Is your marcom program keeping pace with your accelerated product development cycle?

Doug Smith, President

Times were, the folks developing new products for your company had months, even years to ‘build’ whatever was in the pipeline. And you, as the marketing or marketing communications manager assigned to the project, had more or less the same amount of time to develop a suitably well-targeted, hard-hitting, and on-message marcom campaign to introduce said new products to the universe.

Flash forward to today, and -- whether the new product or service in question is entirely novel to your company or a next-gen version of an earlier offering – there can be no doubt the concept-to-realization timeline is far more compressed.

Credit for this new reality is shared by what one might call fundamental causes and enabling capabilities, a very few of which I’ve listed below:

Some causes of today’s compressed product development cycles

• Need to be first-to-market
• Pressure from offshore or even domestic copycats
• Pressure to grow or maintain market share, by introducing additional customer-valued features and functions
• Sea-change acceptance of iterative rollouts (aka: “Product 2.0, Product 3.1, and so on)
• Market-leader strategy focused on continuous innovation & planned obsolescence (typified by aggressive R&D investment & cultural focus on customer ‘problem-solving’)
• Market-driven need to abruptly ‘re-position’ an existing product

Some of the enabling capabilities that contribute to today’s compressed product development cycles

• Ever-more facile product development software
• Rapid prototyping technologies & techniques (e.g. open source software & hardware/dev kits employed in electronics space, 3D printing, etc.)
• Concurrent engineering
• Agile or other streamlined project management approaches
• Online or enterprise-level collaboration tools
• Modularity of product components & assemblies

But whatever the cause or the enabler, it is clear that development of marketing programs must keep pace with, support, and (ideally) even identify and glean value from today’s accelerated product development and introduction regimens.

One way is to accomplish this is to have your marcom program mirror and participate in your product development team’s ‘agile’ process.

Step one? Understand the hallmarks of the agile process, which include:

• early and constant involvement of real users and/or customers in the product’s development;
• reacting to customer feedback and market realities in real time (think of it as course correction) rather than a rigid focus on original specifications;
• cross-discipline and continuous collaboration (e.g. procurement, engineering, operations, QA, biz-dev, marketing);
• despite some fluidity in the process, the deadline remains completely fixed (this being achieved through concurrent engineering, daily communication, accountability,
• collaboration, and documentation);
• and, oftentimes, use of an ‘agile’ product management tool such as Jira, Rally, Mingle, or any number of alternatives.

Step two? Apply these same principles to your marketing program -- by adopting the sprints, scrums, daily stand-ups, and ‘stakeholder-sessions’ of the agile methodology. Whether that means “testing” with actual customers the language you use to describe your product features/benefits; working collaboratively with engineers and product line managers from the onset of the project to ID and articulate your media strategy versus, say, hiding it under a bushel until you spring it on them as a fait accompli; or sitting in on engineering and manufacturing meetings to gain a deeper and more realistic appreciation of the technical issues and obstacles that exist when transitioning your nascent product from the factory floor to the market.

Not only will you be joining your agile team, your marketing program is likely to be better supported internally, better informed by customer input, and more resonant as a result. (FOR MORE WAYS TO ENSURE A SPEEDY MARCOM PROGRAM, READY OUR WHITE PAPER.)

Thanks for listening.

DCS

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