
Harbingers of Failure [pdf] - isp
https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/mktg/assets/File/Anderson-Eric%202015_02_05_Harbingers.pdf
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kazinator
That is fascinating. These customers are sort of like a high pass filter. They
react to a step (something new) and generate a spike (uptick in sales that
doesn't last).

They don't care that they are buying a failed product because "failed" only
means "didn't sell to a lot of people". The product is actually okay, and they
bought it because it's new.

Might it be possible that the pattern of buying failed products is self-
reinforcing? Failed products keep disappearing off the shelves. So the people
who started buying them have to look for something else. This switches their
brains into "look for new stuff" mode, so they find new stuff beyond merely
replacing what disappeared.

Now, perhaps the problem is that _most new stuff fails_ , so it is easy to get
into this pattern.

Just because you are into buying new stuff and it keeps disappearing doesn't
mean you're a predictor for failed products. Your purchase patter just isn't
good predictor for what will become popular.

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skewart
The paper is looking at these types of consumers in aggregate, effectively at
the proportion of a product's sales that come from each group. These
"harbinger" consumers are only harbingers if, collectively, they make up a
disproportionately large percentage of sales.

Another way to think about it is that what you really should care about is not
the number of sales, but instead the the number of sales to people who have
similar purchasing patterns to the typical consumer you hope to reach.

What's interesting is that the authors are arguing that sometimes having a lot
of early sales is actually worse than having only a few. It's a problem if
that large number of sales includes a disproportionately high percentage of
"flop affinity" consumers. It would be better to have a small number of sales,
but also with low percentage of high "flop affinity" consumers. The intuition
behind this is perhaps that in order to reach so many of a relatively rare
consumer type - the harbinger of failure consumer - you must have also reached
a lot of the more typical consumers, and they decided your product isn't
appealing to them. On the other hand if you have low sales, but only a small
percentage of these sales is to harbinger consumers then presumably your
product is appealing to mainstream consumers, and your sales problem can be
fixed with relatively straightforward marketing and distribution tactics.

Maybe the tl;dr could basically just be: not all early sales are the same, so
understand who your buyers are and how representative their purchasing habits
actually are of the market you're trying to reach.

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virmundi
Didn't Innovator's Dilemma cover this? The cable shovel customers said, "Ya,
bigger shovels! Screw tiny hydraulics!" All the while hydrolics kept getting
better. Then the bottom feel out?

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marcosdumay
Well, no. Innovator's Dilemma is about successful products, not failures. The
cable shovels were very successful, until they suddenly stopped being.

~~~
Animats
The problem there, which The Innovator's Dilemma didn't cover, is that seals
were a huge problem for hydraulics until the invention of Neoprene synthetic
rubber around 1930. Until then, hydraulics always leaked. Somebody built a
hydraulic excavator around 1880, but that was a dead end. Success didn't come
until 1948 or so.

Pumps, valves, and hydraulic cylinders that don't leak are a post-WWII
technology. Natural rubber doesn't tolerate oil. All the alternative to it
(cloth packing, oiled leather, etc.) are worse, and hopeless at high
pressures. This is an example of something that just doesn't work with natural
materials.

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paulajohnson
While this is likely true it doesn't detract from Christensen's point, which
is that the steam shovel companies went out of business because they couldn't
switch. The steam shovel companies saw hydraulics as toys, or a sideline, or
as sweeteners to throw in with a big steam shovel contract. They didn't
understand how to exploit hydraulics when they finally developed enough to
move earth by the ton more cheaply than large steam shovels.

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chipuni
Did anyone proofread this PDF before they sent it out? I couldn't read the
equations.

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Animats
This has to be an early draft. There are lines such as "Figure 2 about here".

