FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENINGby Nicholas Webb CEO Lassen Innovation

SPONSORED BY

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 2

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

New product developers typically rely on voice of the customer (VOC) research techniques and other traditional methods to look for insights they can turn into new product ideas The drawback to that approach is that VOC results are backward-facing and often erroneous or fractional with the result that new products based on VOC findings have high failure rates

To determine if social listening could be used instead of VOC to deliver the high-quality insights necessary to develop a successful new product for the highly competitive educational toy market Lassen Innovation conducted an experiment Lassen used social listening to understand the target demographic for the new product analyze the online conversation about competitive products identify the drivers behind consumer sentiment around educational toys and pinpoint unmet needs being expressed by passionate consumers

The company used the insights it found to design and launch Haumlnz which became one of the most award-winning educational toys ever and is projected to have revenues of $8 million in only its second year of availability

This paper describes the benefits of using social listening in a new product development process identifies best practices for its use and includes a short case study on how Lassen employed it to develop the highly successful Haumlnz educational toy line

FIGURING OUT WHAT TO INVENT

Inventing is easy gaining the insights necessary to know what to invent is the secret

Recent studies show that new products have a failure rate of 25 percent to 45 percent and for every seven new product ideas about four enter development one and a half are launched and only one succeeds1 The overall success rate for commercializing intellectual property is estimated to be less than one percent2 Why is the success rate for new products so low In researching my books The Innovation Playbook and The Digital Innovation Playbook I found that when you do a post-mortem on unsuccessful product launches you find the problem wasnrsquot that the products werenrsquot cool or that the technology wasnrsquot amazingmdashthey were The innovation and genius behind them was dead on The problem was a lack of insight into the needs desires and opportunity represented by the people who would ultimately buy the product My colleagues and I concluded that the biggest challenge isnrsquot being innovative itrsquos understanding what current and future customers want and how theyrsquoll respond to a new product Given that we decided to experiment with a research approach that would give us better insights into customer wants and that would in turn lead to more successful new products

1 httpwwwpdmaorgpbletblogaid=115

2 Technology Commercialization Manual Melvin J DeGeeter PhD

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 3

DRAWBACKS OF THE TRADITIONAL VOC-BASED APPROACH

Like most companies working in new product development ours was accustomed to relying on traditional research methods We used VOC techniques did retail surveys to determine what products had the highest SKU movement and conducted interviews with retailers industry thought leaders and trade associations to get their high-level overview of whatrsquos trending We would also buy canned market data

The problem is VOC is a cryptic old-fashioned circa-1950 way of trying to understand customersmdashand it yields minimally useful data and insights It often consists of asking a statistically diverse group what they think of something Itrsquos plagued by the data-gathering challenge that once you put an individual in a test environment the researcherrsquos presence affects the individualrsquos responses So you end up with erroneous insights or fractional insights and as a result the conclusions you draw are wrong Based on those you proceed to develop products that fail in the marketplace The end result is that brilliant product developers are creating cool things that nobody cares about

To be fair to my fellow product developers we know that VOC does not provide accurate information we can use to make critical business decisions And we know we need better tools

So at Lassen we decided to do an experimentmdashsort of a side lab testmdashto find out if itrsquos possible to move beyond the old-fashioned approach of working with rear-facing data and find a better way to glean insights that lead to more successful innovations and products

SOCIAL LISTENINGmdashA HIGHLY SENSITIVE TOOL

To do our research we dropped the VOC approach and instead used a social analytics solution to listen to and analyze the online conversation related to the market we wanted to develop products for which in this case was the educational toy market

One of the key attributes of our social listening tool is that itrsquos an exquisite instrument with a high degree of sensitivity Unlike traditional VOC techniques that require big movements and lots of data points to identify a trend with social listening you can drill down and find small but significant movements They may take the form of five sound bites on Twitter but those five sound bites could be epic in terms of heralding an emerging trend Individual sound bites can hold tremendous insights

VOC is a cryptic old-fashioned circa-1950 way of trying to understand customersmdashand it yields minimally useful data and insights

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 4

This is not to say that the insights you find with social listening are abundant Yoursquore panning for gold and yoursquove got to sift through a lot of sand and silt to find a few nuggets This is also not about the recent movement towards crowdsourcing the loud crowd to be blunt is often stupid And the louder the crowd members are the stupider they are

Rather this is about finding the insightful few in social recognizing that theyrsquore onto something and building on their insights to create innovative solutions to problems

MAKING DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION THE GOAL

There are basically three flavors of innovation incremental breakout and disruptive3 The old methods of VOC create incremental innovations or as I used to put it ldquoThey paint it blue and call it newrdquo These are simply variations on a thememdashcompanies make very slight changes to an existing product that have little perceived value Breakout innovations are those that significantly up the level of play within an existing category Disruptive innovations disrupt

3 httpwwwfastcodesigncom1665186there-are-three-types-of-innovation-heres-how-to-manage-them

Excerpt from the real-time stream of sound bites in the online conversation about educational toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 5

the current market behavior rendering existing solutions obsolete Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory It takes you beyond rigid thinking and allows you to adopt a fresh perspective and find disruptive ideas that have significant value to the enterprise and to customers

Companies with established products need to be using social listening today to find the ideas that will lead to disruptive productsmdashbefore their competitors do For example if five years from now 50 percent of American homes have a consumerized 3D printer they bought for $100 which will be the case when does LEGOreg jump in and decide that theyrsquore going to start creating two-dollar STL files to sell their product as a 3D printable digital file A tough decision but without a doubt thatrsquos where wersquore heading An analogy is the publishing business Decision-makers there didnrsquot believe a physical book would be replaced by a digital file They were wrong People in the music industry didnrsquot believe a CD would be replaced by a digital file Also wrong

Even successful companies perhaps especially successful companies need to be using social listening now to find the insights that lead to their next generation of products

BENEFITS OF INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING INTO THE NPD PROCESS

Two of the biggest problems facing product developers are that the information they have is either erroneous meaning itrsquos wrong or itrsquos fractional meaning itrsquos incomplete I feel strongly that social listening is a way to get more accurate and more meaningful emotional data and itrsquos a better way to fill in informational gaps Itrsquos even useful as an instrument to test what you think you know

Social listening is a tremendous way to get a more authentic ethnographic kind of insight It allows us to listen to our customer communities which is the online equivalent of ldquoliving with the triberdquo Itrsquos listening to a natural voice that doesnrsquot have the observational bias of traditional research More importantly it allows us to listen to the emotive drivers behind behaviors At the end of the day a technology is nothing more than a device system or service that delivers layered and dynamic value to customers It makes an emotional connection There is an intellectual dimension to why customers make purchases but brand passion data provides the best insights about the emotional factors that ultimately drive purchase decisions

Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 6

FORWARD-FACING DATA

For product developers social listening also changes the machinery of how we gain insights We used to look at post-mortem data sales numbers market size historical financials and other data thatrsquos primarily rear-facing Social listening in contrast supplies real-time data For instance right now at Lassen wersquore putting together a set of experiments with keywords to help us understand the passion around what people hate and what they love Up until now that hasnrsquot been a common activity for someone in new product development This new approach gives us better machinerymdashit gives us a chance to be future-facing rather than past-facing in our search for customer insight

Whatrsquos also valuable is that with social listening and netnography which is online ethnography we can listen to individuals in online communities who are passionate about the subjects wersquore researching These people are thinking about these subjects more than we are and can be a rich source of insights

REAL-TIME COURSE CORRECTIONS

Another advantage to social listening is that it provides real-time data In an environment where product life cycles are collapsing real-time data can be invaluable for making rapid course corrections in product design packaging and marketing In the past long product lifecycles of three or four years were the norm with four distinct stages introduction growth maturity and decline Today wersquore dealing with stages that last only months or even weeks We can use social listening in the much-shortened introduction stage to measure and monitor responses to our messaging so we can make real-time course corrections This use of social listening obviously crosses over into the marketing side but product managers are often involved in NPD activities and are responsible for a successful launch

This word cloud uses different type sizes to show the relative frequency of key terms appearing in the online conversation around LEGO toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 7

For example we learned through social listening that the market for our educational toy is like the market for fashion Our target customer is typically a female buyer with a dynamic kid and both of them want new stuff all the time So wersquove learned to layer on value and product-line extensions For example as we were launching the Genius Blocksmdashan extension to the Haumlnz toy linemdashwe were already creating our articulating build and adding our robot build and continuing to extend the line Finding the insight that our customers are always looking for the next thing gave us the justification for working on line extensions sooner than we otherwise might have Thatrsquos why itrsquos important for those of us in development to use insights from social monitoring to optimize launch success

The insights we find pertain to several areas including packaging and messaging For example we analyzed how people perceived our packaging which led us to change it during the launch phase With social listening feedback we can optimize product design change the bundle structure of products change the delivery modality and more There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to be able to make certain we put ourselves in a position to optimize the success of the product launch

BEST PRACTICES FOR INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING

Based on our experience using social listening at Lassen wersquove arrived at several best practices that can increase its value for new product development

LOOK FOR EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS

Many people in NPD believe theyrsquore delivering a transaction for an event Thatrsquos not how we see our task and not how social listening can be most valuable Rather social listening provides insight to deliver an experience across a journey In fact I think itrsquos important to look at social listening as a means of finding emotional insights rather than market insights Because at the end of the day what we really leverage is emotion Developers may say ldquoI sell pharmaceuticalsrdquo or ldquoI sell products that are B2B and very pragmatic This is a value propositionrdquo What theyrsquore missing is that every great companymdashno matter what industry itrsquos in or how vanilla its productmdashmust deliver layered and dynamic value across the customer journey

So Irsquod advise developers to stop thinking of themselves as being in the transaction business If you continue to develop products that are transactional in nature meaning that people just want a widget yoursquoll fail In my research for The Innovation Playbook I looked at over 800 companies and it was clear that the winners were the ones who analyzed

There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to optimize the success of the launch

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 8

emotional drivers across all touchpoints of the customer journey Thatrsquos where successful innovation comes frommdashitrsquos not fractional itrsquos holistic We need to look at a productrsquos design in light of how it will live across the customer journey Social listening is extremely useful for that

LESS HATE MORE LOVE

As developers we need to understand what people hate and how to make that pain go away while identifying what people love and how to layer on more of that That may sound too touchy-feely but itrsquos the practice applied by every innovation superstar You wonrsquot find much of the emotional insight you need through conventional VOC and CRM methodologies You do find it through social listening

SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS

One practical tip is that your starting point should be understanding the success drivers of the products in your space and building a set of keywords around those drivers that you can search for in social media

So if itrsquos speed size taste safety whatever your first step should be to set up a series of keywords I actually go into the Google AdWords keyword generator and generate a set of keywords based on real-time search terms Doing that enables you to be sure that yoursquore searching on terms that people searching on topics similar to yours are going to be using When I do this Irsquom looking for noise that is the conversation around the topics that matter to me So before I even start using my social analytics tool I can find out where the conversation around key topics is taking place

