Change Your Market, Not Your Product

Harvard Business Review

Oh, thank you very much. So, product management is about creating new products or creating new markets for existing products. But if, like Shakespeare says, there’s nothing new under the sun, so how is it that you’re to create something new? The, the product companies that I admire the most are the ones that, that package or talk about their products in very different ways, even if it’s the same product that 17 other companies have.

I now make cheese, and I make a high-end fish. French artisan style cheese that my market doesn’t necessarily understand. So, in order to talk about it differently, with a recipe that’s, that’s existed for hundreds of years, again, nothing new under the sun, how do I talk to my audience in a way that they get it, they understand it, that it’s approachable and they can use it every day.

So, what we did is we created a concept cheese from a French tradition of using a fromage blank for breakfast. We concepted that out and called A new line of cheeses, breakfast cheeses. We took these to market in a way, really with a dialogue that does, that did not exist in the United States about cheese and about breakfast cheeses and talked about them differently.

And upon launching those a year and a half ago, we took best new product at the fancy food show in New York. We took best cheese the next year. We’ve won probably 20 awards and recognition for those and have had placements now nationally because we’re talking about a cheese that tended to be very high end, intimidating and unapproachable.

And we’ve made that dialogue and that interaction with the market very, very different because we talk about it differently. So, in software or in soft cheese, it’s the same thing. The features and the benefits don’t necessarily matter. What matters is how you talk about your product to your audience in a way in which they can understand.

My software could have the same features and benefits that Microsoft has, or my soft cheeses could have the same features and benefits as another cheese producer. But what matters is how I package that and how I talk to my market about it in a way that It’s unique and innovative, and perhaps even irreverent, that changes the market.