How It's Better To Fail Quickly And Cheaply With Pathwwway Product Testing


The Failure rate of new consumer products in the market is as high as 80-90 percent. Still, there is no dearth of new businesses flooding the market, or sale of such products to customers. This is because product failure is rightly acclaimed as the mother of product innovation. Failure motivates innovation and saves businesses from their death due to resistance to change. The crux of the problem centres around how early and how cheap you fail. Pathwwway product testing works on this fail-fast, innovate-early technique.

  • To Fail Fast Is To Succeed Faster

Fast failures gives you an opportunity to fix those lapses and come back with an even better product. The value-added insights gained from early product failures will make the future products a sure success. Products may fail due to a misleading USP, as in the case of Fitbit Charge HR, where the product failed to live up to its claims in monitoring heart rates. Or the product belongs to a very new category and customer education in the market in inadequate. In either of the cases, when the initial product idea fails on testing, the losses thereof are manageable. It is only a matter of time to recover from the loss of producing the MVP (minimum viable product) and go on to launch a successful full-fledged product in the right markets.

  • Continuous Testing Of Customer Satisfaction

One of the biggest reasons for product failure is a lack of understanding of how customers perceive your brand and make the decision to buy. Product testing, by carrying out various hypothetical and empirical tests in controlled and uncontrolled testing environments, help to ascertain how efficiently products will perform in the target markets. Testing post product development will do nothing to stop product failures. In such cases, it is certain that your brand will not only fail late, but also will fail expensively. The cost of such late failures not only includes monetary cost of time, labour, capital and resources but the major non-monetary cost of loss of customer goodwill when you hit market with sub-optimal products.

  • Do Not Hesitate To Scrap The Failed Designs: Avoid The Sunk Cost Pitfall

The process is too evident in big production houses and also in SMEs. It happens when the production team becomes so married to the product development process that they fail to notice the early symptoms of product failure. To avoid the faux pas of admitting the failure of their pet product idea, the project managers keep on spending money in it. This human tendency to avoid failure pressurizes them to keep on investing, leading to a whirlpool of sunken costs.

It is always better to fail early and safe, instead of trying out mass production without getting a sense of industry demand for the product. Pathwwway product testing uses product data in an intelligent manner using smart technology and big data analysis. A/B testing of different variants of a product is done systematically. In case of a product failure when it is launched in the test markets, it is better to abort the mission and innovate better the next time.

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