HOW NOT TO USE SOCIAL LISTENING FOR NPD

If I were to ask everyone in a room full of product developers to be honest with me and then said ldquoDo you make decisions based on opportunity or on risk managementrdquo I assure you that 100 percent of the hands would be raised for risk management

Thatrsquos a problem in applying social listening for NPDmdashyou canrsquot look at it as a risk management tool It does provide risk management by increasing the likelihood of a successful product but if you try to use it as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs If you use it for that yoursquore using it for evil instead of good and it wonrsquot serve you well

Look instead for opportunities Be brave Identify emerging trends before the competition Take the risk of listening to what customers love and hate and yoursquoll create products that win in the market Thatrsquos the beauty of social listeningmdashitrsquos an opportunity tool

If you try to use social listening as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 9

HOW LASSEN INNOVATION USED SOCIAL LISTENING TO DEVELOP HAumlNZ

Our Haumlnz toy started out as a lab experiment to test the theory that we could use social listening and social insights to replace VOC CRM and conventional market data as a way to drive design inputs and create products that are more relevant to the customer We believe using this new approach to research can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of added value for enterprises If we capture insights successfully we felt wersquod have design inputs that would produce market-winning technologies

Unlike large companies that use social listening to monitor and manage brand positions we use it far more surgically as an NPD tool That means itrsquos common for us to drill deep rather than wide because we use it to test assumptions and market reactions and to test our theories of what people are talking about

We knew LEGO would be a key competitor so we researched that product to find out what moms didnrsquot like about it We looked at trajectory of usage and other factors many of which I would never have thought to explore with traditional methods Even a single Twitter post which I could drill down to via social listening led me to mountains of data

DEVELOPING BLENDED VALUE

Many people in the NPD space are using social listening as a test instrument to validate conclusions theyrsquove drawn from old market data Theyrsquore doing that because theyrsquore probably risk-centric So they stick with old methods they like even though theyrsquove resulted in a high level of failure

We do the opposite Why Because if you use social listening to look for emerging opportunities and discussions about what people love and hate you get a clean slate from which to start your design process By contrast if you start from the risk-centric point of view all yoursquoll get is historical data from which yoursquoll develop products that are an imitation of an already-successful product What we do is try to change the trajectory of insight by saying ldquoWhatrsquos going to supplant the widget What are the disruptive technologies that will make widgets irrelevantrdquo

Taking that approach enables us to deliver blended value In the context of our toy that means we provide STL filesmdashthree-dimensional printable filesmdashbecause we know a good percentage of our customers have 3D printers So we make parts of our kits available free in an STL formatmdashwersquore also making them available soon on Thingiversemdashso customers can download STL files and get blended value Specifically if our customers buy an Inventorrsquos Lab and have a 3D printer they can print the robot interface and now they have a robot kit which would have cost them a lot more money But now theyrsquore getting it for freemdashthatrsquos blended value

SHORTENING TIME-TO-DESIGN BY 63 PERCENT

Lassen Scientific used to do a lot of contract product development so wersquove been involved in the development andor launch of hundreds of products Historically wersquod spend about three months looking for the information we needed to formulate our design inputs We would use traditional VOC techniques where we would basically find any and every

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 2

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

New product developers typically rely on voice of the customer (VOC) research techniques and other traditional methods to look for insights they can turn into new product ideas The drawback to that approach is that VOC results are backward-facing and often erroneous or fractional with the result that new products based on VOC findings have high failure rates

To determine if social listening could be used instead of VOC to deliver the high-quality insights necessary to develop a successful new product for the highly competitive educational toy market Lassen Innovation conducted an experiment Lassen used social listening to understand the target demographic for the new product analyze the online conversation about competitive products identify the drivers behind consumer sentiment around educational toys and pinpoint unmet needs being expressed by passionate consumers

The company used the insights it found to design and launch Haumlnz which became one of the most award-winning educational toys ever and is projected to have revenues of $8 million in only its second year of availability

This paper describes the benefits of using social listening in a new product development process identifies best practices for its use and includes a short case study on how Lassen employed it to develop the highly successful Haumlnz educational toy line

FIGURING OUT WHAT TO INVENT

Inventing is easy gaining the insights necessary to know what to invent is the secret

Recent studies show that new products have a failure rate of 25 percent to 45 percent and for every seven new product ideas about four enter development one and a half are launched and only one succeeds1 The overall success rate for commercializing intellectual property is estimated to be less than one percent2 Why is the success rate for new products so low In researching my books The Innovation Playbook and The Digital Innovation Playbook I found that when you do a post-mortem on unsuccessful product launches you find the problem wasnrsquot that the products werenrsquot cool or that the technology wasnrsquot amazingmdashthey were The innovation and genius behind them was dead on The problem was a lack of insight into the needs desires and opportunity represented by the people who would ultimately buy the product My colleagues and I concluded that the biggest challenge isnrsquot being innovative itrsquos understanding what current and future customers want and how theyrsquoll respond to a new product Given that we decided to experiment with a research approach that would give us better insights into customer wants and that would in turn lead to more successful new products

1 httpwwwpdmaorgpbletblogaid=115

2 Technology Commercialization Manual Melvin J DeGeeter PhD

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 3

DRAWBACKS OF THE TRADITIONAL VOC-BASED APPROACH

Like most companies working in new product development ours was accustomed to relying on traditional research methods We used VOC techniques did retail surveys to determine what products had the highest SKU movement and conducted interviews with retailers industry thought leaders and trade associations to get their high-level overview of whatrsquos trending We would also buy canned market data

The problem is VOC is a cryptic old-fashioned circa-1950 way of trying to understand customersmdashand it yields minimally useful data and insights It often consists of asking a statistically diverse group what they think of something Itrsquos plagued by the data-gathering challenge that once you put an individual in a test environment the researcherrsquos presence affects the individualrsquos responses So you end up with erroneous insights or fractional insights and as a result the conclusions you draw are wrong Based on those you proceed to develop products that fail in the marketplace The end result is that brilliant product developers are creating cool things that nobody cares about

To be fair to my fellow product developers we know that VOC does not provide accurate information we can use to make critical business decisions And we know we need better tools

So at Lassen we decided to do an experimentmdashsort of a side lab testmdashto find out if itrsquos possible to move beyond the old-fashioned approach of working with rear-facing data and find a better way to glean insights that lead to more successful innovations and products

SOCIAL LISTENINGmdashA HIGHLY SENSITIVE TOOL

To do our research we dropped the VOC approach and instead used a social analytics solution to listen to and analyze the online conversation related to the market we wanted to develop products for which in this case was the educational toy market

One of the key attributes of our social listening tool is that itrsquos an exquisite instrument with a high degree of sensitivity Unlike traditional VOC techniques that require big movements and lots of data points to identify a trend with social listening you can drill down and find small but significant movements They may take the form of five sound bites on Twitter but those five sound bites could be epic in terms of heralding an emerging trend Individual sound bites can hold tremendous insights

VOC is a cryptic old-fashioned circa-1950 way of trying to understand customersmdashand it yields minimally useful data and insights

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 4

This is not to say that the insights you find with social listening are abundant Yoursquore panning for gold and yoursquove got to sift through a lot of sand and silt to find a few nuggets This is also not about the recent movement towards crowdsourcing the loud crowd to be blunt is often stupid And the louder the crowd members are the stupider they are

Rather this is about finding the insightful few in social recognizing that theyrsquore onto something and building on their insights to create innovative solutions to problems

MAKING DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION THE GOAL

There are basically three flavors of innovation incremental breakout and disruptive3 The old methods of VOC create incremental innovations or as I used to put it ldquoThey paint it blue and call it newrdquo These are simply variations on a thememdashcompanies make very slight changes to an existing product that have little perceived value Breakout innovations are those that significantly up the level of play within an existing category Disruptive innovations disrupt

3 httpwwwfastcodesigncom1665186there-are-three-types-of-innovation-heres-how-to-manage-them

Excerpt from the real-time stream of sound bites in the online conversation about educational toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 5

the current market behavior rendering existing solutions obsolete Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory It takes you beyond rigid thinking and allows you to adopt a fresh perspective and find disruptive ideas that have significant value to the enterprise and to customers

Companies with established products need to be using social listening today to find the ideas that will lead to disruptive productsmdashbefore their competitors do For example if five years from now 50 percent of American homes have a consumerized 3D printer they bought for $100 which will be the case when does LEGOreg jump in and decide that theyrsquore going to start creating two-dollar STL files to sell their product as a 3D printable digital file A tough decision but without a doubt thatrsquos where wersquore heading An analogy is the publishing business Decision-makers there didnrsquot believe a physical book would be replaced by a digital file They were wrong People in the music industry didnrsquot believe a CD would be replaced by a digital file Also wrong

Even successful companies perhaps especially successful companies need to be using social listening now to find the insights that lead to their next generation of products

BENEFITS OF INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING INTO THE NPD PROCESS

Two of the biggest problems facing product developers are that the information they have is either erroneous meaning itrsquos wrong or itrsquos fractional meaning itrsquos incomplete I feel strongly that social listening is a way to get more accurate and more meaningful emotional data and itrsquos a better way to fill in informational gaps Itrsquos even useful as an instrument to test what you think you know

Social listening is a tremendous way to get a more authentic ethnographic kind of insight It allows us to listen to our customer communities which is the online equivalent of ldquoliving with the triberdquo Itrsquos listening to a natural voice that doesnrsquot have the observational bias of traditional research More importantly it allows us to listen to the emotive drivers behind behaviors At the end of the day a technology is nothing more than a device system or service that delivers layered and dynamic value to customers It makes an emotional connection There is an intellectual dimension to why customers make purchases but brand passion data provides the best insights about the emotional factors that ultimately drive purchase decisions

Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 6

FORWARD-FACING DATA

For product developers social listening also changes the machinery of how we gain insights We used to look at post-mortem data sales numbers market size historical financials and other data thatrsquos primarily rear-facing Social listening in contrast supplies real-time data For instance right now at Lassen wersquore putting together a set of experiments with keywords to help us understand the passion around what people hate and what they love Up until now that hasnrsquot been a common activity for someone in new product development This new approach gives us better machinerymdashit gives us a chance to be future-facing rather than past-facing in our search for customer insight

Whatrsquos also valuable is that with social listening and netnography which is online ethnography we can listen to individuals in online communities who are passionate about the subjects wersquore researching These people are thinking about these subjects more than we are and can be a rich source of insights

REAL-TIME COURSE CORRECTIONS

Another advantage to social listening is that it provides real-time data In an environment where product life cycles are collapsing real-time data can be invaluable for making rapid course corrections in product design packaging and marketing In the past long product lifecycles of three or four years were the norm with four distinct stages introduction growth maturity and decline Today wersquore dealing with stages that last only months or even weeks We can use social listening in the much-shortened introduction stage to measure and monitor responses to our messaging so we can make real-time course corrections This use of social listening obviously crosses over into the marketing side but product managers are often involved in NPD activities and are responsible for a successful launch

This word cloud uses different type sizes to show the relative frequency of key terms appearing in the online conversation around LEGO toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 7

