The new consumer order

82% of all new product launches in the USA failed last year. That’s because they were products that consumers could see no real need for.Marketers bravely come up with new extensions, new variants and new takes on old brands just to try to keep us interested and most of the time they fail miserably. Still, the money they spend does help keep the economy chugging along and right now it needs as much chug as it can get.
The point is, consumers have always had more common sense than marketers and you would imagine that in all those research groups they are given the opportunity to help brand managers avoid expensive mistakes. It’s not that marketers are not listening, but that they are asking all the wrong questions and in the wrong ways and in the wrong places. In truth, the consumer has changed, yes. But that doesn't mean we need to change how we address him and her. It means we have to change everything we do; how we organise our companies, how we manufacture our products and how we price them.As a result of the digital revolution, the consumer can be, even should be, an active participant in the four P’s of marketing – in helping to create the product then place it, price it and promote it.

The trouble is, like so many organizations, they are working hard to preserve the status quo, to keep processes and procedures exactly as they are. The companies that will succeed in these bold new times are those that actively set out to create and manage change, knowing that if they do not, change will come and engulf them anyway. It is not so much that there is a new consumer nowadays as a whole new order.