As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products.  Here’s my “Five on Friday” compilation for May 13th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.  

1. Another Product Marketing Commandment from Pragmatic Marketing

A few weeks ago, I included on of the Pragmatic Marketing’s Ten Commandments of Product Marketing in a recent Five on Friday. In case you haven’t had time to review the entire list (recommended), here’s another of my particular favorites to consider:

With audience’s increasing reliance on recommendations and third-party expert sources, this recommendation is more pertinent than ever. Now sure how to begin?  Here are a few suggestions: 

Identify your influencers. While these will be different from subscription to subscription, they can include associations, industry leaders and topic experts, other press outlets or your advertisers. Of course, any subscriber that’s active on blogs or rating sites should be scrutinized, too.

Read what they write.  Influencers are recognized as such because they take the time to critique and compare your products to others. By reviewing their posts you can learn not only how they view you, but how they view your competitors. 

Act on the knowledge.  Does what you read about your subscription align with your own market messaging?  Do you have a good handle on the competitors and how they stack up?  Rather than trying to correct an influencer (unless their facts are incorrect), use the knowledge you glean from their positioning to refine your own product and how you market it. 

2. HBR Says It’s Not Lonely at the Top; or Is It?

While a group of eight studies performed by Adam Waytz and published in Harvard Business Review ostensibly revealed that power and loneliness aren’t directly linked, Waytz critiques his own work throughout the article.  In spite of the results, tester Thomas J. Saporito had this to say:

I’ve spoken with 200 CEOs, and there are precious few that didn’t, in the privacy of our discussions, talk about loneliness.

 The article goes on to explain the disconnect between the research results and general opinion by pointing out the design flaws in the research, including the abstract nature of the testing scenarios. In other words, in the real world, CEOs do, in fact, feel a great deal of loneliness.

This article is worth a read, but not for the reasons HBR hoped.

3. Beware of a Disconnect Between Research Results and Reporting

The article above is one of the few HBR work products I’ve found to be anything less than very well done.  And, while the article itself is confusing (and therefore uninformative), it can teach us several good lessons about how to report research:

Let the results drive the narrative. In this article, it’s clear that the researchers expected to prove that loneliness is part of the CEO’s life. When the results didn’t bear this out, the writers created an entire article detailing why the studies were wrong.  Was your research methodology sound?  If so, don’t try to fit the results into a pre-conceived narrative.

All content shouldn’t be published. One the other hand, what if your research methodology wasn’t sound? Just because you’ve performed a study doesn’t mean you should publish it. You may, on a review of the sample size, questions or tabulation process, feel that your study wasn’t an accurate tool for gathering the results you received. If so, the best course of action is to scrap the results.  This can be painful, particularly when a great deal of time and money has been spent, but is necessary to the integrity of your publication.

Don’t take a mistake public.  Another, less high-minded but equally important, reason to review before publishing is to avoid airing your dirty laundry in public.  The HBR article focuses largely on detailing the weaknesses of the studies done, although the topic of the article isn’t how studies can go awry. Why publish this? Neither the test framers nor HBR looks good as a result.

4. Adults Continue to Read Print Magazines, but Digital Continues to Climb

5. For Insiders Only: a New Product Development Handbook

I hope those of you who are members of Subscription Insider will read the first installment of my handbook on new product development. This tool is designed for those of you who are new to technical product development and provides detailed checklists, templates, and tips on writing requirements, prioritizing features and working effectively with IT to get your product out the door and into the hands of subscribers. 

Have a great weekend, everyone.

 Diane