Identifying Opportunities and Risks for Product Development

New products are launching every day across every industry throughout the globe carrying their business risks. The CPG industry alone is responsible for an average of 30,000 launches annually, with most of those launches failing. The failure rate is so substantial that HBR notes that about 95% of new products fail and “less than 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed first-year sales of $50 million—considered the benchmark of a highly successful launch.”

There are plenty of places for a company to trip up as they set out to launch a new product. Some of the obstacles that can contribute to a failure include:

• The product doesn’t do what it’s supposed to
• The growth outpaces the company’s ability to support the product
• The product is a category-maker and requires substantial customer education
• There is no market for the product
• The creation isn’t distinct enough from competitors

So what differentiates a failure from a success? From pricing and messaging to market sizing and competitive deep-dives, gaining a thorough understanding of the total addressable market and your end buyers. In addition, a robust and data-driven planning process centered around detailed market research can often be the differentiating factor that leads to a successful product launch.

Related Reading: An Innovator’s Guide to Competitive Intelligence

The challenges of data-driven research

The quality of research and the ability to find granular information are key factors that can make or break the success of a product launch. Total addressable market, market share, growth potential, peer strategy and suppliers, macro trend impact, and M&A activity are all fine pieces of information that you might be on a journey to discover. Unfortunately, much of the challenge comes from the fact that these insights lie within sources on disparate, expensive, difficult-to-search platforms.

With both speed and accuracy paramount in the fight to gain market share, delays and incomplete or poor quality of information could mean a missed business opportunity in today’s competitive markets.

AI-powered market intelligence

Tedious research processes to validate market information have been displaced by modern technology. With powerful NLP technology layered on top of millions of curated content sources, you can gain speed and accuracy as you assess market risks and opportunities.  

Confidence in the big picture

Millions of trusted sources are available within the AlphaSense platform, providing confidence in the depth and quality of research outputs. Many turn to the Wall Street Insights collection to uncover expert information on market share, growth potential, and total addressable market. These research reports do much of the heavy-lifting, with expert analysts often outlining this specific information within their analyses. For example, a leader from one of the world’s largest pharma companies used these expert reports to identify the US market share for oncology treatments. He placed a detailed table outlining the precise information he was after in seconds.

Instead of boiling the ocean, expert insights and high-level trend visualizations allow you to get intelligent, quick. For example, using the Search Summary from a thematic search, you can gain an insightful overview of your industry’s key players and competitive landscape. Without this unique view, smaller players can quickly fly under the radar.

AlphaSense’s innovative technology searches across valuable content sets and builds confidence that no information is falling through the cracks, often leading to finding data that teams weren’t previously aware existed.

Efficiency gains for higher-value activities

With a deep library of valuable content, you also gain central efficiency in your workflow by conducting thematic searches across the vast array of sources available within AlphaSense and, for example, analyzing what the press, analysts, and other companies are saying about a recent trend or new product in the market provides a more holistic view of supporting a product launch.

Pairing a thematic search with a Watchlist allows you to simultaneously track peers, competitors, clients, or suppliers. For example, one Competitive Intelligence leader mentioned that their AlphaSense Watchlist enabled them to track sustainable packaging initiatives among their peers and see when their competitors started looking into the idea. With this level of detailed insight, they could share this critical information with their C-Suite stakeholders quickly.

As speed and accuracy of information continue to play a huge role in businesses’ ability to launch new products effectively, the need for technology to aid in the research process only grows. AlphaSense’s unique AI search is powering the research process and enabling businesses to make more timely, data-driven decisions.

Check out this video of best practices in leveraging AI to identify opportunities and risks for new product launches or unlock a free trial of AlphaSense here.

Here are a few scenarios and how AlphaSense’s intelligent AI can tackle the new product development workflow:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. Since 2011, our AI-based technology has helped professionals make smarter business decisions by delivering insights from an extensive universe of public and private content—including company filings, event transcripts, news, trade journals, expert calls, broker reports, and equity research. Our platform is trusted by over 2,000 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 100. Headquartered in New York City, AlphaSense employs over 1,000 people across offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, Germany, and India.

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