Failed Product Investigation

Doing Market Research to Determine Why a Product Failed

This was a project I completed during my internship at Cognex Corporation. The goal of this project was to determine why a recently released product had failed to sell. The company had invested a considerable amount of money into the development and marketing of the product only to yield poor sales. By the time I had started the analysis, the company had already completed their own investigation into the failure, however, they wanted an outsider perspective. I was not informed of the conclusion of the previous investigation until after I completed my own.

I started by going through the publicly facing website and marketing material of the product and competitors offering with the mindset of an engineer trying to find the best product for their application. In my past experiences, I had been in the position in which I was the engineer deciding which product to purchase, so I was familiar with the methods and decisions an engineer would make when purchasing new equipment. From my investigation I was able to determine that the failed product had limited capabilities when compared to other products (some within the company's own product line).

While my investigation of the marketing material seemed to answer the question I was not done with my investigation. I was able to obtain the failed product and some of the competitors for in person testing and benchmarking. Since I was unfamiliar with all the products I was able to give the unique perspective of a new engineer learning the product, giving insights into its advantages and disadvantages.

After comparing the products I was left with a very different impression than what I got from the marketing material. I found the failed product great, offering many advantages over its competitors, being faster and easier to use. Despite this it did have limited capabilities compared to some competitors despite being the same price. Herein lied the issue, the company had priced the product poorly. In addition, I think they did not spend enough time on emphasizing the products best feature, its speed and ease of use, something which appeals to engineers and would give it an advantage

While the project was designed to be mainly done independently there were some sections in which I needed help. Being an intern I was largely unfamiliar with the product and market, and had some help learning about them. In particular I needed help understanding the technical specs and how they would influence an engineers decision. I was taught the meaning of the specs and their impact on performance by onw of the lead engineers. Similarly, when comparing the products I occasionally had technical issues with the various products. These issues were largely helped by engineers working at the company. Other than that I had no help in my investigation.