I should probably call this post the genius of incremental product development … here’s what I mean.
At a luncheon today I heard David Charmatz, the SVP of Product Planning and Development at Starz, speak on what the media consumer of the future, say 2012, will be like. David’s talk was very illuminating and, according to his research, tomorrow’s media consumer won’t look so dramatically different from the consumer of today. Sure, more people will be using DVRs and on-demand programming a few years from now, but the large majority of viewers will still be watching regular old cable programming for the forseeable future. As David said, people change their habits very slowly, so don’t expect everyone to flock to the newest technologies, because on average it takes 9 times longer for the general population to adapt to a technology than it did to invent it in the first place.
This all leads me to the genius of incremental product improvement, incremental innovation, incremental marketing. The big names in technology over the last several years – Google and Facebook, for starters – didn’t make their billions by creating a groundbreaking, fundamentally new technology. They basically made incremental improvements to an existing idea and positioned themselves as a grade better, a bit smarter, a little sharper, a tad more friendlier, than the other guys.
I see many fledgling startups and small businesses hanging their hat on the next groundbreaking technology or game-changing product. That’s great if you’re a gambling man and have about a decade to wait until people adapt. Instead of charging ahead with your “groundbreaking” message, consider scaling it back so your offering isn’t 3 steps away with what people are familiar with, and bring it back to their current frame of reference so they can relate to it better. You don’t want a product people will ooh and ahh at and then think it’s beyond their needs right now; you want a product the can see themselves using and buy.