For example we learned through social listening that the market for our educational toy is like the market for fashion Our target customer is typically a female buyer with a dynamic kid and both of them want new stuff all the time So wersquove learned to layer on value and product-line extensions For example as we were launching the Genius Blocksmdashan extension to the Haumlnz toy linemdashwe were already creating our articulating build and adding our robot build and continuing to extend the line Finding the insight that our customers are always looking for the next thing gave us the justification for working on line extensions sooner than we otherwise might have Thatrsquos why itrsquos important for those of us in development to use insights from social monitoring to optimize launch success

The insights we find pertain to several areas including packaging and messaging For example we analyzed how people perceived our packaging which led us to change it during the launch phase With social listening feedback we can optimize product design change the bundle structure of products change the delivery modality and more There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to be able to make certain we put ourselves in a position to optimize the success of the product launch

BEST PRACTICES FOR INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING

Based on our experience using social listening at Lassen wersquove arrived at several best practices that can increase its value for new product development

LOOK FOR EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS

Many people in NPD believe theyrsquore delivering a transaction for an event Thatrsquos not how we see our task and not how social listening can be most valuable Rather social listening provides insight to deliver an experience across a journey In fact I think itrsquos important to look at social listening as a means of finding emotional insights rather than market insights Because at the end of the day what we really leverage is emotion Developers may say ldquoI sell pharmaceuticalsrdquo or ldquoI sell products that are B2B and very pragmatic This is a value propositionrdquo What theyrsquore missing is that every great companymdashno matter what industry itrsquos in or how vanilla its productmdashmust deliver layered and dynamic value across the customer journey

So Irsquod advise developers to stop thinking of themselves as being in the transaction business If you continue to develop products that are transactional in nature meaning that people just want a widget yoursquoll fail In my research for The Innovation Playbook I looked at over 800 companies and it was clear that the winners were the ones who analyzed

There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to optimize the success of the launch

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 8

emotional drivers across all touchpoints of the customer journey Thatrsquos where successful innovation comes frommdashitrsquos not fractional itrsquos holistic We need to look at a productrsquos design in light of how it will live across the customer journey Social listening is extremely useful for that

LESS HATE MORE LOVE

As developers we need to understand what people hate and how to make that pain go away while identifying what people love and how to layer on more of that That may sound too touchy-feely but itrsquos the practice applied by every innovation superstar You wonrsquot find much of the emotional insight you need through conventional VOC and CRM methodologies You do find it through social listening

SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS

One practical tip is that your starting point should be understanding the success drivers of the products in your space and building a set of keywords around those drivers that you can search for in social media

So if itrsquos speed size taste safety whatever your first step should be to set up a series of keywords I actually go into the Google AdWords keyword generator and generate a set of keywords based on real-time search terms Doing that enables you to be sure that yoursquore searching on terms that people searching on topics similar to yours are going to be using When I do this Irsquom looking for noise that is the conversation around the topics that matter to me So before I even start using my social analytics tool I can find out where the conversation around key topics is taking place

HOW NOT TO USE SOCIAL LISTENING FOR NPD

If I were to ask everyone in a room full of product developers to be honest with me and then said ldquoDo you make decisions based on opportunity or on risk managementrdquo I assure you that 100 percent of the hands would be raised for risk management

Thatrsquos a problem in applying social listening for NPDmdashyou canrsquot look at it as a risk management tool It does provide risk management by increasing the likelihood of a successful product but if you try to use it as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs If you use it for that yoursquore using it for evil instead of good and it wonrsquot serve you well

Look instead for opportunities Be brave Identify emerging trends before the competition Take the risk of listening to what customers love and hate and yoursquoll create products that win in the market Thatrsquos the beauty of social listeningmdashitrsquos an opportunity tool

If you try to use social listening as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 9

HOW LASSEN INNOVATION USED SOCIAL LISTENING TO DEVELOP HAumlNZ

Our Haumlnz toy started out as a lab experiment to test the theory that we could use social listening and social insights to replace VOC CRM and conventional market data as a way to drive design inputs and create products that are more relevant to the customer We believe using this new approach to research can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of added value for enterprises If we capture insights successfully we felt wersquod have design inputs that would produce market-winning technologies

Unlike large companies that use social listening to monitor and manage brand positions we use it far more surgically as an NPD tool That means itrsquos common for us to drill deep rather than wide because we use it to test assumptions and market reactions and to test our theories of what people are talking about

We knew LEGO would be a key competitor so we researched that product to find out what moms didnrsquot like about it We looked at trajectory of usage and other factors many of which I would never have thought to explore with traditional methods Even a single Twitter post which I could drill down to via social listening led me to mountains of data

DEVELOPING BLENDED VALUE

Many people in the NPD space are using social listening as a test instrument to validate conclusions theyrsquove drawn from old market data Theyrsquore doing that because theyrsquore probably risk-centric So they stick with old methods they like even though theyrsquove resulted in a high level of failure

We do the opposite Why Because if you use social listening to look for emerging opportunities and discussions about what people love and hate you get a clean slate from which to start your design process By contrast if you start from the risk-centric point of view all yoursquoll get is historical data from which yoursquoll develop products that are an imitation of an already-successful product What we do is try to change the trajectory of insight by saying ldquoWhatrsquos going to supplant the widget What are the disruptive technologies that will make widgets irrelevantrdquo

Taking that approach enables us to deliver blended value In the context of our toy that means we provide STL filesmdashthree-dimensional printable filesmdashbecause we know a good percentage of our customers have 3D printers So we make parts of our kits available free in an STL formatmdashwersquore also making them available soon on Thingiversemdashso customers can download STL files and get blended value Specifically if our customers buy an Inventorrsquos Lab and have a 3D printer they can print the robot interface and now they have a robot kit which would have cost them a lot more money But now theyrsquore getting it for freemdashthatrsquos blended value

SHORTENING TIME-TO-DESIGN BY 63 PERCENT

Lassen Scientific used to do a lot of contract product development so wersquove been involved in the development andor launch of hundreds of products Historically wersquod spend about three months looking for the information we needed to formulate our design inputs We would use traditional VOC techniques where we would basically find any and every

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 3

DRAWBACKS OF THE TRADITIONAL VOC-BASED APPROACH

Like most companies working in new product development ours was accustomed to relying on traditional research methods We used VOC techniques did retail surveys to determine what products had the highest SKU movement and conducted interviews with retailers industry thought leaders and trade associations to get their high-level overview of whatrsquos trending We would also buy canned market data

The problem is VOC is a cryptic old-fashioned circa-1950 way of trying to understand customersmdashand it yields minimally useful data and insights It often consists of asking a statistically diverse group what they think of something Itrsquos plagued by the data-gathering challenge that once you put an individual in a test environment the researcherrsquos presence affects the individualrsquos responses So you end up with erroneous insights or fractional insights and as a result the conclusions you draw are wrong Based on those you proceed to develop products that fail in the marketplace The end result is that brilliant product developers are creating cool things that nobody cares about

To be fair to my fellow product developers we know that VOC does not provide accurate information we can use to make critical business decisions And we know we need better tools

So at Lassen we decided to do an experimentmdashsort of a side lab testmdashto find out if itrsquos possible to move beyond the old-fashioned approach of working with rear-facing data and find a better way to glean insights that lead to more successful innovations and products

SOCIAL LISTENINGmdashA HIGHLY SENSITIVE TOOL

To do our research we dropped the VOC approach and instead used a social analytics solution to listen to and analyze the online conversation related to the market we wanted to develop products for which in this case was the educational toy market

One of the key attributes of our social listening tool is that itrsquos an exquisite instrument with a high degree of sensitivity Unlike traditional VOC techniques that require big movements and lots of data points to identify a trend with social listening you can drill down and find small but significant movements They may take the form of five sound bites on Twitter but those five sound bites could be epic in terms of heralding an emerging trend Individual sound bites can hold tremendous insights

VOC is a cryptic old-fashioned circa-1950 way of trying to understand customersmdashand it yields minimally useful data and insights

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 4

This is not to say that the insights you find with social listening are abundant Yoursquore panning for gold and yoursquove got to sift through a lot of sand and silt to find a few nuggets This is also not about the recent movement towards crowdsourcing the loud crowd to be blunt is often stupid And the louder the crowd members are the stupider they are

Rather this is about finding the insightful few in social recognizing that theyrsquore onto something and building on their insights to create innovative solutions to problems

MAKING DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION THE GOAL

There are basically three flavors of innovation incremental breakout and disruptive3 The old methods of VOC create incremental innovations or as I used to put it ldquoThey paint it blue and call it newrdquo These are simply variations on a thememdashcompanies make very slight changes to an existing product that have little perceived value Breakout innovations are those that significantly up the level of play within an existing category Disruptive innovations disrupt

3 httpwwwfastcodesigncom1665186there-are-three-types-of-innovation-heres-how-to-manage-them

Excerpt from the real-time stream of sound bites in the online conversation about educational toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 5

the current market behavior rendering existing solutions obsolete Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory It takes you beyond rigid thinking and allows you to adopt a fresh perspective and find disruptive ideas that have significant value to the enterprise and to customers

Companies with established products need to be using social listening today to find the ideas that will lead to disruptive productsmdashbefore their competitors do For example if five years from now 50 percent of American homes have a consumerized 3D printer they bought for $100 which will be the case when does LEGOreg jump in and decide that theyrsquore going to start creating two-dollar STL files to sell their product as a 3D printable digital file A tough decision but without a doubt thatrsquos where wersquore heading An analogy is the publishing business Decision-makers there didnrsquot believe a physical book would be replaced by a digital file They were wrong People in the music industry didnrsquot believe a CD would be replaced by a digital file Also wrong

Even successful companies perhaps especially successful companies need to be using social listening now to find the insights that lead to their next generation of products

BENEFITS OF INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING INTO THE NPD PROCESS

Two of the biggest problems facing product developers are that the information they have is either erroneous meaning itrsquos wrong or itrsquos fractional meaning itrsquos incomplete I feel strongly that social listening is a way to get more accurate and more meaningful emotional data and itrsquos a better way to fill in informational gaps Itrsquos even useful as an instrument to test what you think you know

Social listening is a tremendous way to get a more authentic ethnographic kind of insight It allows us to listen to our customer communities which is the online equivalent of ldquoliving with the triberdquo Itrsquos listening to a natural voice that doesnrsquot have the observational bias of traditional research More importantly it allows us to listen to the emotive drivers behind behaviors At the end of the day a technology is nothing more than a device system or service that delivers layered and dynamic value to customers It makes an emotional connection There is an intellectual dimension to why customers make purchases but brand passion data provides the best insights about the emotional factors that ultimately drive purchase decisions

Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 6

FORWARD-FACING DATA

For product developers social listening also changes the machinery of how we gain insights We used to look at post-mortem data sales numbers market size historical financials and other data thatrsquos primarily rear-facing Social listening in contrast supplies real-time data For instance right now at Lassen wersquore putting together a set of experiments with keywords to help us understand the passion around what people hate and what they love Up until now that hasnrsquot been a common activity for someone in new product development This new approach gives us better machinerymdashit gives us a chance to be future-facing rather than past-facing in our search for customer insight

