The tortoise and the hare: in praise of consistency

Product launches. Grand openings. Big events. Most of us have done more than a few. If we had to account for the results of these activities, could we say that they were worth it? Seth Godin says, “Probably not.”

Make a list of successful products in your industry. Most of them didn’t start big. Not the Honda Accord or Facebook, not Aetna Insurance, not JetBlue or that church down the street. Most overnight successes take a decade (okay, four years online).

The grand opening is a symptom of the real problem… the limited attention span of marketers. Marketers get focused (briefly) on the grand opening and then move on to the next thing (quickly). Grand opening syndrome forces marketers to spend their time and money at exactly the wrong time, and worse, it leads to a lack of patience that damages the prospects of the product and service being launched.

Launches have their place, but they are never really a substitute for consistent, ongoing activity. Your big news is exciting for you, but remember that you’re talking to a market that needs to know why they should care. It’s very hard to make that case on launch day. It takes persistence, patience, and consistency - none of which are things that are easily incorporated into the Big Product Launch.

(Good reasons for grand openings and product launches: getting news coverage. Rallying the internal team.)

Here’s a great story of slow and steady: Ning. In a recent Fast Company article, Adam Penenberg writes about how Ning was written off as insufficiently cool and compelling by the Web 2.0 world, where attention spans and company lifecycles are often comparable to the life cycle of a fly. Ning kept on doing their thing, and now they’re being talked about all over the place as a success - with hundreds of thousands of social networks running on their platform to prove it.

For a more allegorical approach, think of the tortoise and the hare. The point is the same. Keep your eye on the next real milestone and keep going.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.

The Opinionated Marketers | Powered by WordPress | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice