“Welcome to the Proven, Practical, Profitable Innovation podcast! I am Richard and I thank you very much for taking time out of your busy day to listen to this podcast. My goal is to make sure you get a high return on your time investment listening to this podcast. I want you to immediately be able to use the information in this podcast to help you sell more and make more. When you find that this podcast helps you, I would greatly appreciate it if you could give me a five-star rating and a written review. It helps us to become visible to more and more people who can benefit from the help in this podcast. Thank you in advance for your help with getting five-star ratings.
This podcast and the next four that follow it may be the most helpful and valuable podcasts you ever listen to. Before you dismiss this as an exaggeration, please consider the following facts.
Almost everyone who uses innovation to invent a new product or make an existing one better believes they have a slam dunk success on their hands. You get excited. You can’t wait to start collecting the profits.
Here is a sobering fact that has been true for many decades: 25% of all products are successful for five years. 75% of all products fail. Most of them fail in the first 12 – 24 months, with many not making it past the six-month mark. These numbers apply to the biggest corporations like Procter & Gamble down to the smallest entrepreneurs.
Here is a tragic fact. Some innovators go to market with a product that uses customer communication giving them only a 25% chance for success or less. For these innovators, what’s holding them back is not very persuasive customer communication. In truth, they have a much, much better product than they are effectively communicating. If the product had communication guided by the science of persuasion its chances could be twice as high.
Today’s podcast is the first in a series about what it takes for an innovative new or existing product to have high chances for long-term success. In this series will learn how you can double the chances for success of an existing or new product – proven by rock solid science known as the Science of Persuasion powered by Merwyn Technology. This podcast provides you with an overview with subsequent podcasts going into detail on the individual elements of the science of persuasion.
Often innovation is focused on inventing an entirely new product or making an existing product better. When we use quantum idea generation the result is many options to accomplish both of these objectives.
The challenge then becomes selecting a very few ideas for further development.
Major companies rely on Merwyn Technology to evaluate their options and select the one with the highest chances for long-term success.
In your product innovation work, you want to make sure that you understand the three critical elements that drive your chances for long-term success.
When you have an existing product, you want to use Merwyn Technology’s science of persuasion to optimize the persuasiveness of your communication to potential customers.
Beyond product innovation, in any situation where you need to persuade people, the science of persuasion will quickly and easily make you as persuasive as you can possibly be.
If after listening to this podcast you feel a need for more help, please contact me directly—my email is richard@i2ge.com. You can also go to my website—i2ge.com– where you can explore many innovation topics, especially check out the DIY Innovation Training on the menu bar. We customize all the training programs to our clients’ unique needs and circumstances.
Merwyn Technology – overview.
Merwyn Technology was first developed and patented by Doug Hall of Eureka Ranch plus two people with PhDs.
His motivation for developing it was to help clients who had developed many ideas at Eureka Ranch to identify the ideas with the highest chances for long-term success. Prior to Merwyn, him the identification process was highly subjective and Merwyn added an important objective perspective.
Developing Merwyn took six years and almost $10 million.
When it was introduced, Fortune magazine referred to it as one of the most promising new technologies in America.
Since it was first developed, many, many Fortune 500 companies plus hundreds of small businesses have used Merwyn.
Today Merwyn has two major ways it can help your business.
Regarding innovation, it identifies the three critical factors that dramatically influence a product or service’s chances for long-term success – long term defined as five years. With Merwyn we know when we have a big idea.
Merwyn Technology is also the science of persuasion. Those same three critical factors need to be strongly present in customer communication if that communication is to be highly persuasive.
In both cases, there is a statistical evaluation of a new or existing product message. The quality of the research and real world confirmation of Merwyn’s accuracy is very high. Its accurate statistical evaluations have been confirmed many, many times with real-world examples.
For example, a very large financial services company evaluated more than 20 of its direct mail pieces. Merwyn evaluated each of them and gave them a score. There was a statistically positive correlation between the score and the response rate. Put another way, the higher the Merwyn score, the higher the response rate.
Many hundreds of real world examples also support the accuracy of the Merwyn scores.
Maybe most important for me, is that Merwyn Technology easily passes the common sense test.
Critical understanding of the customer buying process.
