How to build a good reputation for a product during its introduction period?

Today let’s talk about a not very interesting question.

Product Life Cycle

This matter has been discussed before, you can see: How to understand " Operation reverse product suggestions"? If you don't want to read the first part, I'll post it:

The life cycle of a product is easy to understand:

Products in the start-up phase may be version 1.0 or even version 0.1. Products in this period are derived from the product manager 's understanding of user needs in the market. For example, tool products have cameras on mobile phones, which provide users with scenarios for taking photos. After taking photos, users need to beautify them, so filter products are a basic user demand. Digging deeper, portrait products also require effects such as skin smoothing, whitening, and red lipstick. Once you see a simple product starting to add more features, it often means that the product has ended its startup phase and entered its development phase.

Products in the development stage will consciously or unconsciously add more functions to meet the evolution of complex scenarios and complex needs brought by the growing number of users. At this stage, the size of the product will become larger, and the launch and removal of functions will become more frequent. At this stage, the product manager will pay close attention to competing products, and every move of the competing products will attract the product manager's attention.

The functions of mature products will tend to be stable, and product managers will not and dare not change the products because the user base is there. As long as the product data itself does not fluctuate greatly and user feedback is not intense, the iteration will focus on optimization rather than innovation. At the same time, product managers will continue to pay attention to competing products, but since barriers have been formed, this focus will be more on the features.

Needless to say, during the decline period, product managers gradually withdraw and no longer continue maintenance. The user is passed to the operation for transfer and landing.

The question is about the introduction period. In fact, the concept of the "introduction period" of a product comes from traditional business. Traditional business believes that:

There are five stages in the product life cycle:

Introduction phase, rising phase, growth phase, maturity phase and decline phase.

For example, the start-up phase mentioned earlier, in fact, both introduction and growth belong to this period.

The product introduction period or "introduction period" refers to

When a brand new product first enters the market, it is not well known and there is no apparent demand in the market.

Since the demand has not yet appeared, how can we talk about word of mouth?

This involves another concept. Fortunately, someone even wrote a book about this concept many years ago.

Crossing the Chasm

Geoffrey Moore wrote a book called "Crossing the Chasm". The idea in the book is very simple. It puts forward a theory called "Chasm Theory":

There is a huge "gap" between the early market and the mainstream market of high-tech companies. If you can cross it, you can survive and even become a generation of heroes; if you can't cross it, you will die.

The reason why there is such a huge gap between the early market and the mainstream market is that the roles of these two markets are different.

The main roles in the early market are early adopters and insiders, while the mainstream market is ordinary consumers.

The book mentions that early users and insiders both play a role in helping the product get started during the introduction phase.

During the introduction period, you should reach out to your early users as much as possible, identify who are the insider enthusiasts and who are the early pragmatic masses, and classify them.

Experts are the ones you need to pay close attention to, because they will either lead your product into a ditch or give your product original suggestions for the next iteration.

Early pragmatists are actually very patient people. This group of people are the real initiators of your future reputation because they are part of the masses. They just have more decision-making motivation than others, but this group of people will often become a very important part of the entire life cycle of this high-tech company.

So, if an expert praises you, don't be happy, because it is possible that he will lead you into a ditch next, but if it is the early masses who praise you, then you can rest assured, because it means that early word of mouth has really been formed.

So, how to do it?

What I want to say is that the truth is always super simple. But it is never as easy as it looks.

1. Target the population.

If the product is to be imported, then to what kind of people should it be imported? This is the initial question to be answered. This question can be answered by either marketing or operations, depending on your company's organizational structure.

2. Get close to the group.

There are actually many examples of getting close to the group. For example, the early founder of Zhihu took the initiative to contact content creators and like their posts; Xiaomi used Weibo to conduct social marketing , and so on.

3. Identify the highlights

Products, features, services, which one is your highlight? Find it out, then let these groups see and accept it, and be willing to share and pass on the content so that more people can feel it.

4. Quick response

The purpose of positioning, identifying, and entering the crowd is to make this group of people have a good impression of your product, and these good impressions will accumulate as word of mouth.

5. Explode Popularity

You use WeChat because everyone around you is using WeChat. Therefore, it is very important to make the good reputation of the product spread in a small circle. Small circles may not necessarily be related to each other, but we need to find ways to find several related small circles and detonate them together. For example, the Internet circle, the venture capital circle, and the media circle seem to have no connection, but the Internet executive circle, the Internet venture capital circle, and the technology media circle are related.

Of course, these are methodologies, so let's take a look at a small example.

Blog/Weibo/Zhihu

These three products have gained a good reputation during the introduction period.

The era of blogs predates that of Weibo, and the popularity of Weibo predates that of Zhihu.

During the introduction period of the blog product, it was favored by people in the technology media, so there is a joke that Feng Dahui may not be the best programmer, but he must be the most famous engineer for blogging; of course, the case we are going to talk about has nothing to do with Feng Dahui.

But the truth is, blogging never really caught on. There is a threshold for long articles, so Weibo came into being.

The only difference between early Weibo and current Weibo is that current Weibo provides many tools for adding followers.

In the early days, Weibo gained a very good reputation because it could help fans get closer to their idols (well, actually it was a feeling). Coupled with the speed and popularity of events spreading on Weibo, it once became the birthplace of hot events.

Later, Weibo declined for a while, and then it picked up again.

In the early days of Zhihu, it was a closed community, and people who didn’t enter it would envy the prosperity and sophistication of the community from the outside; after it opened up, it is certainly doing well now, but there are always people who worry about the watering down of the community content, etc.

Although these three products are all content-based products, when you compare blogs with the later Weibo and Zhihu, although they had a good reputation back then, they did not really prosper at home and abroad. Weibo is to Twitter, and Zhihu is to Quora. They did have a good reputation in the early days and eventually developed well.

Therefore, the gap problem must be resolved so that the product reputation during the introduction period can be truly valuable in the future; otherwise, it is all fake.

The author of this article @张亮 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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