletter

Newsletters can be cost-effective external and/or internal communication tools, but start simple. A format that’s too dense or a schedule that’s too frequent will produce a decline in quality, audience fatigue, author fatigue or all of the above.

Public Relations

This is the arrow to put the wood behind, and not by generating press releases. Identify the journalists, pitch the angle that’s relevant to each one’s specific readership and enlist a pro if you need to.

Social Media

The ROI case for different channels is still unclear, but here’s the minimum you should be doing: create content and promote what you create in the places where your prospects spend formal or informal work time.

Content Marketing

As buyers have become able to answer their own initial questions as quickly as they can do an Internet search, creating relevant, informative content and putting it in places your prospects are likely to find it has become the best lead-generation tactic at your disposal. The benefits content marketing delivers accelerate over time, but don’t underestimate the time and effort required to do it right.

Webinars

If you’ve already got a good demo to start with, if you’ve collected a list of prospects who’ve expressed interest, if you can piggyback on a corporate webinar system or if you’ve got a few thousand dollars in your budget, webinars can work.

Print Advertising

Be careful before you commit to a print campaign. Ads are great for helping big brands assert a broad presence and premium feel. They’re less effective at generating new awareness or driving prospects to immediate action.

Videos

Typically, 80% of video viewers drop off within the first 30 seconds. Video can be a great asset, but don’t do it because it’s cheap—do it because you have something important to say and a highly creative way of saying it.

Demonstrations

There are no shortcuts, and production value must be high, but spending time developing short, mid-length and customizable demos will pay significant, ongoing dividends with customers, journalists and bloggers.

Online Display Advertising

Unless customers actually purchase your product or service online with minimal research, don’t waste your time or money with banner ads. Don’t believe us? Check Wikipedia’s article on “Click-through rate” and do the math.

Search Engine Marketing

Good SEO is critical, and these days it’s more about high-quality content and links than clever code tricks. The effectiveness of sponsored search, on the other hand, depends highly on the nature of your product or service and the competitive environment.

Direct Mail

You need to craft a design and content that stand out, you need a specific call to action that moves prospects further down the sales funnel and you may need to offer something in return. But direct mail can still make sense in a variety
of contexts.