For almost any type of product a customer needs or wants to buy there are many, many options available to them.
Go into a store and look at the toothpaste section. There is a bewildering array of brands and options within those brands. The customer needing toothpaste will probably purchase only one out of about 50 options available to them. They are going to choose the option that they believe is better than any of the other options.
The same challenge exists with much more expensive purchases. When you are in the market to buy a car, there are more than 20 brands each with more than five different models or well over 100 options for you to consider. Again, since your budget cannot afford to buy all 100, you will determine which one option is better at meeting your needs than all of the others.
Get in touch with your own personal buying process. Regardless of the business that you are in, reacquainting yourselves with the fundamentals of the buying process always reveals insights that can help you sell more and make more.
Please consider the last time you purchased a vehicle. When you began the purchasing process how would you have described your need? Family vehicle like a minivan? SUV for off roading? Car with good mileage and an excellent safety record?
How many options did you seriously evaluate? How many test drives did you do?
When you narrowed your options down to two possible choices, what were the primary benefits of each option? Put another way, how would you have described how each option met your needs?
Why did you believe each option could actually deliver the promised benefit? Did you experience it in a test drive? Did you read an evaluation like Consumer Reports?
You ultimately chose one of the options. Why did you decide that one option was better than any of the others? Price? Benefits? Higher trust?
What we have just briefly gone through is the buying process almost everyone goes through in making a purchase.
Some of these steps in the process can be assumptive and habitual. For example, you might already believe, “I always buy a Honda or I always buy Crest toothpaste.” At one time in your life you made a reasoned purchase and subsequent experiences to confirm the rightness of that decision. As a result, your previous experiences strongly influence your current purchase decision. These experiences usually fall under the heading of giving you reason to believe the benefits the product delivers to you. These experiences built trust.
There is an important dynamic in the purchase process that most business people tend to overlook. Making a purchase is about choosing one option over others, sometimes many others. Choosing one option involves consciously or subconsciously making comparisons. This often overlooked but critical purchase decision step turns out to be the single most powerful part of the science of persuasion.
Big picture view– the extensive research that led to Merwyn’s development identified three critical elements needed for a new or existing product to successful persuade a consumers to buy it.
First, the product needs to meet a customer need or want. Needs are usually higher priorities than wants, but the emotions associated with many wants can make them pretty powerful. When communicating with potential customers, it is critical that we communicate the benefit our product has – how it meets their need or want. Put another way, we need to communicate to potential customers what’s in it for them if they buy our product.
Second, having communicated a benefit, we need to make that benefit promise credible. We need to give them specific reasons to believe that we can deliver on our promise. Absent a credible reason to believe, our benefit promise can have very little persuasiveness.
Third, we need to communicate to potential customers how our product is better than some, most, or all other competitive choices those customers have. Put another way, why should they buy our product instead of a competitor’s product. The source of “better” is often a stronger and more credible benefit promise.
The upcoming podcasts.
Benefit promise: we will do a deep dive into how you make the absolutely most persuasive benefit promise your product is capable of. You may be surprised by how much we know about highly persuasive benefit communication.
Reason to believe: once we know what our benefit promises, we need to craft a reason to believe that potential customers find highly credible. You will discover the five different strategies available to us in creating a highly persuasive reason to believe.
Dramatic difference: the most powerful part of the science of persuasion is communicating our benefit promise is better – hopefully dramatically better – then some, most, or all of the competitive options. You will learn how to communicate these differences with skill and persuasiveness.
Ongoing close.
Even with this introductory information you now have the opportunity to become more persuasive in your communication with customers or anyone else where persuasion is needed. You also know the three critical elements necessary to dramatically increase a new or existing products chances for long-term success. You can start using this information today.
If you would like to see the key written points from this podcast, you can find them in my blog – i2ge.com/blog.
One of my six books is Proven Practical Innovation That Delivers Results. This very low-cost book is available at Amazon in paperback and has a Kindle book. Is truly packed with lots of practical help.
Here’s a quick review of upcoming podcasts. The next podcast will be on communicating benefits followed by one on highly credible reasons to believe followed by one on the importance of communicating your dramatic differences. The series will conclude with a podcast that pulls the three elements together.
Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to reconnecting with you soon.
