It is important to distinguish between brand innovation and brand renovation. Understanding the difference that exists between the two product management concepts can yield a market advantage.
Most of the time, what a business product needs to regain market relevance isn’t innovation but renovation. Innovation is a lever that should be pulled under certain conditions. And that is the key – the ability to understand which of the concepts to apply to influence product performance. Innovating where market conditions aren’t ripe for it can lead to huge losses.
Market is always transforming. Consumer tastes and demands are always shifting. Groundbreaking products and services soon become a norm, commoditised, customised or grow obsolete. You’re aware of the casualties of that trend – Yahoo, BlackBerry, etc.
The race to secure a healthy market performance often pushes business organisations to keep searching for the next ‘big thing’. Managers pitch new initiatives during product development sessions, forgetting to balance short-term, mid-term and long-term objectives. Some firms rush headlong into risking their product development war chest on a game-changing product idea.
The consequences sometimes are that the market isn’t ready for the new offering. The new offering may not tackle core needs satisfactorily. The offering may be innovations easily copied by the competition quickly. At times, unexpected market events may crop up to undo to turn expert predictions on their head.
Harvard’s Innovation Ambition Matrix model, developed by Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff, may come in handy. It prescribed an incremental, transformative and evolutionary approach to innovation. They are smart. If you check human psychology, you should understand that humans’ natural response to anything completely new is shock.
Newness naturally receives market pushback. Who knows if that was the reason Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), thought no one would ever need a computer in 1977.
Although the computer eventually became a big success after years of transformative investment in making it better and user-friendly, many new product investments haven’t been that lucky. Take, for instance, experts reported that 95% of innovative new products fail.
Put simply, what some businesses need isn’t a complete innovation. It is a renovation. Renovation is about making an incremental tweak to existing product features.
Renovation is about making small changes to a product or service offering to capture emerging needs. It is not a complete overhaul; it is an adjustment that combines familiar features with something trendy or aspirational.
Renovation is an update. It is not a complete redesign. The advantages can be impressive – costs are manageable, making the price affordable for users.
Time is at a premium these days. Everyone is busy. Users don’t need to spend too much time learning how to use a new offering. Here are three ways to carry out product renovation:
- Target improvement – The Blue Ocean framework fits this part. Resist the temptation to overhaul the entire product. Instead, search for and introduce trendy features to existing products to meet emerging needs.
- Maintain core identity – Tweaks that make the product unrecognisable to the existing customer base could be sharply resisted. In renovating the product, ensure you keep its core identity. When Coca-Cola tried to copy Pepsi by making a rapid change to its classic Coke, its market share took a dive. The company learned a big lesson.
- Focus on extending the product life cycle – A new generation of users comes with new expectations. The major objective of product renovation is to make an existing product appealing, acceptable and affordable to a new generation. It is wise to focus on that objective in choosing the features to add to the product being renovated.
