Last week, we covered some of the do's and don'ts of launching a new product. Today, we're bringing you some cold, hard statistics to help guide your journey to launch day and beyond.

• According to Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School around 30,000 new consumer products launch every year, and around 90% of them are doomed to fail. While some experts believe this number is high, there’s no debating the fact that new products face an uphill battle to gain widespread attention, let alone acceptance.[1]
  
  
• Consumer behavior varies when it comes to adopting new products, so it’s important to craft a product launch and support strategy that takes into account the different phases of consumer adoption. Only around 15% of customers will make the leap to purchase a new product immediately after its launch, while around 50% will wait until the product has been around for a while and is no longer considered a “hot” new item. A launch strategy that ends shortly after launch ignores the majority of your potential customers.[2]
  
  
• Beyond knowing who your launch is targeting, it’s important to understand your core audience’s shopping persona. In a Nielsen survey, Baby Boomers and Silent Generation respondents cited affordability is their biggest determinant of value. Meanwhile, Generation Z and Millennials shop with a more hierarchical approach—they’re willing to spend more on products they value. To that end, 26% and 21% of Gen Z and Millennial respondents respectively said that they’ve splurged on a new product that they deemed “worth it,” compared to 16% of Gen X and just 12% of Baby Boomers.[3]
• 77% of buyers want to see different types of content at different stages of the product research process. That means relying too much on ads or any one form of content can hamper your product marketing strategy. Instead, think of it as a progressive journey, where potential customers move from quick, non-interactive content, to deeper, more in-depth, interactive content as they approach a purchase decision.[4]
  
  
• Know your industry: How much your customers are willing to pay for a newer, more innovative product likely depends as much on the type of product as it does the innovation involved. For instance, in one survey, more than 83% of respondents were willing to pay extra for innovative electronics, and 75% of potential automobile customers said the same. On the other hand, for industries like insurance and gas technology, that number hovers a little over 50%.[5]