With the upcoming FESPA 2010 Exhibition in Munich, Germany, a slew of new products will hit the printing, display and visual communications industry. Many of those new products will not make it to South Africa and equally as many will. South Africa has many savvy entrepreneurs traversing the globe in search of the next big thing to take the wind out of their competition’s sails and many actually succeed in doing this. Just the other day I overheard a conversation in which the CEO of a company spoke about importing 20 machines a month – at around 150K a pop (i’m guessing). I say MAZALTOV to that.. everybody has to eat. But how many of our business savvy people share some of the knowledge of what to look for and which yardsticks to use when evaluating new products? Not many.

We’ve been bringing new products to market since 2002, and recently started developing and manufacturing our own products as well. But how we engage in the process of deciding what to bring into the South African creative space is what we really want to share. So here goes:

Packaging

One of the first things we look for in any product is “packaging”. The refers to design aesthetics, how components ft together, what the finished product looks like and the impression you get the first time you see it. In a nutshell we look at it’s outward image. Whilst image is not everything on the supply curve of the business, it’s everything on the demand curve. Customers will see your product long before they even realise they need it, and by the time they really need it.. they’ll come and but the “pretty” one they remember YOU were selling.

Value

This is VERY important to many customers. They are – and you always need to remember this – not buying a product from you. They buy a solution, ie. something that adds value to either their professional or personal endeavours. People have the tendency to think of themselves first, so the question that automatically pops up when you present your product is: “How will the product benefit ME”? Customers do not buy food from take-aways; they buy a full stomach. The buy the quenching of thirst when they reach for a cooldrink. So always find the products that presents the most in value not the lowest in price or highest in margin.

User experience

Equally important as value is the way your product engages its user, or how the user gets to engage with the product – whichever is more important to you. The product must be easy to interact with, easy to figure out and easy to learn to use initially. An example of this that I could never understand is why Aldus Corporation never had a font preview in their groundbreaking Pagemaker software. Around 1995 Pagemaker was more preferred than any other software for multi-page publication layout, ad if you were using a range of fonts then you had to know your fonts by name. The software did not have the functionality to show you a preview of what your selected fonts looked like. Pagemaker was then taken over by Adobe Systems but the font preview was still absent despite a more visionary company having taken over the license to develop the software. This has been to the detriment of Pagemaker (now Adobe InDesign) and the benefit of CorelDraw. CorelDraw also has a very gentle learning curve, so very little to no training is really necessary to use it. In fact CorelDraw epitomises user-friendliness. The easier a customer can learn to use your product and teach others to do so as well, the better that product will sell.

More one“Bringing new products to market” in the next post..