Make Marketing History

The views of a marketing deviant.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

I Could Have Been A Contender.

Effectively combining the attention-grabbing and neuromarketing themes of the past two days, the work of Harvard Business School's John Gourville quantifies why new offerings really do need to be remarkable.

The risk aversion of consumers and their investment in existing solutions means that your alternative needs to appear ten times as good as the status quo if it is to really catch on. Yes TEN times! Consumers overvalue products they own by a factor of three while product developers over-rate their products by a similar factor and the result is what he calls the "9X problem" which generates "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want."

That makes you look at what you're trying to sell and the strength of supposedly vulnerable incumbents such as Microsoft in a different light doesn't it?

3 Comments:

Blogger Hotel @nyware said...

There is a 2000 Blogger meme, that I mutated over to my site http://hotelanyware.blogspot.com/
to create a 150 z list

I'm sneezing on you.

2:01 PM, January 25, 2007  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School Touched on that point quite nicely, when it comes to new Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The 9X Email Problem

8:01 AM, January 26, 2007  
Blogger john dodds said...

Thanks for the link derik, it ties in quite well wih my geek marketing arguments that you need to focus on what people want rather than what you can do. I too like that reference to a "comfort app" and will post about it.

9:08 AM, January 26, 2007  

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