Whatrsquos also valuable is that with social listening and netnography which is online ethnography we can listen to individuals in online communities who are passionate about the subjects wersquore researching These people are thinking about these subjects more than we are and can be a rich source of insights

REAL-TIME COURSE CORRECTIONS

Another advantage to social listening is that it provides real-time data In an environment where product life cycles are collapsing real-time data can be invaluable for making rapid course corrections in product design packaging and marketing In the past long product lifecycles of three or four years were the norm with four distinct stages introduction growth maturity and decline Today wersquore dealing with stages that last only months or even weeks We can use social listening in the much-shortened introduction stage to measure and monitor responses to our messaging so we can make real-time course corrections This use of social listening obviously crosses over into the marketing side but product managers are often involved in NPD activities and are responsible for a successful launch

This word cloud uses different type sizes to show the relative frequency of key terms appearing in the online conversation around LEGO toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 7

For example we learned through social listening that the market for our educational toy is like the market for fashion Our target customer is typically a female buyer with a dynamic kid and both of them want new stuff all the time So wersquove learned to layer on value and product-line extensions For example as we were launching the Genius Blocksmdashan extension to the Haumlnz toy linemdashwe were already creating our articulating build and adding our robot build and continuing to extend the line Finding the insight that our customers are always looking for the next thing gave us the justification for working on line extensions sooner than we otherwise might have Thatrsquos why itrsquos important for those of us in development to use insights from social monitoring to optimize launch success

The insights we find pertain to several areas including packaging and messaging For example we analyzed how people perceived our packaging which led us to change it during the launch phase With social listening feedback we can optimize product design change the bundle structure of products change the delivery modality and more There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to be able to make certain we put ourselves in a position to optimize the success of the product launch

BEST PRACTICES FOR INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING

Based on our experience using social listening at Lassen wersquove arrived at several best practices that can increase its value for new product development

LOOK FOR EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS

Many people in NPD believe theyrsquore delivering a transaction for an event Thatrsquos not how we see our task and not how social listening can be most valuable Rather social listening provides insight to deliver an experience across a journey In fact I think itrsquos important to look at social listening as a means of finding emotional insights rather than market insights Because at the end of the day what we really leverage is emotion Developers may say ldquoI sell pharmaceuticalsrdquo or ldquoI sell products that are B2B and very pragmatic This is a value propositionrdquo What theyrsquore missing is that every great companymdashno matter what industry itrsquos in or how vanilla its productmdashmust deliver layered and dynamic value across the customer journey

So Irsquod advise developers to stop thinking of themselves as being in the transaction business If you continue to develop products that are transactional in nature meaning that people just want a widget yoursquoll fail In my research for The Innovation Playbook I looked at over 800 companies and it was clear that the winners were the ones who analyzed

There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to optimize the success of the launch

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 8

emotional drivers across all touchpoints of the customer journey Thatrsquos where successful innovation comes frommdashitrsquos not fractional itrsquos holistic We need to look at a productrsquos design in light of how it will live across the customer journey Social listening is extremely useful for that

LESS HATE MORE LOVE

As developers we need to understand what people hate and how to make that pain go away while identifying what people love and how to layer on more of that That may sound too touchy-feely but itrsquos the practice applied by every innovation superstar You wonrsquot find much of the emotional insight you need through conventional VOC and CRM methodologies You do find it through social listening

SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS

One practical tip is that your starting point should be understanding the success drivers of the products in your space and building a set of keywords around those drivers that you can search for in social media

So if itrsquos speed size taste safety whatever your first step should be to set up a series of keywords I actually go into the Google AdWords keyword generator and generate a set of keywords based on real-time search terms Doing that enables you to be sure that yoursquore searching on terms that people searching on topics similar to yours are going to be using When I do this Irsquom looking for noise that is the conversation around the topics that matter to me So before I even start using my social analytics tool I can find out where the conversation around key topics is taking place

HOW NOT TO USE SOCIAL LISTENING FOR NPD

If I were to ask everyone in a room full of product developers to be honest with me and then said ldquoDo you make decisions based on opportunity or on risk managementrdquo I assure you that 100 percent of the hands would be raised for risk management

Thatrsquos a problem in applying social listening for NPDmdashyou canrsquot look at it as a risk management tool It does provide risk management by increasing the likelihood of a successful product but if you try to use it as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs If you use it for that yoursquore using it for evil instead of good and it wonrsquot serve you well

Look instead for opportunities Be brave Identify emerging trends before the competition Take the risk of listening to what customers love and hate and yoursquoll create products that win in the market Thatrsquos the beauty of social listeningmdashitrsquos an opportunity tool

If you try to use social listening as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 9

HOW LASSEN INNOVATION USED SOCIAL LISTENING TO DEVELOP HAumlNZ

Our Haumlnz toy started out as a lab experiment to test the theory that we could use social listening and social insights to replace VOC CRM and conventional market data as a way to drive design inputs and create products that are more relevant to the customer We believe using this new approach to research can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of added value for enterprises If we capture insights successfully we felt wersquod have design inputs that would produce market-winning technologies

Unlike large companies that use social listening to monitor and manage brand positions we use it far more surgically as an NPD tool That means itrsquos common for us to drill deep rather than wide because we use it to test assumptions and market reactions and to test our theories of what people are talking about

We knew LEGO would be a key competitor so we researched that product to find out what moms didnrsquot like about it We looked at trajectory of usage and other factors many of which I would never have thought to explore with traditional methods Even a single Twitter post which I could drill down to via social listening led me to mountains of data

DEVELOPING BLENDED VALUE

Many people in the NPD space are using social listening as a test instrument to validate conclusions theyrsquove drawn from old market data Theyrsquore doing that because theyrsquore probably risk-centric So they stick with old methods they like even though theyrsquove resulted in a high level of failure

We do the opposite Why Because if you use social listening to look for emerging opportunities and discussions about what people love and hate you get a clean slate from which to start your design process By contrast if you start from the risk-centric point of view all yoursquoll get is historical data from which yoursquoll develop products that are an imitation of an already-successful product What we do is try to change the trajectory of insight by saying ldquoWhatrsquos going to supplant the widget What are the disruptive technologies that will make widgets irrelevantrdquo

Taking that approach enables us to deliver blended value In the context of our toy that means we provide STL filesmdashthree-dimensional printable filesmdashbecause we know a good percentage of our customers have 3D printers So we make parts of our kits available free in an STL formatmdashwersquore also making them available soon on Thingiversemdashso customers can download STL files and get blended value Specifically if our customers buy an Inventorrsquos Lab and have a 3D printer they can print the robot interface and now they have a robot kit which would have cost them a lot more money But now theyrsquore getting it for freemdashthatrsquos blended value

SHORTENING TIME-TO-DESIGN BY 63 PERCENT

Lassen Scientific used to do a lot of contract product development so wersquove been involved in the development andor launch of hundreds of products Historically wersquod spend about three months looking for the information we needed to formulate our design inputs We would use traditional VOC techniques where we would basically find any and every

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 4

This is not to say that the insights you find with social listening are abundant Yoursquore panning for gold and yoursquove got to sift through a lot of sand and silt to find a few nuggets This is also not about the recent movement towards crowdsourcing the loud crowd to be blunt is often stupid And the louder the crowd members are the stupider they are

Rather this is about finding the insightful few in social recognizing that theyrsquore onto something and building on their insights to create innovative solutions to problems

MAKING DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION THE GOAL

There are basically three flavors of innovation incremental breakout and disruptive3 The old methods of VOC create incremental innovations or as I used to put it ldquoThey paint it blue and call it newrdquo These are simply variations on a thememdashcompanies make very slight changes to an existing product that have little perceived value Breakout innovations are those that significantly up the level of play within an existing category Disruptive innovations disrupt

3 httpwwwfastcodesigncom1665186there-are-three-types-of-innovation-heres-how-to-manage-them

Excerpt from the real-time stream of sound bites in the online conversation about educational toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 5

the current market behavior rendering existing solutions obsolete Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory It takes you beyond rigid thinking and allows you to adopt a fresh perspective and find disruptive ideas that have significant value to the enterprise and to customers

Companies with established products need to be using social listening today to find the ideas that will lead to disruptive productsmdashbefore their competitors do For example if five years from now 50 percent of American homes have a consumerized 3D printer they bought for $100 which will be the case when does LEGOreg jump in and decide that theyrsquore going to start creating two-dollar STL files to sell their product as a 3D printable digital file A tough decision but without a doubt thatrsquos where wersquore heading An analogy is the publishing business Decision-makers there didnrsquot believe a physical book would be replaced by a digital file They were wrong People in the music industry didnrsquot believe a CD would be replaced by a digital file Also wrong

Even successful companies perhaps especially successful companies need to be using social listening now to find the insights that lead to their next generation of products

BENEFITS OF INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING INTO THE NPD PROCESS

Two of the biggest problems facing product developers are that the information they have is either erroneous meaning itrsquos wrong or itrsquos fractional meaning itrsquos incomplete I feel strongly that social listening is a way to get more accurate and more meaningful emotional data and itrsquos a better way to fill in informational gaps Itrsquos even useful as an instrument to test what you think you know

Social listening is a tremendous way to get a more authentic ethnographic kind of insight It allows us to listen to our customer communities which is the online equivalent of ldquoliving with the triberdquo Itrsquos listening to a natural voice that doesnrsquot have the observational bias of traditional research More importantly it allows us to listen to the emotive drivers behind behaviors At the end of the day a technology is nothing more than a device system or service that delivers layered and dynamic value to customers It makes an emotional connection There is an intellectual dimension to why customers make purchases but brand passion data provides the best insights about the emotional factors that ultimately drive purchase decisions

Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 6

FORWARD-FACING DATA

For product developers social listening also changes the machinery of how we gain insights We used to look at post-mortem data sales numbers market size historical financials and other data thatrsquos primarily rear-facing Social listening in contrast supplies real-time data For instance right now at Lassen wersquore putting together a set of experiments with keywords to help us understand the passion around what people hate and what they love Up until now that hasnrsquot been a common activity for someone in new product development This new approach gives us better machinerymdashit gives us a chance to be future-facing rather than past-facing in our search for customer insight

Whatrsquos also valuable is that with social listening and netnography which is online ethnography we can listen to individuals in online communities who are passionate about the subjects wersquore researching These people are thinking about these subjects more than we are and can be a rich source of insights

REAL-TIME COURSE CORRECTIONS

Another advantage to social listening is that it provides real-time data In an environment where product life cycles are collapsing real-time data can be invaluable for making rapid course corrections in product design packaging and marketing In the past long product lifecycles of three or four years were the norm with four distinct stages introduction growth maturity and decline Today wersquore dealing with stages that last only months or even weeks We can use social listening in the much-shortened introduction stage to measure and monitor responses to our messaging so we can make real-time course corrections This use of social listening obviously crosses over into the marketing side but product managers are often involved in NPD activities and are responsible for a successful launch

