The Chaser

Chasers, by their nature, read about news biz disappointments and want to know how they can move faster, compete better and nurture the information landscape for a stronger future.

Here's one idea to get you thinking, agree or not.

Anytime you have a new product or service idea for which you believe the best introduction to customers is a "soft launch" -- meaning little or no marketing, a.k.a. dipping toes in the water -- kill it!

Not the launch. The product.

Does this approach sound extreme? What about the investment of time and resources it takes to get a product ready for launch? Isn't it a waste?

Yes, and that's the point. A soft launch is like advertising a car as just a place to sit -- maybe customers will realize it does other things very well at some point, maybe they won't. The problems abound:

• Soft launches generally rely on existing customers to find the new product or service through passing references in existing products or services. That tendency leaves almost no opportunity for acquiring new customers.
• Soft launches assume incorrectly that people are actively watching and waiting for new products and services from you. If you're Google, yes, they are -- so everything can be a "beta" and a crowd will form around it. The news biz? We hate to break it to you, but prospective customers aren't exactly camped out to get tickets to our laboratories.
• Worst, soft launches indicate a lack of confidence in our ability to scope, develop and manage new products and services. That's a shame. There are enough Chasers in this business to go around, to have great ideas and to build on them. If mainstream media don't show enough confidence in the ideas they grow from the inside, the brightest minds on the inside will soon be on the outside.

What to do? The answers lie in common business practices for companies that maintain pipelines of new products and services.

1. Cultivate at least some lightweight processes for taking great ideas and turning them into finished products and services. That doesn't mean you have to build a huge team of technologists and creatives; in fact, you can do very well by staying deliberately smaller than the competition. It just means that you should have a plan, a way, a culture for building new stuff.
2. Learn the customer (as opposed to the time-worn, overconfident "know the customer"). Research money spent on consumer audience segmentation, for example, probably serves media better than money spent on technology sciences.
3. Remember that media businesses are more services than products. We talk a lot about "product development" (including in this post) when what we're providing are services to consumers and advertisers. It's a different mindset. Introductions of new services must, for one, be perceived as distinctly more human, more personal than selling some new widget.
4. Plan for success. That means bake marketing and promotion money into the product or service development budget. And it means, given the fact that we're talking about services rather than products, planning for an uptick in requests for customer support, even if we perceive our new idea to be perfectly executed.

If that's what we believe, there's no excuse for a soft launch, right? The biggest difference between great innovations we know about and great innovations we've never heard of is the confidence with which they were put forth.