The vast majority of products fail. There are myriad reasons for this, not the least is that getting from Napkin to Purchase is a complex, synchronized effort involving hundreds of people and thousands of decisions. In B2B, we contend marketing is too often seen as the “promotional” afterthought, rather than a driver and accurate representative of customer need, which should drive the effort throughout.

Therefore, the following quote should appear — as it does to us — as staggering endorsement of that thought:

“ Teams should perform a market opportunity assessment BEFORE building a prototype. This sounds obvious, but many teams omit this step. Cooper’s industry studies show that inadequate market assessment is one of the reasons why new products fail; only 25% of the teams he studied performed this step.”

Launch Your New Products/Services Better, Faster.
Gary S. Lynn and Ali E. Akgun