Launching a new product is always filled with anxiety and expectations as every company and brand wants its product to do well. They leave no stone unturned in marketing that product to their target markets which include advertising heavily, doing
But, when it comes to innovations, which are products that are new, unique and have never been used by people, marketing can become a very tricky ball game altogether.
You can definitely use the conventional methods to market your normal category specific products, but for innovative ones, you need to think out of the box and do something that resonates enough with the audience so that they are compelled to use your product. In the past decade, many innovative products have been successfully marketed through unique strategies which made them into multi-million dollar success stories. These highly offbeat marketing strategies are definitely a place to learn and grow from.
#1. Expensive for the Greater Good
Tesla is one of the most important car companies in the world right now as they are leading the charge aggressively towards making electric cars more adaptive and better than conventional ones. But there was one thing that was against it achieving this prime goal and that was that most of its cars were expensive and not a lot of people would buy them because of that. But that changed through a stroke of marketing genius.
Tesla told that the more you buy their expensive cars, the more money they’ll have to invest in bringing inexpensive ones towards a more mass audience. Which roughly translates into Extravagant purchase = Charity. New technology is expensive but provides more benefits to us, so Tesla is going down the road and portraying that it’s not out there to earn money, breaking the greedy corporates persona, and telling people that if they buy something from them, it’s for their own good.
This single marketing tactic could be beneficial towards humankind to no end and help sell other quite beneficial technology which is sometimes quite expensive as well. Tesla’s affiliate SolarCity could sell its innovative solar paneling and Komatsu could help sell its autonomous haulage vehicle in some examples of promising technologies that face impediments due to their price tags.
#2. Influencing the Audience
When it comes down to trying a new product, there is always that fear or a gap of trust, on how the service or product would actually turn out to be. This gap translates into slow adoption rates and takes longer for innovative products to gain traction and a loyal audience. This is probably the biggest impediment on launching new products and has slowed down countless new entrants in the market. But brands like Uber found a way around it. Influencer marketing is not a recent phenomenon but the morphed version used most effectively by Uber, definitely is.
Celebrities, sports stars, and other known personalities were used by companies to appear in their advertisements and “Act” about the products in conventional advertising but to influence the audience, you need to make them feel that you are having a real experience. This empathy based marketing tactic of influencing the audience is employed by Uber all over the world in whichever city it get launched.
It gets on board well-known people and asks them to try out their service and then serve the whole experience they had to people which increases the trust barrier. It has also been employed to neutralize some cultural barriers like female drivers as well, improving its power to penetrate deeper into the audience’s minds and become a success story like no other.
#3. Targeting a future audience and easy adopters
There are not many overnight success stories doing rounds but Snapchat isn’t definitely one of those as this amazing social media platform is now worth in excess of $20 billion in just a little over 6 years. But what made Snapchat successful? The answer lies in a simple fact that around 60% percent of Snapchat users lie in the age bracket of 13-24 years old.
This is an unusually odd target audience as not a lot of them would have any considerable independent purchasing power, so who will bring on the ads to target them? But these very age groups that Snapchat has captured were easy adopters towards such a fun platform and a powerful target market for the future. This enabled Snapchat to become so popular so fast and adding the idea of ephemerality which made people turn into more compulsive users out of the fear that they could miss out on anything and you have a marketing winner by Snapchat.
Marketing is one of the cornerstones of a business’s viability, and in today’s fast-paced and rapidly changing environment, it is immensely important for companies that place their bets on innovation to learn more on how they can market their products in a unique manner.
When it comes down to innovative products, consumers haven’t likely experienced something like them before and they would stand to be drawn more to these products if only they see them as bringing a big difference in their lives and solve their problems, which is a message that can be conveyed only through offbeat marketing tactics, otherwise innovative products could only go so far by using conventional methods like third party paid advertisements.
Innovation is great and it takes our human race forward but selling it is as difficult as making it happen in the first place. The future decade promises a lot of innovations in fields like big data, automation, artificial intelligence and a host of other domains and with it there will come newer and better ideas to market these highly unique products towards their target audience which will not only help these products survive and rise but also provide conventional companies and brands to alter their myopic views and widen their vision when it comes to marketing.
