Product infatuation, leading to blindness

Here’s a massive challenge we’re seeing all the time.

😍 Product infatuation, leading to blindness 😍

When you create a new business or need to keep an existing business fresh, it’s easy to suffer from blinding product infatuation.

Your established products have worked before and customers love them. So you don’t want to mess with the brand or its offering.

Or your new product, obsessed about for months or years, has become a monster in your head blocking your view of customers’ needs.

Your brand becomes entwined in the product. So you can’t refresh one without impacting the other. Everything stalls.

Two decisions can lead to this blindness…

Decision 1. The initial insight that sparked your product hasn’t been updated.😴

So your product/market fit starts to creak (if it’s truly there at all).

You’re asleep at the wheel.

This happens with big brands a lot. They had a product and a place in the market and they’ve lost their passion along the way leading to me-too products and a “meh!” brand.

Look at Virgin – a brand I have helped build (launching products across several of their businesses), and one that I respect enormously.

Currently, it feels middle-aged and out of touch. Even with the promise of space travel! It’s over stretched and needs pruning. It needs to get back to its founding insights and make them applicable for the 21st Century.

Decision 2. The customer development process hasn’t been followed. 🙄

You’ve been lazy. This is very very common.

The process of testing customer problems is hard and slow and scientific. While building new stuff is fast and easy and exciting.

Customer development is an established process of rigorously testing every product and brand assumption you have.

There are several stages and it’s tough.

Creating product and brand desirability by building a ‘pain killer’ not a ‘vitamin’ involves creating utility, pleasurability and usability. Getting that right is immensely hard.

So skipping a few stages is attractive.

We’re working with several new businesses on problem testing. And we’re helping existing brands reignite the passion they’ve lost along the way.

We use a process of coaching, training and strategic tools to reboot brands (and their products) within a few weeks – with guaranteed transformations.

If you’re losing traction or beginning to feel your offering is going stale, let’s chat today

www.elysianfields.co

🙏 Onwards upwards!