Product managers can effectively balance the desire to innovate and introduce new features with the need to address buyer resistance by creating products that fall into the “smash hit” category. Smash hits include products that have significant product changes and limited behavior changes. Many times innovations can fall into the other categories such as easy sells, limited product changes and behavior changes, long hauls, significant product and behavior changes, or lastly sure failures, limited product changes and significant changes.
From there, accepting resistance is often needed. As mentioned in the reading, “the simplest strategy for dealing with consumer resistance is to brace for slow adoption.” Many companies that assume the new innovation adoption will be rapid tend to put way too much of its resources into the creation of the product while instead patience was needed for the consumers to adapt to the new innovations that were being made. In addition, product managers should strive for 10x improvement. In those cases, the innovations are so great that it helps to eliminate the consumer’s potential loses to adapting to using the product. In some rare cases, it is also possible to eliminate the old rival altogether. Policies especially in this day and age around environmental laws and regulations can help in certain industries to eliminate previous ways of doing things and instead adapt to some of the new technologies that are being developed.
Minimizing resistance also plays a huge role especially in scenarios where it is not possible to make a product that has 10x improvement or in industries where it is not possible to eliminate previous competitors. In these cases, it is important for product managers to make behaviorally compatible products. An example of this was the hybrid vehicle introduced by Toyota that allows the user to experience the benefits of both types of engines. In addition, companies can aim to target new markets that are not extreme fans/believes of a certain brand or product yet. Many times this can include younger audiences. Lastly creating products for users that might have other considerations/ areas that they care a lot about such as environmental factors or supply chain can be a great way to differentiate a product. In many cases, users will consider buying from a new company that creates products that are more environmentally friendly or considers more of the factors that influence their supply chain.
An idea that I find interesting throughout all of this, is the idea of loss aversion and how it often affects the new/existing features that a product manager chooses to add and/or keep. Loss aversion is the concept that the potential loss perceived by an individual is far more severe than the potential gain. The gains must be much higher than the losses for a user to switch over to using another new product otherwise the user will continue to use the old one even if the new product/technology has some sizable benefits. As product managers help to develop new features, this is notable as this means the new product will either have to have new features that are greatly significant in comparison to the previous one or the company strongly needs to consider keeping many of the existing features while adding an assortment of new ones to reduce the loss.
