If your company makes yoghurt, don't take this personally.

Most people understand yoghurt, so I’ve chosen yoghurt as an example of a typical product to illustrate my point. Which isn’t to criticise yoghurt producers. Or ‘dairies’ as I think they would prefer to be called.

My point is that new product launches can be made more successful and less wasteful with the help of a decent copywriter and a big pen.

Let me explain.

No new yoghurt reaches the supermarket shelves without heaps of research.

Insight. Market trends. Demographics. You name it. There will have been no shortage of hours spent on analysing the potential of the new product.

In bland meeting rooms throughout the land, focus groups will have slurped their way through litres of yoghurt before being interviewed with forensic detail about what the mouth-feel was like. Or how creamy it was on a scale of one to ten.

So then, why does this new yoghurt fail and get de-listed from Aldi?

I don’t know.

But I think there’s a simple way to reduce the risk of the launch going pear-shaped.

My opinion is based on a small point that many NPD professionals miss but many copywriters like me don’t.

A new yoghurt flavour will eventually be seen as ready for market because it did well (after all the research and insight) in a taste test.

But people usually don’t buy yoghurt because someone gave them a taste test first.

It happens, I know, but it’s not the norm.

They buy it because they have been persuaded to do so by a poster or some other kind of advertising.

Advertising promotes the desire to try and the argument it employs is either agreed with or rejected pretty much instantly.

So, even if research leads us to believe that the world is ready for peanut flavoured yoghurt, it’s the idea of peanut flavoured yoghurt that the poster on the bus shelter is showcasing.

And, as a consumer, I choose whether I like the idea of the product without ever having seen it or tasted it.

So, as part of the intensive pre-launch procedure, why not get a copywriter in the room and brief them to do some posters? Mock them up so they look realistic. Show them to some focus groups and get their response. The cost will be peanuts compared to your yoghurt formulation. (Sorry.)

If people in the focus groups like the idea of peanut yoghurt as demonstrated in a decent poster, the general public is more likely to buy it.

If they don’t, you’re going to be disappointed.

But you’re not going to have wasted yoghurt, peanuts, plastic, production hours, packaging, transportation…

How strange. The old-fashioned way of persuading people to want a product could save the product from failing in the first place.