Accelerating the Perception of Difference

The widespread adoption of a new product can be agonizingly slow for at least a couple of reasons:

• Users tend to be biased toward the status quo, which means that a prospective innovation typically must offer a compelling relative advantage.
• The perception of advantage is a function of familiarity.

Innovation is a hard game, in part because it tends to require insight and superior product design and manufacturing execution and effective marketing.

My friend and colleague, John Funk, is living that multi-dimensional challenge.  Recently, he formed Long Tail Pet Products to launch the DogPause bowl, the healthy dog bowl for dogs that eat too fast (based on an invention developed by, and licensed from, our firm, Evergreen Innovation Partners).

The 9X Effect

In Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers, John Gourville asserts:

There's a fundamental problem for companies that want consumers to embrace innovations: While developers are already sold on their products and see them as essential, consumers are reluctant to part with what they have.  This conflict results in a mismatch of nine to one between what innovators believe consumers want and what consumers truly desire..

In part, that's because prospective consumers are reasonably satisfied with the status quo and, consequently, fail to see the need for the new product.

Noticeable Difference

The 9X effect seems to hold true even when the new product really does offer a dramatic difference in performance.  That is, of course, because the difference has to be perceived before it can motivate a change in the behavior of consumers.  Because most consumers won't be intimately familiar with the context for which the new product is designed, they are less likely to notice an actionable difference.

Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research explains:

I've decided to name a new law "GGR," or the law of gradual granularity refinement...JND significance ~ 1 / familiarity.  The term JND (just noticeable difference)...asks, "What is the smallest level of differentiation that you can perceive as being significant?"  The tilde character (~) means "varies with."

Hence, the law says that the granularity at which we distinguish meaningful differences gets finer the more our familiarity with a subject grows.  Conversely, it also says the less familiar we are with something, the coarser the granularity will be before we can distinguish differences as being significant.

So, we aspiring innovators face a dilemma:  In order to increase the odds of breakthrough success, it helps if we identify and develop products that are really new and different.  However, because of the their newness, prospective buyers won't be familiar with such products and are, consequently, less likely to notice an actionable degree of difference on their own.  That means we have to find creative ways to accelerate familiarity.

Reasons to Believe

Doug Hall has deconstructed the elements of effective marketing communication into a framework he calls marketing physics.  Assuming a clearly articulated benefit (e.g., "The Healthy Dog Bowl"), it is the marketer's responsibility to provide real reasons to believe the claim.  After all, what makes the DogPause bowl healthy?  Does the bowl offer enough of a difference to my dog's health to matter to me enough to buy the product?

Big companies have an advantage in that they have the capacity to use mass advertising to build consumer awareness of a new product's difference.  On the other hand, as Amar Bhide has shown, that capacity has a high opportunity cost, and opportunity cost translates into risk, which tends to inhibit big company's willingness to launch really new and different products.

Small companies (like Long Tail Pet Products) are more likely to launch new and different products, but they don't have the resources to launch carpet-bombing marketing campaigns.  Guerrilla marketing is more their style, but it can take longer to achieve results.

Check out the DogPause web site to see how John is using the elements of kitchen logic, personal experience, pedigree, testimonials, and a guarantee to provide reasons to believe in order to accelerate consumer's understanding of why the DogPause bowl deserves to be purchased.  Here is a sample:

Comments

[Kathleen]

I miss you when you're away but you always make up for it.