Product launch marketing trends in the next 5 years.

We asked our panel of Launch Legends how they think we will launch products and what product launch marketing trends will exist in 5 years time.

The Launch Legends panel were:

• Ken Valledy, Founder of Progressive
• Cormac Whelan, CEO, Nokia UK & Ireland
• Paul Wright, Director of eCommerce & IT, Fatface

Below you will find a transcription of what has been said, in case you don’t have access to any audio capabilities. We wouldn’t want you to miss out!

Ken Valledy – All I can say is that I can almost guarantee that things will be ten times faster, 100 times and there will be many more options out there. The world will be a different place to what we see now. So I don’t think there is a do this, do that kind of answer. All I am going to say is that things are going to be very, very different. One thing I firmly believe in is against all of this and in regards to product launch marketing is to try and keep things simple.

What I tend to say to a lot of startups from my days in the corporate world is the simple things work really well. Whatever is happening around you, it’s just being very simple and very focused. I think the world is going to be so mad in a good way in three years, in five years time that the people that will win will be the ones that go ‘this is the way we are going to do this, this and this and we’re going to stick to that and keep it simple’ rather than piling things on and over tiering things. So what I would say, is in 5 years time, I don’t know what it’s going to be like but I think simplicity will win through.

Cormac Whelan – When I think of product launch marketing, I think the first thing I would say is that if you have to launch a product in five years time, they are going to launch themselves. If you seed them into the right places, it’s how it will happen, it won’t be an event. It won’t be a curtain. It won’t be traditional. It won’t even necessarily be a day or a date or a soft or a hard launch. I think it will happen by osmosis. Maybe that is a little bit far fetched. I think secondly, the ubiquity of networking is going to mean that you will be able to do it anyway, anywhere, any means to anybody that you can. At the moment, we tend to think of all those things as independent. You may have a Sky Box or a BT box or a broadband box. You’ll have a phone line. You have your mobile phone. What you’ll have now, you’re starting to see is a connected home. So you now have people that have their TV, their WIFI, their lights, their heating and their cooker and everything else all on and you can control the whole thing online.

There’s a lady who works for me and her husband really annoys her because every day she’s working from home, he keeps dialling in and turning off the heating. He wanted to know why the heater was on so high and she replied ‘I’m working from home today’ and he said ‘well work harder’. So he’s controlling her home from somewhere else. We all have different domestic challenges in some way, shape or form but everything will be in online! So my ultimate vision on this, if anybody remembers the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise, here’s how I think marketing will be. You will walk into a building, into a shopping mall, you will walk into a bus shelter it doesn’t matter and iris scanning will know who you are and what you do. They’ll know what your likes are, your last internet search was and it will market to you what it thinks you will want.

By Alexis Eyre