This word cloud uses different type sizes to show the relative frequency of key terms appearing in the online conversation around LEGO toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 7

For example we learned through social listening that the market for our educational toy is like the market for fashion Our target customer is typically a female buyer with a dynamic kid and both of them want new stuff all the time So wersquove learned to layer on value and product-line extensions For example as we were launching the Genius Blocksmdashan extension to the Haumlnz toy linemdashwe were already creating our articulating build and adding our robot build and continuing to extend the line Finding the insight that our customers are always looking for the next thing gave us the justification for working on line extensions sooner than we otherwise might have Thatrsquos why itrsquos important for those of us in development to use insights from social monitoring to optimize launch success

The insights we find pertain to several areas including packaging and messaging For example we analyzed how people perceived our packaging which led us to change it during the launch phase With social listening feedback we can optimize product design change the bundle structure of products change the delivery modality and more There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to be able to make certain we put ourselves in a position to optimize the success of the product launch

BEST PRACTICES FOR INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING

Based on our experience using social listening at Lassen wersquove arrived at several best practices that can increase its value for new product development

LOOK FOR EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS

Many people in NPD believe theyrsquore delivering a transaction for an event Thatrsquos not how we see our task and not how social listening can be most valuable Rather social listening provides insight to deliver an experience across a journey In fact I think itrsquos important to look at social listening as a means of finding emotional insights rather than market insights Because at the end of the day what we really leverage is emotion Developers may say ldquoI sell pharmaceuticalsrdquo or ldquoI sell products that are B2B and very pragmatic This is a value propositionrdquo What theyrsquore missing is that every great companymdashno matter what industry itrsquos in or how vanilla its productmdashmust deliver layered and dynamic value across the customer journey

So Irsquod advise developers to stop thinking of themselves as being in the transaction business If you continue to develop products that are transactional in nature meaning that people just want a widget yoursquoll fail In my research for The Innovation Playbook I looked at over 800 companies and it was clear that the winners were the ones who analyzed

There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to optimize the success of the launch

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 8

emotional drivers across all touchpoints of the customer journey Thatrsquos where successful innovation comes frommdashitrsquos not fractional itrsquos holistic We need to look at a productrsquos design in light of how it will live across the customer journey Social listening is extremely useful for that

LESS HATE MORE LOVE

As developers we need to understand what people hate and how to make that pain go away while identifying what people love and how to layer on more of that That may sound too touchy-feely but itrsquos the practice applied by every innovation superstar You wonrsquot find much of the emotional insight you need through conventional VOC and CRM methodologies You do find it through social listening

SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS

One practical tip is that your starting point should be understanding the success drivers of the products in your space and building a set of keywords around those drivers that you can search for in social media

So if itrsquos speed size taste safety whatever your first step should be to set up a series of keywords I actually go into the Google AdWords keyword generator and generate a set of keywords based on real-time search terms Doing that enables you to be sure that yoursquore searching on terms that people searching on topics similar to yours are going to be using When I do this Irsquom looking for noise that is the conversation around the topics that matter to me So before I even start using my social analytics tool I can find out where the conversation around key topics is taking place

HOW NOT TO USE SOCIAL LISTENING FOR NPD

If I were to ask everyone in a room full of product developers to be honest with me and then said ldquoDo you make decisions based on opportunity or on risk managementrdquo I assure you that 100 percent of the hands would be raised for risk management

Thatrsquos a problem in applying social listening for NPDmdashyou canrsquot look at it as a risk management tool It does provide risk management by increasing the likelihood of a successful product but if you try to use it as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs If you use it for that yoursquore using it for evil instead of good and it wonrsquot serve you well

Look instead for opportunities Be brave Identify emerging trends before the competition Take the risk of listening to what customers love and hate and yoursquoll create products that win in the market Thatrsquos the beauty of social listeningmdashitrsquos an opportunity tool

If you try to use social listening as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 9

HOW LASSEN INNOVATION USED SOCIAL LISTENING TO DEVELOP HAumlNZ

Our Haumlnz toy started out as a lab experiment to test the theory that we could use social listening and social insights to replace VOC CRM and conventional market data as a way to drive design inputs and create products that are more relevant to the customer We believe using this new approach to research can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of added value for enterprises If we capture insights successfully we felt wersquod have design inputs that would produce market-winning technologies

Unlike large companies that use social listening to monitor and manage brand positions we use it far more surgically as an NPD tool That means itrsquos common for us to drill deep rather than wide because we use it to test assumptions and market reactions and to test our theories of what people are talking about

We knew LEGO would be a key competitor so we researched that product to find out what moms didnrsquot like about it We looked at trajectory of usage and other factors many of which I would never have thought to explore with traditional methods Even a single Twitter post which I could drill down to via social listening led me to mountains of data

DEVELOPING BLENDED VALUE

Many people in the NPD space are using social listening as a test instrument to validate conclusions theyrsquove drawn from old market data Theyrsquore doing that because theyrsquore probably risk-centric So they stick with old methods they like even though theyrsquove resulted in a high level of failure

We do the opposite Why Because if you use social listening to look for emerging opportunities and discussions about what people love and hate you get a clean slate from which to start your design process By contrast if you start from the risk-centric point of view all yoursquoll get is historical data from which yoursquoll develop products that are an imitation of an already-successful product What we do is try to change the trajectory of insight by saying ldquoWhatrsquos going to supplant the widget What are the disruptive technologies that will make widgets irrelevantrdquo

Taking that approach enables us to deliver blended value In the context of our toy that means we provide STL filesmdashthree-dimensional printable filesmdashbecause we know a good percentage of our customers have 3D printers So we make parts of our kits available free in an STL formatmdashwersquore also making them available soon on Thingiversemdashso customers can download STL files and get blended value Specifically if our customers buy an Inventorrsquos Lab and have a 3D printer they can print the robot interface and now they have a robot kit which would have cost them a lot more money But now theyrsquore getting it for freemdashthatrsquos blended value

SHORTENING TIME-TO-DESIGN BY 63 PERCENT

Lassen Scientific used to do a lot of contract product development so wersquove been involved in the development andor launch of hundreds of products Historically wersquod spend about three months looking for the information we needed to formulate our design inputs We would use traditional VOC techniques where we would basically find any and every

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 5

the current market behavior rendering existing solutions obsolete Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory It takes you beyond rigid thinking and allows you to adopt a fresh perspective and find disruptive ideas that have significant value to the enterprise and to customers

Companies with established products need to be using social listening today to find the ideas that will lead to disruptive productsmdashbefore their competitors do For example if five years from now 50 percent of American homes have a consumerized 3D printer they bought for $100 which will be the case when does LEGOreg jump in and decide that theyrsquore going to start creating two-dollar STL files to sell their product as a 3D printable digital file A tough decision but without a doubt thatrsquos where wersquore heading An analogy is the publishing business Decision-makers there didnrsquot believe a physical book would be replaced by a digital file They were wrong People in the music industry didnrsquot believe a CD would be replaced by a digital file Also wrong

Even successful companies perhaps especially successful companies need to be using social listening now to find the insights that lead to their next generation of products

BENEFITS OF INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING INTO THE NPD PROCESS

Two of the biggest problems facing product developers are that the information they have is either erroneous meaning itrsquos wrong or itrsquos fractional meaning itrsquos incomplete I feel strongly that social listening is a way to get more accurate and more meaningful emotional data and itrsquos a better way to fill in informational gaps Itrsquos even useful as an instrument to test what you think you know

Social listening is a tremendous way to get a more authentic ethnographic kind of insight It allows us to listen to our customer communities which is the online equivalent of ldquoliving with the triberdquo Itrsquos listening to a natural voice that doesnrsquot have the observational bias of traditional research More importantly it allows us to listen to the emotive drivers behind behaviors At the end of the day a technology is nothing more than a device system or service that delivers layered and dynamic value to customers It makes an emotional connection There is an intellectual dimension to why customers make purchases but brand passion data provides the best insights about the emotional factors that ultimately drive purchase decisions

Today if you want to go beyond incrementalism into breakout and disruptive innovations I believe social listening is mandatory

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 6

FORWARD-FACING DATA

For product developers social listening also changes the machinery of how we gain insights We used to look at post-mortem data sales numbers market size historical financials and other data thatrsquos primarily rear-facing Social listening in contrast supplies real-time data For instance right now at Lassen wersquore putting together a set of experiments with keywords to help us understand the passion around what people hate and what they love Up until now that hasnrsquot been a common activity for someone in new product development This new approach gives us better machinerymdashit gives us a chance to be future-facing rather than past-facing in our search for customer insight

Whatrsquos also valuable is that with social listening and netnography which is online ethnography we can listen to individuals in online communities who are passionate about the subjects wersquore researching These people are thinking about these subjects more than we are and can be a rich source of insights

REAL-TIME COURSE CORRECTIONS

Another advantage to social listening is that it provides real-time data In an environment where product life cycles are collapsing real-time data can be invaluable for making rapid course corrections in product design packaging and marketing In the past long product lifecycles of three or four years were the norm with four distinct stages introduction growth maturity and decline Today wersquore dealing with stages that last only months or even weeks We can use social listening in the much-shortened introduction stage to measure and monitor responses to our messaging so we can make real-time course corrections This use of social listening obviously crosses over into the marketing side but product managers are often involved in NPD activities and are responsible for a successful launch

This word cloud uses different type sizes to show the relative frequency of key terms appearing in the online conversation around LEGO toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 7

For example we learned through social listening that the market for our educational toy is like the market for fashion Our target customer is typically a female buyer with a dynamic kid and both of them want new stuff all the time So wersquove learned to layer on value and product-line extensions For example as we were launching the Genius Blocksmdashan extension to the Haumlnz toy linemdashwe were already creating our articulating build and adding our robot build and continuing to extend the line Finding the insight that our customers are always looking for the next thing gave us the justification for working on line extensions sooner than we otherwise might have Thatrsquos why itrsquos important for those of us in development to use insights from social monitoring to optimize launch success

The insights we find pertain to several areas including packaging and messaging For example we analyzed how people perceived our packaging which led us to change it during the launch phase With social listening feedback we can optimize product design change the bundle structure of products change the delivery modality and more There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to be able to make certain we put ourselves in a position to optimize the success of the product launch

BEST PRACTICES FOR INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING

Based on our experience using social listening at Lassen wersquove arrived at several best practices that can increase its value for new product development

LOOK FOR EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS

Many people in NPD believe theyrsquore delivering a transaction for an event Thatrsquos not how we see our task and not how social listening can be most valuable Rather social listening provides insight to deliver an experience across a journey In fact I think itrsquos important to look at social listening as a means of finding emotional insights rather than market insights Because at the end of the day what we really leverage is emotion Developers may say ldquoI sell pharmaceuticalsrdquo or ldquoI sell products that are B2B and very pragmatic This is a value propositionrdquo What theyrsquore missing is that every great companymdashno matter what industry itrsquos in or how vanilla its productmdashmust deliver layered and dynamic value across the customer journey

