Product managers can employ a number of different strategies to effectively handle buyer resistance while still maintaining innovation and new features. Primarily, product managers should seek to accept the existence of buyer resistance, and push for features that create the largest amount of improvement and benefits with the lowest amount of behavior change – these changes will be the most appealing to customers as they will have fewer perceived losses and far more perceived gains. In addition, product managers should look to reduce the friction for buyers to transition to new and innovative products – they can either simply wait out the process of a slow adoption, or speed up the process by removing older products from circulation to push customers towards the innovations. Knowledge of buyer resistance and “loss aversion” can also be used to inform the direction of new features, as new features should seek to minimize the so-called “losses” that a customer may experience. It’s important to consider from the customer’s perspective what they might value and find important and what they might be particularly averse to losing, as an employee/developer will most likely overvalue certain benefits of new features and innovations. Another option is to locate niche or underserved markets for which an innovative product would serve them best, such as for Burton Snowboards and hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles in Reykjavik. One question that I had was related to the idea of “loss aversion” and whether or not we as product managers might actually be able to use the psychological effect to our benefit rather than as something to minimize. For example, many F2P games / markets use limited time offers or limited time items that are only for sale for a moment to incentivize purchases for fearing of losing out on a limited time item – is there a way that we can market our innovations in a similar way to bolster adoption, perhaps by framing the innovations in a different way?
