The Homa Files

Excerpted from Ad Age “Want to Know Where to Launch a New Product?” by Marissa Miley, October 28, 2008 

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The best place to introduce a new product: Japan. The worst place: China.

Those are among the findings of a new study…called “Global Takeoff of New Products: Culture, Wealth or Vanishing Differences,” which claims to be the first global analysis of its kind…

The study…looked at data for consumer household products over 50 years and across 31 developed and developing countries. To rank the countries, they created an “innovativeness metric” based on the time it takes for new products to take off in a particular country.

A product “takes off” in a country…when it has started to grow rapidly, moving from being used by a few people to being used by the mass market. The time it takes depends on a number of variables: the economic strength and cultural mores of the country, as well as the price and category of the product. Nations with the shortest time to new-product takeoff landed at the top of the list.

Japan, Norway and Sweden came in first, second and third, respectively. The U.S. came in sixth…Oddly, two of the countries normally considered fast-growing, India and China, were on the bottom…

The study can save marketers “a lot of time [and] get quick results…This ranking of countries tells you which to launch in first.” The authors recommend a “waterfall” approach to launches, staggering them from one country to the next, and they created a hazard model for the study to determine how many years it will be before products “take off” in a national market.

For the study, the co-authors analyzed two different kinds of consumer household products: “fun” products that provide entertainment, such as MP3 players and cellphones; and “work” products that improve work efficiency, such as microwaves and washing machines…”fun” products take off far more quickly than “work” products (7 yrs vs. 12 yrs), and therefore require different marketing strategies.

Fun products take off more quickly because they are “more glamorous, more visible…We don’t go house to house boasting about our vacuum cleaner, but we do for our cellphones.” In these cases, the authors suggest that marketers might benefit from using the “sprinkler” strategy, launching products in several countries at once.

Edit by SAC  

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Full article:
http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=132082

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