So Irsquod advise developers to stop thinking of themselves as being in the transaction business If you continue to develop products that are transactional in nature meaning that people just want a widget yoursquoll fail In my research for The Innovation Playbook I looked at over 800 companies and it was clear that the winners were the ones who analyzed

There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to optimize the success of the launch

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 8

emotional drivers across all touchpoints of the customer journey Thatrsquos where successful innovation comes frommdashitrsquos not fractional itrsquos holistic We need to look at a productrsquos design in light of how it will live across the customer journey Social listening is extremely useful for that

LESS HATE MORE LOVE

As developers we need to understand what people hate and how to make that pain go away while identifying what people love and how to layer on more of that That may sound too touchy-feely but itrsquos the practice applied by every innovation superstar You wonrsquot find much of the emotional insight you need through conventional VOC and CRM methodologies You do find it through social listening

SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS

One practical tip is that your starting point should be understanding the success drivers of the products in your space and building a set of keywords around those drivers that you can search for in social media

So if itrsquos speed size taste safety whatever your first step should be to set up a series of keywords I actually go into the Google AdWords keyword generator and generate a set of keywords based on real-time search terms Doing that enables you to be sure that yoursquore searching on terms that people searching on topics similar to yours are going to be using When I do this Irsquom looking for noise that is the conversation around the topics that matter to me So before I even start using my social analytics tool I can find out where the conversation around key topics is taking place

HOW NOT TO USE SOCIAL LISTENING FOR NPD

If I were to ask everyone in a room full of product developers to be honest with me and then said ldquoDo you make decisions based on opportunity or on risk managementrdquo I assure you that 100 percent of the hands would be raised for risk management

Thatrsquos a problem in applying social listening for NPDmdashyou canrsquot look at it as a risk management tool It does provide risk management by increasing the likelihood of a successful product but if you try to use it as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs If you use it for that yoursquore using it for evil instead of good and it wonrsquot serve you well

Look instead for opportunities Be brave Identify emerging trends before the competition Take the risk of listening to what customers love and hate and yoursquoll create products that win in the market Thatrsquos the beauty of social listeningmdashitrsquos an opportunity tool

If you try to use social listening as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 9

HOW LASSEN INNOVATION USED SOCIAL LISTENING TO DEVELOP HAumlNZ

Our Haumlnz toy started out as a lab experiment to test the theory that we could use social listening and social insights to replace VOC CRM and conventional market data as a way to drive design inputs and create products that are more relevant to the customer We believe using this new approach to research can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of added value for enterprises If we capture insights successfully we felt wersquod have design inputs that would produce market-winning technologies

Unlike large companies that use social listening to monitor and manage brand positions we use it far more surgically as an NPD tool That means itrsquos common for us to drill deep rather than wide because we use it to test assumptions and market reactions and to test our theories of what people are talking about

We knew LEGO would be a key competitor so we researched that product to find out what moms didnrsquot like about it We looked at trajectory of usage and other factors many of which I would never have thought to explore with traditional methods Even a single Twitter post which I could drill down to via social listening led me to mountains of data

DEVELOPING BLENDED VALUE

Many people in the NPD space are using social listening as a test instrument to validate conclusions theyrsquove drawn from old market data Theyrsquore doing that because theyrsquore probably risk-centric So they stick with old methods they like even though theyrsquove resulted in a high level of failure

We do the opposite Why Because if you use social listening to look for emerging opportunities and discussions about what people love and hate you get a clean slate from which to start your design process By contrast if you start from the risk-centric point of view all yoursquoll get is historical data from which yoursquoll develop products that are an imitation of an already-successful product What we do is try to change the trajectory of insight by saying ldquoWhatrsquos going to supplant the widget What are the disruptive technologies that will make widgets irrelevantrdquo

Taking that approach enables us to deliver blended value In the context of our toy that means we provide STL filesmdashthree-dimensional printable filesmdashbecause we know a good percentage of our customers have 3D printers So we make parts of our kits available free in an STL formatmdashwersquore also making them available soon on Thingiversemdashso customers can download STL files and get blended value Specifically if our customers buy an Inventorrsquos Lab and have a 3D printer they can print the robot interface and now they have a robot kit which would have cost them a lot more money But now theyrsquore getting it for freemdashthatrsquos blended value

SHORTENING TIME-TO-DESIGN BY 63 PERCENT

Lassen Scientific used to do a lot of contract product development so wersquove been involved in the development andor launch of hundreds of products Historically wersquod spend about three months looking for the information we needed to formulate our design inputs We would use traditional VOC techniques where we would basically find any and every

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 6

FORWARD-FACING DATA

For product developers social listening also changes the machinery of how we gain insights We used to look at post-mortem data sales numbers market size historical financials and other data thatrsquos primarily rear-facing Social listening in contrast supplies real-time data For instance right now at Lassen wersquore putting together a set of experiments with keywords to help us understand the passion around what people hate and what they love Up until now that hasnrsquot been a common activity for someone in new product development This new approach gives us better machinerymdashit gives us a chance to be future-facing rather than past-facing in our search for customer insight

Whatrsquos also valuable is that with social listening and netnography which is online ethnography we can listen to individuals in online communities who are passionate about the subjects wersquore researching These people are thinking about these subjects more than we are and can be a rich source of insights

REAL-TIME COURSE CORRECTIONS

Another advantage to social listening is that it provides real-time data In an environment where product life cycles are collapsing real-time data can be invaluable for making rapid course corrections in product design packaging and marketing In the past long product lifecycles of three or four years were the norm with four distinct stages introduction growth maturity and decline Today wersquore dealing with stages that last only months or even weeks We can use social listening in the much-shortened introduction stage to measure and monitor responses to our messaging so we can make real-time course corrections This use of social listening obviously crosses over into the marketing side but product managers are often involved in NPD activities and are responsible for a successful launch

This word cloud uses different type sizes to show the relative frequency of key terms appearing in the online conversation around LEGO toys

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 7

For example we learned through social listening that the market for our educational toy is like the market for fashion Our target customer is typically a female buyer with a dynamic kid and both of them want new stuff all the time So wersquove learned to layer on value and product-line extensions For example as we were launching the Genius Blocksmdashan extension to the Haumlnz toy linemdashwe were already creating our articulating build and adding our robot build and continuing to extend the line Finding the insight that our customers are always looking for the next thing gave us the justification for working on line extensions sooner than we otherwise might have Thatrsquos why itrsquos important for those of us in development to use insights from social monitoring to optimize launch success

The insights we find pertain to several areas including packaging and messaging For example we analyzed how people perceived our packaging which led us to change it during the launch phase With social listening feedback we can optimize product design change the bundle structure of products change the delivery modality and more There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to be able to make certain we put ourselves in a position to optimize the success of the product launch

BEST PRACTICES FOR INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING

Based on our experience using social listening at Lassen wersquove arrived at several best practices that can increase its value for new product development

LOOK FOR EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS

Many people in NPD believe theyrsquore delivering a transaction for an event Thatrsquos not how we see our task and not how social listening can be most valuable Rather social listening provides insight to deliver an experience across a journey In fact I think itrsquos important to look at social listening as a means of finding emotional insights rather than market insights Because at the end of the day what we really leverage is emotion Developers may say ldquoI sell pharmaceuticalsrdquo or ldquoI sell products that are B2B and very pragmatic This is a value propositionrdquo What theyrsquore missing is that every great companymdashno matter what industry itrsquos in or how vanilla its productmdashmust deliver layered and dynamic value across the customer journey

So Irsquod advise developers to stop thinking of themselves as being in the transaction business If you continue to develop products that are transactional in nature meaning that people just want a widget yoursquoll fail In my research for The Innovation Playbook I looked at over 800 companies and it was clear that the winners were the ones who analyzed

There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to optimize the success of the launch

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 8

emotional drivers across all touchpoints of the customer journey Thatrsquos where successful innovation comes frommdashitrsquos not fractional itrsquos holistic We need to look at a productrsquos design in light of how it will live across the customer journey Social listening is extremely useful for that

LESS HATE MORE LOVE

As developers we need to understand what people hate and how to make that pain go away while identifying what people love and how to layer on more of that That may sound too touchy-feely but itrsquos the practice applied by every innovation superstar You wonrsquot find much of the emotional insight you need through conventional VOC and CRM methodologies You do find it through social listening

SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS

One practical tip is that your starting point should be understanding the success drivers of the products in your space and building a set of keywords around those drivers that you can search for in social media

So if itrsquos speed size taste safety whatever your first step should be to set up a series of keywords I actually go into the Google AdWords keyword generator and generate a set of keywords based on real-time search terms Doing that enables you to be sure that yoursquore searching on terms that people searching on topics similar to yours are going to be using When I do this Irsquom looking for noise that is the conversation around the topics that matter to me So before I even start using my social analytics tool I can find out where the conversation around key topics is taking place

HOW NOT TO USE SOCIAL LISTENING FOR NPD

If I were to ask everyone in a room full of product developers to be honest with me and then said ldquoDo you make decisions based on opportunity or on risk managementrdquo I assure you that 100 percent of the hands would be raised for risk management

Thatrsquos a problem in applying social listening for NPDmdashyou canrsquot look at it as a risk management tool It does provide risk management by increasing the likelihood of a successful product but if you try to use it as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs If you use it for that yoursquore using it for evil instead of good and it wonrsquot serve you well

Look instead for opportunities Be brave Identify emerging trends before the competition Take the risk of listening to what customers love and hate and yoursquoll create products that win in the market Thatrsquos the beauty of social listeningmdashitrsquos an opportunity tool

If you try to use social listening as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 9

HOW LASSEN INNOVATION USED SOCIAL LISTENING TO DEVELOP HAumlNZ

Our Haumlnz toy started out as a lab experiment to test the theory that we could use social listening and social insights to replace VOC CRM and conventional market data as a way to drive design inputs and create products that are more relevant to the customer We believe using this new approach to research can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of added value for enterprises If we capture insights successfully we felt wersquod have design inputs that would produce market-winning technologies

Unlike large companies that use social listening to monitor and manage brand positions we use it far more surgically as an NPD tool That means itrsquos common for us to drill deep rather than wide because we use it to test assumptions and market reactions and to test our theories of what people are talking about

We knew LEGO would be a key competitor so we researched that product to find out what moms didnrsquot like about it We looked at trajectory of usage and other factors many of which I would never have thought to explore with traditional methods Even a single Twitter post which I could drill down to via social listening led me to mountains of data

DEVELOPING BLENDED VALUE

Many people in the NPD space are using social listening as a test instrument to validate conclusions theyrsquove drawn from old market data Theyrsquore doing that because theyrsquore probably risk-centric So they stick with old methods they like even though theyrsquove resulted in a high level of failure

We do the opposite Why Because if you use social listening to look for emerging opportunities and discussions about what people love and hate you get a clean slate from which to start your design process By contrast if you start from the risk-centric point of view all yoursquoll get is historical data from which yoursquoll develop products that are an imitation of an already-successful product What we do is try to change the trajectory of insight by saying ldquoWhatrsquos going to supplant the widget What are the disruptive technologies that will make widgets irrelevantrdquo

