9 Great Product-Development Lessons From The Trading-Card Biz
Photo by Blake Guidry on Unsplash.
Like a lot of people, I have A Past. And a lot of it was spent in sports marketing.
Also, like a lot of people who have Pasts in sports marketing, the term poorly encapsulates what I actually did, which was to create and help market sports collectibles, primarily trading cards.
Hey, it paid the bills and then some. I was in the trading-card business at its apex, working with leagues and players’ associations and their licensees and miscellaneous camp followers[1], helping all sides make millions and millions of dollars.
The boom is long gone, and the trading-card business has settled into a cozy why-is-it-still-around dotage, but at its peak, I was helping three of the five biggest trading-card companies create and market a new product every week and a half or so.
In a good year, my firm would create more than 125 new products, handling everything from product naming and composition to positioning and collateral.
And then I went into insurance.
In the 15-plus years I’ve worked in the insurance industry, the companies I’ve worked for have created and launched fewer than 10 new products – less than a month’s work in the old days.
I've never given up hope that insurance will take a few cues from trading cards in the product department … and to help it along, here are some tips from developing two-plus products a week that can help any business or industry that finds itself at a creative standstill.
Think fast – no matter how slow your business
Just because your business or industry moves at a snail’s pace doesn’t mean your product-development process has to move that speed. Stay nimble; stay ready. Be prepared to act when a market opportunity presents itself.
To that end, never stop the creative process; keep running product ideas up the flagpole. Will you be rejected, ignored, told to get lost? Sure. But you only need to be right once to vindicate everything.
Cast a broad net
We put baseball cards in cans; we packaged them with coins; we stuck baseball cards inside baseball cards.
None of these were the traditional way of marketing trading cards, which was in sealed packs with or without bubble gum. But we would ask printers for their wildest ideas and newest tech, and go to Toy Fair, and read the headlines, and we’d come back and turn those ideas into trading cards.
Some flopped miserably. But some didn’t. And to echo the previous point, it only takes one non-flop to make up for a score of flops.
Photo by Peter Feghali on Unsplash.
Do the research
We knew our markets so well that we could estimate almost to the dollar how much product would sell into a channel, how much would sell through, what the secondary market value would be, and how much we would be able to sell the next time around.
If you don’t have that depth of market knowledge, of course there’s going to be trepidation around a new product launch. So get learning!
Calculate your calculated risks
When you know the market as well as we did, gambles aren’t really gambles. Our clients could afford to take what might have seemed like big risks because we knew the depth of the floor, the height of the ceiling, and all steps in between.
It’s going to be okay, as long as you have the distribution
The invaluable insurance newsletter Coverager has noted that insurance is all about distribution – to which I say, “What isn’t?”
Distribution is always the key challenge to any product launch. If you have it at the outset, your chances of success are significantly higher than if you have to earn it along the way.
Retail and consumer packaged goods are much more fickle than insurance. But if you have a product with a known lifecycle, and you’re able to make money in the front half of its lifecycle, you should be just fine.
Does it all come back to knowing your market and never slacking on the prelaunch grunt work? Absolutely. That's how it's done.
Segment
Make that knowing your markets. Selling trading cards was about creating the appropriate configuration for the segment – 24-pack boxes for the hobby trade, J-hook packs for mass retail, tri-packs or jumbo packs for warehouse clubs, packouts with binders and sheets for shopping channels, and so on.
Match your product configuration to your segments, not the other way around. If you’re having trouble identifying segments, do some customer research – and if you do it right, they’ll pop right up.
Distribution is a struggle if you don’t segment properly. Get your segments right and sales will follow.
Don’t bail at the first sign of weakness
Here’s where insurance and trading cards diverge. We didn’t worry much about bailing on a trading-card product because we knew another one would be along next week. Insurance companies tend to launch products thinking they’re going to be around a decade or more.
However, the products we launched were extensions of sub-brands, and we fully expected those sub-brands to be around for a decade.
If a particular sub-branded product struggled in the market, we didn’t necessarily see it as a failure of the sub-brand. We’d tweak and launch something different under that sub-brand and see how it performed, and if that one failed and the one after we’d research why they were struggling.
Was it price point? Design? Composition? Competition? We’d figure it out – but we wouldn’t bail.
Too many insurance companies I’ve known have been incredibly skittish when it comes to their new products, pulling or tweaking them after only a couple weeks on the market.
If you calculated wrong and your loss ratio is sky-high, I get it. Take it back to the shop. Otherwise, let it breathe a little. Keep educating your customer bases. Let the market come around to you.
Insurance is about patience. That should extend to product launches, too.
It’s about line extensions
Al Ries, the anti-guru of line extensions, would not appreciate this, but in trading cards and insurance the most logical way to launch new products is to build them off of existing products and brands.
However, sometimes insurance companies are brand-naive. They’ll slap a gold-silver-bronze on a product line and call it good.
The problem with gold-silver-bronze is it’s hard to build products off such a rigid structure.
If Tide had three product lines called Tide Gold, Tide Silver, and Tide Bronze, imagine how hard it would be to market Tide Bronze Gel-Paks.
Think about extending your product lines when you name your products. It’ll save you headaches down the road.
It ought to be fun
Developing trading cards was a hoot … but so is developing insurance products. It’s been one of my most enjoyable jobs.
If you envision product development as identifying a need, meeting the need, and doing it creatively, product development can be a blast – and the end result will be the better for it.
So go on – let your creativity run wild! That’s how great products are made … everywhere.
[1] Especially in NASCAR, where it was never clear who had the business relationship with whom, though it was crystal-clear that they all had to get paid.