Rethinking Underperformance: Why Product Launches Miss the Mark—and Strategies to Overcome It
- Harris Kaplan
- May 14
- 2 min read
Depending on which consulting firm’s estimates you want to use, approximately half of new product launches underperform their pre-launch forecasts by 20% or more. This statistic is striking, not just because of the financial implications, but because it suggests a deeper disconnect between how companies plan for success and how markets actually respond.
When a brand doesn’t perform as expected, it’s tempting to search for a single cause—a flawed message, a pricing error, a missed feature. But in practice, brand underperformance tends to result from a combination of factors that interact in complex, often opaque ways. Making sense of this complexity requires moving beyond spreadsheets and dashboards. It demands a closer look at the lived realities of the people most connected to the brand: customers, frontline teams, and those who considered the product but ultimately walked away. Surprisingly often, customers understand how a product should be positioned more clearly than the team that developed it. This isn't a critique of marketing teams—it’s a reflection of how hard it is to see a product from the outside when you're deeply embedded in its development.
The Customer’s Lens is a Critical First Step
To truly understand what’s going on when a brand struggles, a broader lens is needed. Understanding a product from both the customer's perspective and the sales force's experience offers a comprehensive and insightful approach to diagnosing and addressing underperformance. That’s why a thoughtful diagnostic approach often includes:
Engaging the internal team to surface their assumptions and early hypotheses about what might be going wrong.
Speaking directly with current customers and non-customers to understand what is resonating—and what’s not.
Talking with payers, especially when reimbursement or access issues may be quietly shaping uptake in the product launch strategy.
Connecting with the sales force, who have tacit knowledge about how the product is being received.
In our experience, each of these perspectives is incomplete on its own. Only by one team focused on interlocking the perspectives, does a 360° view emerge that illuminates the path forward. Misalignments are identified. Gaps in messaging or strategy come into focus. Previously hidden opportunities emerge. This kind of qualitative depth takes time and thoughtful facilitation, but it offers clarity rooted in context. And results in a productive path forw
The View from the Crow’s Nest
When a brand is underperforming, the solution rarely lies in data alone. Spinnaker’s Brand Acceleration process addresses this challenge by taking a holistic, human-centered approach—engaging internal teams, customers, non-customers, payers, and sales reps to build a 360° understanding of what’s truly happening in the market. This process consistently reveals the disconnects and untapped opportunities that conventional analysis misses. By grounding strategy in real-world insight and frontline perspectives, Spinnaker helps companies not only diagnose performance issues but unlock new pathways to growth—with a track record of success in every Brand Acceleration project undertaken.
