Gourville John T
Harvard Business School, Boston, USA.
Harv Bus Rev. 2006 Jun;84(6):98-106, 145.
Companies that introduce new innovations are the most likely to flourish, so they spend billions of dollars making better products. But studies show that new innovations fail at a staggering rate. While many blame these misses on lackluster products, the reality isn't so simple. The goods that consumers dismiss often do offer improvements over existing ones. So why don't people purchase them? And why do companies keep peddling products that buyers are likely to reject? The answer, says the author, can be found in the brain. New products force consumers to change their behavior, and that has a psychological cost. Many products fail because people irrationally over-value the benefits of the goods they own over those they don't possess. Executives, meanwhile, overvalue their own innovations. This leads to a serious clash. Studies show, in fact, that there is a mismatch of nine to one, or 9x, between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers truly desire. Fortunately, companies can overcome this disconnect. To start, they can determine where their products fall in a matrix with four categories: easy sells, sure failures, long hauls, and smash hits. Each has a different ratio of product improvement to change required from the consumer. Once businesses know where their products fit into this grid, they can manage the resistance to change. For some innovations, major behavior change is a given. In those cases, companies can either wait for consumers to warm to the product, make the improvement so great that buyers get past their apprehension, or try to eliminate the incumbent product. Firms can also try to minimize buyer resistance by making products that are compatible with incumbent goods, seeking out those who are not yet users of the existing product, or finding true believers.
引入新创新的公司最有可能蓬勃发展，因此它们投入数十亿美元来制造更好的产品。但研究表明，新创新的失败率高得惊人。虽然许多人将这些失败归咎于平淡无奇的产品，但现实并非如此简单。消费者摒弃的产品往往确实比现有产品有所改进。那么为什么人们不购买它们呢？为什么公司还在不断兜售买家可能会拒绝的产品呢？作者表示，答案可以在大脑中找到。新产品迫使消费者改变他们的行为，而这会产生心理成本。许多产品失败是因为人们非理性地过度看重自己拥有的产品的好处，而不是他们没有的产品的好处。与此同时，高管们高估了他们自己的创新。这导致了严重的冲突。事实上，研究表明，创新者认为消费者想要的东西与消费者真正渴望的东西之间存在九比一的不匹配，即9倍的差距。幸运的是，公司可以克服这种脱节。首先，他们可以确定自己的产品在一个有四类的矩阵中处于什么位置：容易销售的产品、肯定失败的数据、长期努力的产品和大获成功的产品。每一类产品在产品改进与消费者所需改变之间都有不同的比例。一旦企业知道自己的产品适合这个网格中的哪个位置，他们就可以管理对变革的阻力。对于一些创新来说，重大的行为改变是必然的。在这些情况下，公司可以要么等待消费者对产品产生好感，要么进行如此大的改进，以至于买家克服他们的担忧，要么尝试淘汰现有产品。公司还可以通过制造与现有产品兼容的产品、寻找尚未使用现有产品的人或找到忠实信徒来尽量减少买家的阻力。
