Most entrepreneurs we meet, sell us on the novelty of their idea. The dimension of the novelty may be a new technology being used, or a new aspect in the local geography. What they are generally unclear about, is how does the novelty translate into a benefit for the end-user and the customer.
People often think novelty is an advantage. In most cases, novelty is a barrier that makes it difficult to sell your offering to the end consumer/customer. Challenges may arise due to the audience not being prepared to take in the innovation. That is, they simply may not be ready to take up the offering. Here is an example: Entrepreneur A loved to develop and design new products in the lighting space. To make it easier to visualize the end product, the entrepreneur developed a simple MVP, to showcase it to the potential customer group of lighting stores. While the customers were amazed by what the tool could do, most of them said, it’s too good for them to use. Their existing systems were not ready for this amount of advancement.
Novelty has another challenge that the entrepreneur has to overcome. The challenge of being able to create an appropriate anchor in the audience’s mind. If an entrepreneur comes to you and begins telling you about the offering and how it is different from the existing one, you are more likely to ask – how is this fitting into something I already know! So when you are communicating your idea, it is essential to think about it from what your audience knows and how the novel elements could be developed as you speak, allowing the audience to place you in the existing mental schema.
This gets us to the flip side of novelty – imitation. Is imitation necessarily bad? Well, it is not really bad. As explained earlier, it makes it easier for you to communicate and maybe even easier for you to avoid having to learn from scratch what has already been established as the norm.
Is it not then a valid question to ask here – Do you not need a unique advantage in your product? The answer is yes. You need it, but the uniqueness only plays a role once you have made it functionally easy to solve existing problems that the audience has—another way to put it, first parity with your comparable products, and then its uniqueness.
This discussion, thus far, should get you to understand that if you are to build a business, you must learn about the unique value that is deliverable from interactions ground up. It points to a potential paradox that the entrepreneur needs to resolve. If novelty is creating user value, is it novel? How could the novelty create a differentiation that could be leveraged?
The thin line is – it should be easy for your audience to relate to and then imagine how your offering can create an advantage for them. So don’t shy away from imitation. Novelty does not necessarily translate to an advantage but should allow you to differentiate and gain a premium for you. Know your audience while you are making these judgments about your offering.
Ask yourself:
Did I include these features in the offering for novelty sake, or do my interactions on the ground suggest the need for these features?
What are parity features in my offering, what and how do certain features create an advantage over others? Am I simply overselling the novelty so that I do not lose my audience in between?