Accelerating Product Launch: Untangling Company Challenges from Concept to Market

Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, the ultimate resource for business leaders eager to skyrocket their company's growth!

In this episode, "Accelerating Product Launch: Untangling Company Challenges from Concept to Market," host Kerry Curran welcomes Cynthia White, president of Ceatro Group. They explore the critical junctures where companies often face hurdles, from the initial stages of product development to bringing a product to market. Cynthia shares insights on how her firm intervenes when products underperform or companies struggle to meet market demands.

Join us to discover how strategic thinking and deep market understanding can turn potential failures into resounding successes. If you're ready to unlock the secrets of accelerating your product launch and boosting your company's revenue, let's get started!Podcast Guest: Cynthia White

Host: Kerry Curran

Title: Accelerating Product Launch: Untangling Company Challenges from Concept to Market

Welcome to Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, the ultimate resource for business leaders eager to skyrocket their company's growth! 

I'm your host, Kerry Curran, and this episode is, “Accelerating Product Launch: Untangling Company Challenges from Concept to Market” With special guest Cythnia White, president of Ceatro Group

In this episode, we'll explore the critical junctures where companies often face hurdles, from the initial stages of product development to the final steps of bringing a product to market. Cynthia will share insights into how her firm intervenes when products underperform or when companies struggle to meet market demands. We'll discuss real-world examples of how strategic thinking and deep market understanding can turn potential failures into resounding successes.

So, if you're ready to unlock the secrets of accelerating your product launch and boosting your company's revenue, let's get started! 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:02.398)

Welcome Cynthia. I'd love for you to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about yourself and your company.

Cynthia White (00:08.511)

Sure, thank you so much. I'm Cynthia White. I am president of Ceatro Group. We are a management consulting anthropology firm. And our specialty has been helping companies understand the people that matter most to them, whether it be customers, employees, or supply chain partners, and figuring out what that means to their strategy, service, experience, product, financial strategy, sort of playing the middle between the market or the humans and the business to make sure the whole, both the company and the people get more value out of it.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:44.542)

Excellent. And so I know we've had a few conversations about a lot of the research you do and the partners that you work with. Talk a bit about when companies and brands tend to call you in and what are their pain points or questions they usually need help with.

Cynthia White (01:04.095)

Sure, so specifically for us. We are usually joining companies, the most ideal scenario is when they are just starting the exploration for a new product or service. That's the exciting stuff because you start early and you stay with them through the whole thing. That's not usually where it happens. Usually they call us in because they've heard that we can help them solve a problem that they haven't found another solution for. And that is usually that there's a product or a service or an experience in the market and it's not producing what they hope or the customers have been complaining or something shifts in the … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:14.782)

Mm-hmm.

Cynthia White (01:36.593)

… market and they need to make a big change. So in the scenario of service development, it could be anything from fixing a customer service strategy. Right now we have a client for whom we've been with for three years where during COVID they recognized that their in -person customer service experience in apparel wasn't going to work well due to COVID and already the changing landscape and they needed a better direct and digital service and experience strategy.

We have a few other clients that we're working with now in the tech space who are launching new products or product feature additions and they want to understand more about how it will land or they want to understand needs and gaps. Right now we're putting together a proposal for a company that wants to transform their post login experience and that means understanding what customers may or may not want from post login. Of course, companies always think if they build it, the …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:28.862)

Mm-hmm.

Cynthia White (02:36.305)

… customers will come, but that almost never happens. So we try to do that early work with them to also see what is worth creating based on the money they need to make or the goals that the company has, not just the customer's goals.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:50.974)

And so how often do you find that they have a product in mind or a solution and they can't quite find the right market or they're asking you to identify, come up with something that just might not exist?

Cynthia White (03:06.495)

You know, I would say over the last three decades, it's transformed to be less about early research and needs development and more about getting this thing to market and we have an idea of what will happen. 

And that's a reality of what's been happening even more so than COVID and even more so in the tech space, especially software. There's a lot more, you know, our smart people have an idea or we have this addition to our tech that our capacity allows us to do. We're going to make it go find someone that it's for. And that is a challenge. We sometimes, we do go to market, to work, but typically what they're actually asking is before going to market. They've got the product and they know someone should have needs that it fits and they ask us to go find the target that has those needs and we wish they will have pulled us in for needs identification before design or with much more conviction on who they designed it for so then we could do the go to market step. You know there's ...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:53.022)

Mm-hmm.

Cynthia White (04:08.991)

I think you and I have been talking as we prepared for this about different languages in this space. Just this morning we were talking about audience targeting versus customer needs versus market needs. And there are many different points in product or service development or campaign development or a product relaunch where you need information about the market. And each level of information is different during each stage. And...

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:13.694)

Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Cynthia White (04:35.647)

Typically, when you already have a product fully baked or a service, we'll just use the product, but we mean services or experiences too. When you have that fully baked, you're ready to say to someone, okay, go make some campaigns or go launch this. And that's a really great place for tactical, go to market. We're going to test this, we're going to test marketing language.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:48.318)

Right, right.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:55.774)

Mm-hmm.

Cynthia White (04:56.287)

And then way up in the front, this sort of fuzzy front end of innovation or product development is where we do more platform work or strategy work to understand who is actually for or what needs are in the market that would lead to something that you'd be capable of making. And then there's all this stuff in the middle.

Cynthia White (05:14.527)

The worst case scenario that happens a lot is when someone comes to us or any other consultant and they say, I have a concept. Can you go test this concept? You know, the concept is this glass case. Can you go test it and tell me the response to it? And if we come back with bad responses, they say, well, no, the responses are supposed to be good. So we often say, well, let me see the research that led you to this glass case. And they say, there isn't any. And that's where we're sort of stuck in this loop.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:41.278)

Yep.

Cynthia White (05:42.399)

When it comes to a feature change or an additional product, that can be okay, because you've already done all the work ahead of time. But if no one did the work to know why this was important, except that you had a hunch, what we often tell companies is that if you had a hunch to make something, but you don't know who the needs are, you better be ready to invest a lot in marketing and thought leadership, because you're going to have to create a market. We just had to have this conversation last week. We tested a concept that was fine.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:48.478)

Mm -hmm.

Cynthia White (06:11.103)

The clients would accept it, but they didn't think it had enough. It was too much risk for what it was worth. So it would probably fall flat, but it wouldn't kill anything. And our advice was if you think it's important, then you better invest in thought leadership to create this foundation that it's going to land on. Cause otherwise the market's not excited about it and you're about to put development dollars to it.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:28.734)

Right, right.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I often remind brands or companies that why would you create a product or solution if you're not going to invest in marketing it and matching that customer with the need and convincing them they need your product? And your deeper side of it is your ...

Cynthia White (06:47.903)

Mm -hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:58.43)

… creating products befor