tangents

Fertile Ground - Customer Research at the Launch Phase

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February 2, 2012
Thoughts by
Tyler Hagler

Customer alignment and effective innovation program launches

This week, Trig is attending the Southern Farm Show at Raleigh’s North Carolina State Fairgrounds from February 1-3. Over 300 exhibiting companies from the world of farm equipment will make the Southern Farm Show the largest exhibition of its kind in the Carolinas/Virginia area of the country.

In addition to building our depth of insight to this industry, we’ll be attending on behalf of a longtime trusted client who is exhibiting at the show.  This client has been one of the foundational collaborators who helped us grow into the branding and marketing services space, giving us the opportunity to help them with their messaging, logos, market research, and help define a visual brand language for their design elements. They have helped us realize our ability to translate product knowledge and customer research into strategic marketing deliverables that have been a driver for growth for their own business.

Southern Farm Show - Trig Industrial Design - Explore Prototype Build

In our first engagement with this client, we developed a comprehensive family of product logos, visual brand language manual for each of their 13 product lines, and supporting printed sales collateral.  Next, we worked with them to develop push-marketing techniques through direct mail and digital campaigns to build new channels for communicating with their customers.

Our current work revolves around the launch of an innovative product line of cutting-edge technology that is truly the next step in precision agriculture.  To support the launch, they asked us to create a brand identity and messaging platform that will quickly communicate the enhanced capabilities, flexible product configurations, and clean user experience – for a total package that will shake up the industry.

It is one thing to develop a brand identity that resonates internally, but there is no substitute for market testing to see if you are on the right track.  Over the course of the show, we will be iterating on the messaging platform as we interact with customers.  This gives us the opportunity to build more effective sales tools that will help to communicate the improvements this product can make to the customer’s financial performance.

To that end, the Trig® Brand team is issuing this challenge to the new product development community:  you should partner with a branding team that understands how essential customer alignment is to effective innovation programs, especially at the product launch.  We invite you to contact us to partner on your next successful launch.

Tyler Hagler
Principal

As a career industrial designer and innovation practitioner, Ty Hagler has managed hundreds of new product development programs through the process of opportunity identification guided to commercialization.

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