Taking that approach enables us to deliver blended value In the context of our toy that means we provide STL filesmdashthree-dimensional printable filesmdashbecause we know a good percentage of our customers have 3D printers So we make parts of our kits available free in an STL formatmdashwersquore also making them available soon on Thingiversemdashso customers can download STL files and get blended value Specifically if our customers buy an Inventorrsquos Lab and have a 3D printer they can print the robot interface and now they have a robot kit which would have cost them a lot more money But now theyrsquore getting it for freemdashthatrsquos blended value

SHORTENING TIME-TO-DESIGN BY 63 PERCENT

Lassen Scientific used to do a lot of contract product development so wersquove been involved in the development andor launch of hundreds of products Historically wersquod spend about three months looking for the information we needed to formulate our design inputs We would use traditional VOC techniques where we would basically find any and every

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 7

For example we learned through social listening that the market for our educational toy is like the market for fashion Our target customer is typically a female buyer with a dynamic kid and both of them want new stuff all the time So wersquove learned to layer on value and product-line extensions For example as we were launching the Genius Blocksmdashan extension to the Haumlnz toy linemdashwe were already creating our articulating build and adding our robot build and continuing to extend the line Finding the insight that our customers are always looking for the next thing gave us the justification for working on line extensions sooner than we otherwise might have Thatrsquos why itrsquos important for those of us in development to use insights from social monitoring to optimize launch success

The insights we find pertain to several areas including packaging and messaging For example we analyzed how people perceived our packaging which led us to change it during the launch phase With social listening feedback we can optimize product design change the bundle structure of products change the delivery modality and more There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to be able to make certain we put ourselves in a position to optimize the success of the product launch

BEST PRACTICES FOR INCORPORATING SOCIAL LISTENING

Based on our experience using social listening at Lassen wersquove arrived at several best practices that can increase its value for new product development

LOOK FOR EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS

Many people in NPD believe theyrsquore delivering a transaction for an event Thatrsquos not how we see our task and not how social listening can be most valuable Rather social listening provides insight to deliver an experience across a journey In fact I think itrsquos important to look at social listening as a means of finding emotional insights rather than market insights Because at the end of the day what we really leverage is emotion Developers may say ldquoI sell pharmaceuticalsrdquo or ldquoI sell products that are B2B and very pragmatic This is a value propositionrdquo What theyrsquore missing is that every great companymdashno matter what industry itrsquos in or how vanilla its productmdashmust deliver layered and dynamic value across the customer journey

So Irsquod advise developers to stop thinking of themselves as being in the transaction business If you continue to develop products that are transactional in nature meaning that people just want a widget yoursquoll fail In my research for The Innovation Playbook I looked at over 800 companies and it was clear that the winners were the ones who analyzed

There are dozens of things we can course-correct during the critical launch phase to optimize the success of the launch

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 8

emotional drivers across all touchpoints of the customer journey Thatrsquos where successful innovation comes frommdashitrsquos not fractional itrsquos holistic We need to look at a productrsquos design in light of how it will live across the customer journey Social listening is extremely useful for that

LESS HATE MORE LOVE

As developers we need to understand what people hate and how to make that pain go away while identifying what people love and how to layer on more of that That may sound too touchy-feely but itrsquos the practice applied by every innovation superstar You wonrsquot find much of the emotional insight you need through conventional VOC and CRM methodologies You do find it through social listening

SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS

One practical tip is that your starting point should be understanding the success drivers of the products in your space and building a set of keywords around those drivers that you can search for in social media

So if itrsquos speed size taste safety whatever your first step should be to set up a series of keywords I actually go into the Google AdWords keyword generator and generate a set of keywords based on real-time search terms Doing that enables you to be sure that yoursquore searching on terms that people searching on topics similar to yours are going to be using When I do this Irsquom looking for noise that is the conversation around the topics that matter to me So before I even start using my social analytics tool I can find out where the conversation around key topics is taking place

HOW NOT TO USE SOCIAL LISTENING FOR NPD

If I were to ask everyone in a room full of product developers to be honest with me and then said ldquoDo you make decisions based on opportunity or on risk managementrdquo I assure you that 100 percent of the hands would be raised for risk management

Thatrsquos a problem in applying social listening for NPDmdashyou canrsquot look at it as a risk management tool It does provide risk management by increasing the likelihood of a successful product but if you try to use it as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs If you use it for that yoursquore using it for evil instead of good and it wonrsquot serve you well

Look instead for opportunities Be brave Identify emerging trends before the competition Take the risk of listening to what customers love and hate and yoursquoll create products that win in the market Thatrsquos the beauty of social listeningmdashitrsquos an opportunity tool

If you try to use social listening as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 9

HOW LASSEN INNOVATION USED SOCIAL LISTENING TO DEVELOP HAumlNZ

Our Haumlnz toy started out as a lab experiment to test the theory that we could use social listening and social insights to replace VOC CRM and conventional market data as a way to drive design inputs and create products that are more relevant to the customer We believe using this new approach to research can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of added value for enterprises If we capture insights successfully we felt wersquod have design inputs that would produce market-winning technologies

Unlike large companies that use social listening to monitor and manage brand positions we use it far more surgically as an NPD tool That means itrsquos common for us to drill deep rather than wide because we use it to test assumptions and market reactions and to test our theories of what people are talking about

We knew LEGO would be a key competitor so we researched that product to find out what moms didnrsquot like about it We looked at trajectory of usage and other factors many of which I would never have thought to explore with traditional methods Even a single Twitter post which I could drill down to via social listening led me to mountains of data

DEVELOPING BLENDED VALUE

Many people in the NPD space are using social listening as a test instrument to validate conclusions theyrsquove drawn from old market data Theyrsquore doing that because theyrsquore probably risk-centric So they stick with old methods they like even though theyrsquove resulted in a high level of failure

We do the opposite Why Because if you use social listening to look for emerging opportunities and discussions about what people love and hate you get a clean slate from which to start your design process By contrast if you start from the risk-centric point of view all yoursquoll get is historical data from which yoursquoll develop products that are an imitation of an already-successful product What we do is try to change the trajectory of insight by saying ldquoWhatrsquos going to supplant the widget What are the disruptive technologies that will make widgets irrelevantrdquo

Taking that approach enables us to deliver blended value In the context of our toy that means we provide STL filesmdashthree-dimensional printable filesmdashbecause we know a good percentage of our customers have 3D printers So we make parts of our kits available free in an STL formatmdashwersquore also making them available soon on Thingiversemdashso customers can download STL files and get blended value Specifically if our customers buy an Inventorrsquos Lab and have a 3D printer they can print the robot interface and now they have a robot kit which would have cost them a lot more money But now theyrsquore getting it for freemdashthatrsquos blended value

SHORTENING TIME-TO-DESIGN BY 63 PERCENT

Lassen Scientific used to do a lot of contract product development so wersquove been involved in the development andor launch of hundreds of products Historically wersquod spend about three months looking for the information we needed to formulate our design inputs We would use traditional VOC techniques where we would basically find any and every

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 8

emotional drivers across all touchpoints of the customer journey Thatrsquos where successful innovation comes frommdashitrsquos not fractional itrsquos holistic We need to look at a productrsquos design in light of how it will live across the customer journey Social listening is extremely useful for that

LESS HATE MORE LOVE

As developers we need to understand what people hate and how to make that pain go away while identifying what people love and how to layer on more of that That may sound too touchy-feely but itrsquos the practice applied by every innovation superstar You wonrsquot find much of the emotional insight you need through conventional VOC and CRM methodologies You do find it through social listening

SEARCH FOR KEYWORDS

One practical tip is that your starting point should be understanding the success drivers of the products in your space and building a set of keywords around those drivers that you can search for in social media

So if itrsquos speed size taste safety whatever your first step should be to set up a series of keywords I actually go into the Google AdWords keyword generator and generate a set of keywords based on real-time search terms Doing that enables you to be sure that yoursquore searching on terms that people searching on topics similar to yours are going to be using When I do this Irsquom looking for noise that is the conversation around the topics that matter to me So before I even start using my social analytics tool I can find out where the conversation around key topics is taking place

HOW NOT TO USE SOCIAL LISTENING FOR NPD

If I were to ask everyone in a room full of product developers to be honest with me and then said ldquoDo you make decisions based on opportunity or on risk managementrdquo I assure you that 100 percent of the hands would be raised for risk management

Thatrsquos a problem in applying social listening for NPDmdashyou canrsquot look at it as a risk management tool It does provide risk management by increasing the likelihood of a successful product but if you try to use it as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs If you use it for that yoursquore using it for evil instead of good and it wonrsquot serve you well

Look instead for opportunities Be brave Identify emerging trends before the competition Take the risk of listening to what customers love and hate and yoursquoll create products that win in the market Thatrsquos the beauty of social listeningmdashitrsquos an opportunity tool

If you try to use social listening as a way to mitigate risk you probably wonrsquot find the insights you need to drive better design inputs

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 9

HOW LASSEN INNOVATION USED SOCIAL LISTENING TO DEVELOP HAumlNZ

Our Haumlnz toy started out as a lab experiment to test the theory that we could use social listening and social insights to replace VOC CRM and conventional market data as a way to drive design inputs and create products that are more relevant to the customer We believe using this new approach to research can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of added value for enterprises If we capture insights successfully we felt wersquod have design inputs that would produce market-winning technologies

Unlike large companies that use social listening to monitor and manage brand positions we use it far more surgically as an NPD tool That means itrsquos common for us to drill deep rather than wide because we use it to test assumptions and market reactions and to test our theories of what people are talking about

We knew LEGO would be a key competitor so we researched that product to find out what moms didnrsquot like about it We looked at trajectory of usage and other factors many of which I would never have thought to explore with traditional methods Even a single Twitter post which I could drill down to via social listening led me to mountains of data

DEVELOPING BLENDED VALUE

Many people in the NPD space are using social listening as a test instrument to validate conclusions theyrsquove drawn from old market data Theyrsquore doing that because theyrsquore probably risk-centric So they stick with old methods they like even though theyrsquove resulted in a high level of failure

We do the opposite Why Because if you use social listening to look for emerging opportunities and discussions about what people love and hate you get a clean slate from which to start your design process By contrast if you start from the risk-centric point of view all yoursquoll get is historical data from which yoursquoll develop products that are an imitation of an already-successful product What we do is try to change the trajectory of insight by saying ldquoWhatrsquos going to supplant the widget What are the disruptive technologies that will make widgets irrelevantrdquo

Taking that approach enables us to deliver blended value In the context of our toy that means we provide STL filesmdashthree-dimensional printable filesmdashbecause we know a good percentage of our customers have 3D printers So we make parts of our kits available free in an STL formatmdashwersquore also making them available soon on Thingiversemdashso customers can download STL files and get blended value Specifically if our customers buy an Inventorrsquos Lab and have a 3D printer they can print the robot interface and now they have a robot kit which would have cost them a lot more money But now theyrsquore getting it for freemdashthatrsquos blended value

