Planning and executing a successful product launch can be quite a daunting task. It is a marketer’s equivalent of a sugar rush but a day before the big launch, it can also seem like your worst nightmare. For the new age advertisers, it’s a constant struggle, trying to re-invent ways of telling the world about the ‘oh-so-awesome’ product, which the product development team thinks is as important as the wheel.

Traditionally, you could put your finger on which process would find a place in which phase – Pre-launch, Launch or Post-launch. In the digital age, there’s an obvious overlap - and sometimes an absence - of certain processes. With the increasing popularity of digital media, the challenge is finding that mind space in the consumer’s chaotic brain and making him/her sit up and take notice.

There is actually no right or wrong way to do a product launch.  A couple of things that would set your product launch apart from the others in the market are how well you know your target audience and whether you have drawn any insights about their behavior. The key is to use these behavioral pointers to slowly inject the product experience into their routine without making them seem intrusive. Though this looks like something even a 10^th grade student could crack, I’m afraid many of the marketers do not want to stray away from what they learnt in their B-schools and what Kotler dictated centuries ago. Not saying all of that is irrelevant, but just that some of these things are hardwired into the marketer’s head and common sense does not prevail!

Recently, I was part of a very interesting product launch. Think of a limited edition pair of jeans with 13 pockets. The moment I heard about it, it sounded like a marriage of cargos and jeans. This was a brave attempt at product innovation and the story of this wonderful pair of jeans had to be told in a brave way too! Teasers for pre-launch, do a big press conference with a well-known celebrity, push with immense media spends online and offline and follow it up with some awesome discounts to get more people to buy it? NO! There had to be a more interesting way!

Picture this: what if the product itself became the story and whatever you wanted to say about the product was only incidental? This gave birth to a thought: can a man stock up his 13 pockets such that it could sustain him for 48 hours? Oh! Better still, lock the person up in a room and let him interact with people just through social media? Sounded like a grand plan! Once the thought was sealed, there were hurdles, of course and there were ways to get over them too. The bottom-line: Do what you want but add an unexpected, interesting spin.

Aside: Check out the Pocketman case study here.

In retrospect, there’s one human insight which came to the fore pretty strongly during the event. I have close to 1500 friends on my FB friend list; but people that I actually am in touch with and speak to on a regular/ sporadic basis – close to 700. The remaining are people who have become friends after one meet or are a friend’s friend. But if these guys do post anything interesting, I interact with them – like, share or comment if I have a point of view. Now back to the campaign. Nobody knew who this guy was. They hadn’t met him even once. They had no reason to watch what he was streaming live or read his tweets. Yet they got involved with everything he said or did. They in fact advised, motivated, appreciated, laughed, cried and celebrated with him. This is where you see how something that happens on your own timeline manifests itself on a larger scale when it was the brand on social media. All those fans actually followed his every move because they genuinely found him interesting. Managing the tweets at the back-end, I saw a surge in the number of ‘I love you’ tweets 2 hours into the campaign. Such is the impact of a powerful thought and a befitting execution.

When you tell the story of your product, it is quite easy to lose track of what you set out to achieve in the first place, which is building awareness, interest in trying the product out and including it in their consideration set while making their next purchase. While the entertainer regaled them with his antics and special skills, the product could not afford to get lost. The merit of the story-telling approach to a product launch lies in how well you are able to weave what the product wants to say. Textbooks tell you that product demos and solution-focused content form important aspects of product launch. Combining the two philosophies was what this campaign did in a naturally beautiful way. He drew the jeans on the white board – front and back with the 13 pockets - and went on to dedicate a pocket each to 13 of his ‘best friends’ on Twitter. What made it wonderful was that none of this was scripted and the man in question had tremendous presence of mind to take the audience involvement to the next level. For a person watching all of this happen from the back-stage, it was a magical experience when the entertainer gave you more content to play with than you expected!

The true test of a product launch campaign is when it gets people talking about the product and the campaign itself and organically so. We did get covered by some of the leading publications both online and offline and a lot of buzz was created around the new way of telling a product story while retaining the core of traditional marketing.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to innovation in advertising. At times, the platform itself could be a strong messenger or the thought could be residing on an unexpected platform – the ways in which you could awe your audience are endless but what you choose to do should be able to effectively translate the brand philosophy and product thought clearly as well!