Outstanding marketers have many titles and come from diverse backgrounds. The best marketers are exceptional learners. They are curious, systematic, adaptive, urgent, inspirational, mostly joyful, and love measuring results of activities.
Unfortunately, there are also many marketers who are pretenders. The pretenders will tell you that they know what to do rather than sharing their plan. The pretenders won’t create a system to get customer feedback and measure activities. The pretenders reduce the success of new product launches. They also tarnish the reputation of the marketing discipline because while they call their work marketing, their work lacks the rigor and success rate of thoughtful, professional marketing. The pretenders have many titles and diverse backgrounds. They tend to tell rather than ask, tend to lack rigorous training and experience in marketing fundamentals, are unrealistic, and create dysfunctional rather than winning teams. This checklist can be a performance enhancement tool for outstanding marketers and an inoculation or insurance against pretenders.
Airline pilots have a preflight checklist. Surgeons have a preoperation checklist. These checklists must be completed prior to each flight or surgery because the consequences of missing a preparation step could be catastrophic. Companies need a product launch checklist. This checklist must be completed prior to each product launch because the consequence of missing an essential preparation step will reduce the success of the product and the value it brings to customers and the company.
“… we need a different strategy for overcoming failures, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. And there is such a strategy …. It is a checklist.” (Gawande 2010, 13)
The new product launch checklist will improve the commercial success of new products and services. However, please keep in mind that certain tasks in the checklist will not be relevant to your situation, some will need modification, and some situations will need additional tasks. We will consider this book a success when it is used to create productive conversations on important tasks required for maximizing the success of your specific product launch.
The target audience for this book is business leaders who want to capture maximum value from introducing a new product or service. Each product introduction occurs in a unique moment in time, in a market with unique characteristics, and in competitive circumstances by a unique company with individuals performing tasks for the launch. Even with these varied circumstances, this checklist will increase the success of the new product and company because it focuses on fundamental tasks.