SHORTENING TIME-TO-DESIGN BY 63 PERCENT

Lassen Scientific used to do a lot of contract product development so wersquove been involved in the development andor launch of hundreds of products Historically wersquod spend about three months looking for the information we needed to formulate our design inputs We would use traditional VOC techniques where we would basically find any and every

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 9

HOW LASSEN INNOVATION USED SOCIAL LISTENING TO DEVELOP HAumlNZ

Our Haumlnz toy started out as a lab experiment to test the theory that we could use social listening and social insights to replace VOC CRM and conventional market data as a way to drive design inputs and create products that are more relevant to the customer We believe using this new approach to research can result in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of added value for enterprises If we capture insights successfully we felt wersquod have design inputs that would produce market-winning technologies

Unlike large companies that use social listening to monitor and manage brand positions we use it far more surgically as an NPD tool That means itrsquos common for us to drill deep rather than wide because we use it to test assumptions and market reactions and to test our theories of what people are talking about

We knew LEGO would be a key competitor so we researched that product to find out what moms didnrsquot like about it We looked at trajectory of usage and other factors many of which I would never have thought to explore with traditional methods Even a single Twitter post which I could drill down to via social listening led me to mountains of data

DEVELOPING BLENDED VALUE

Many people in the NPD space are using social listening as a test instrument to validate conclusions theyrsquove drawn from old market data Theyrsquore doing that because theyrsquore probably risk-centric So they stick with old methods they like even though theyrsquove resulted in a high level of failure

We do the opposite Why Because if you use social listening to look for emerging opportunities and discussions about what people love and hate you get a clean slate from which to start your design process By contrast if you start from the risk-centric point of view all yoursquoll get is historical data from which yoursquoll develop products that are an imitation of an already-successful product What we do is try to change the trajectory of insight by saying ldquoWhatrsquos going to supplant the widget What are the disruptive technologies that will make widgets irrelevantrdquo

Taking that approach enables us to deliver blended value In the context of our toy that means we provide STL filesmdashthree-dimensional printable filesmdashbecause we know a good percentage of our customers have 3D printers So we make parts of our kits available free in an STL formatmdashwersquore also making them available soon on Thingiversemdashso customers can download STL files and get blended value Specifically if our customers buy an Inventorrsquos Lab and have a 3D printer they can print the robot interface and now they have a robot kit which would have cost them a lot more money But now theyrsquore getting it for freemdashthatrsquos blended value

SHORTENING TIME-TO-DESIGN BY 63 PERCENT

Lassen Scientific used to do a lot of contract product development so wersquove been involved in the development andor launch of hundreds of products Historically wersquod spend about three months looking for the information we needed to formulate our design inputs We would use traditional VOC techniques where we would basically find any and every

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 10

data point we could Wersquod do retail surveys to identify the products with the highest SKU movement Wersquod interview industry thought leaders and associations to get their high-level overview of whatrsquos trending And wersquod buy 60 to 70 percent of the data we used It was canned market data which is always stale

With social listening wersquove brought that time-to-design down from three months to six weeksmdashthatrsquos how much time elapsed between deciding to use social for the Haumlnz project and giving design inputs to engineering

LOWERING COST FOR FINDING INSIGHTS BY 43 PERCENT

In addition to shortening time-to-design social listening also enabled us to lower the cost of finding insights The principal cost-saving measure was that we didnrsquot buy lots of studies We still used many conventional research methods such as interviewing experts but we didnrsquot buy a single study I plan never to use a canned study again They represented about half our costs for previous projects because some of them can cost $10000 to $15000 The research firms do new ones every year but theyrsquore still rear-facing I look at them now and am almost embarrassed I ever used one

HITTING A HOME RUN WITH HAumlNZ

In our Haumlnz toy line that we developed based on insights from social listening we started out with the Inventorrsquos Lab then launched our Genius Blocks which have been a total home run Now wersquore developing another line extension which is an articulating set

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 11

We launched the Genius Blocks at a recent Toy Fair in New York and found out wersquod woefully underestimated the response to the product We quickly sold everything wersquod built

The product was launched in June 2013 and we had nearly a quarter million dollars in sales that year In 2014 based on what our representatives are asking for in terms of inventory commitments wersquoll do over $2 million Many of our retailers are already buying for Christmas 2015 and we have projections of $7 to $8 million in revenue for that year

Haumlnz is also one of the most award-winning toys in the industry Our Genius Blocks won the Sterling Award and our Inventorrsquos Lab has won Brain Child Top Fun Top Toy Top Product of the Year and more Wersquove been recognized by the industry as really doing something special in a market segment that is extremely crowded and competitive

Getting that kind of traction so early means we hit a lot of the right notes from the beginning and we attribute that to getting far better insights via social listening than other startup companies do from traditional methods

We hit a lot of the right notes from the beginning and we attribute that to getting far better insights via social listening than other

startup companies do from traditional methods

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 12

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicholas J Webb (wwwnickwebbcom) is a world-renowned business futurist and innovation thought leader The author of The Innovation Playbook and The Digital Innovation Playbook he is also a successful inventor with a wide range of patented technologies ranging from one of the worldrsquos smallest medical implants to consumer and industrial products He is the inventor of the popular Haumlnzreg line of educational toys He has been awarded over 40 patents and has launched hundreds of technologies in his 25-year career His consulting firm Lassen Innovation currently provides business and innovation strategy consulting to a wide range of clients ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 companies

CONCLUSIONmdashA NEW MANDATORY CORE COMPETENCY

A typical large organization Lassen consults with may have 600 people involved in NPD activities If they were all to become experts in social listening and start using it to identify and act on opportunities before the competition they would enjoy a tremendous advantage Even if they use it simply to verify assumptions about user communities or competing products or to listen to the online dialogue within their space they would find it to be a very direct path to all their objectives It will help them find opportunities before the competition It will mitigate riskmdashnot by taking a risk-centric view but by enabling them to create cool products which is the ultimate way to minimize risk It even enables them to create the kind of reports that contain the market data that convinces management to invest $30 million in a new endeavor

The interface between the people who develop new products and the ones who find the insights that determine what gets developed is clunky I believe the solution for my fellow NPD executives is to recognize that developing a skill set around social listening and better insights is now a mandatory core competency It can make the difference between new products that fail and those that succeed in a spectacular way

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 11

We launched the Genius Blocks at a recent Toy Fair in New York and found out wersquod woefully underestimated the response to the product We quickly sold everything wersquod built

The product was launched in June 2013 and we had nearly a quarter million dollars in sales that year In 2014 based on what our representatives are asking for in terms of inventory commitments wersquoll do over $2 million Many of our retailers are already buying for Christmas 2015 and we have projections of $7 to $8 million in revenue for that year

Haumlnz is also one of the most award-winning toys in the industry Our Genius Blocks won the Sterling Award and our Inventorrsquos Lab has won Brain Child Top Fun Top Toy Top Product of the Year and more Wersquove been recognized by the industry as really doing something special in a market segment that is extremely crowded and competitive

Getting that kind of traction so early means we hit a lot of the right notes from the beginning and we attribute that to getting far better insights via social listening than other startup companies do from traditional methods

We hit a lot of the right notes from the beginning and we attribute that to getting far better insights via social listening than other

startup companies do from traditional methods

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 12

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicholas J Webb (wwwnickwebbcom) is a world-renowned business futurist and innovation thought leader The author of The Innovation Playbook and The Digital Innovation Playbook he is also a successful inventor with a wide range of patented technologies ranging from one of the worldrsquos smallest medical implants to consumer and industrial products He is the inventor of the popular Haumlnzreg line of educational toys He has been awarded over 40 patents and has launched hundreds of technologies in his 25-year career His consulting firm Lassen Innovation currently provides business and innovation strategy consulting to a wide range of clients ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 companies

CONCLUSIONmdashA NEW MANDATORY CORE COMPETENCY

A typical large organization Lassen consults with may have 600 people involved in NPD activities If they were all to become experts in social listening and start using it to identify and act on opportunities before the competition they would enjoy a tremendous advantage Even if they use it simply to verify assumptions about user communities or competing products or to listen to the online dialogue within their space they would find it to be a very direct path to all their objectives It will help them find opportunities before the competition It will mitigate riskmdashnot by taking a risk-centric view but by enabling them to create cool products which is the ultimate way to minimize risk It even enables them to create the kind of reports that contain the market data that convinces management to invest $30 million in a new endeavor

The interface between the people who develop new products and the ones who find the insights that determine what gets developed is clunky I believe the solution for my fellow NPD executives is to recognize that developing a skill set around social listening and better insights is now a mandatory core competency It can make the difference between new products that fail and those that succeed in a spectacular way

FIND BETTER IDEAS FOR NEW PRODUCTS WITH SOCIAL LISTENING 12

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicholas J Webb (wwwnickwebbcom) is a world-renowned business futurist and innovation thought leader The author of The Innovation Playbook and The Digital Innovation Playbook he is also a successful inventor with a wide range of patented technologies ranging from one of the worldrsquos smallest medical implants to consumer and industrial products He is the inventor of the popular Haumlnzreg line of educational toys He has been awarded over 40 patents and has launched hundreds of technologies in his 25-year career His consulting firm Lassen Innovation currently provides business and innovation strategy consulting to a wide range of clients ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 companies

CONCLUSIONmdashA NEW MANDATORY CORE COMPETENCY

A typical large organization Lassen consults with may have 600 people involved in NPD activities If they were all to become experts in social listening and start using it to identify and act on opportunities before the competition they would enjoy a tremendous advantage Even if they use it simply to verify assumptions about user communities or competing products or to listen to the online dialogue within their space they would find it to be a very direct path to all their objectives It will help them find opportunities before the competition It will mitigate riskmdashnot by taking a risk-centric view but by enabling them to create cool products which is the ultimate way to minimize risk It even enables them to create the kind of reports that contain the market data that convinces management to invest $30 million in a new endeavor

The interface between the people who develop new products and the ones who find the insights that determine what gets developed is clunky I believe the solution for my fellow NPD executives is to recognize that developing a skill set around social listening and better insights is now a mandatory core competency It can make the difference between new products that fail and those that succeed in a spectacular way

LEGO is a registered trademark of the LEGO Group All other trade names are the property of their respective owners

ABOUT

NetBase enables business leaders to manage marketing and content strategies with real-time fast and accurate social media analytics Clients include AMC Networks American Airlines Coca-Cola National Geographic Ogilvy SAP Taco Bell and Target ROI figures calculated by IntelliCap an independent research firm show that we deliver hard ROI for our customers Among other benefits we can reduce costs to capture social media insights by 34 percent over traditional methods reduce time spent managing PR issues by 20 percent and boost productivity for many functions

Please contact us to learn more or to schedule a custom demo where you can see our solution in action call 1-855-SOCMROI (762-6764) or email infonetbasecom

NetBase NetBaseInc NetBase NetBase Solutions Inc NetBaseInc