Should You Monetize Your Successful Products As Much As You Can? Should You Feel Embarrassed For Doing This?

According to Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, there are over 30,000 products introduced each year and 95% of them fail to sell. This means that only one out of twenty new products survive.

This is a very harrowing statistic considering that it is very hard to think of a new product to produce. Creating a new product is a very big gamble of money, time and other resources. This does not even take into account the bad feelings a business owner feels over a failed product.

To further emphasize how hard it is to create a new product, big companies even spend a good deal of money and resources investing in research on how to make, sell and profit from a product.

This is the reason why when a company develops a successful product, that is, one that makes the company a huge profit, the company usually concentrates all their efforts in further profiting from their successful product.

For the product to be successful, it doesn’t need to be particularly important. For example, this blog of mine is about money matters which is an essential need by many. Yet, my blog is beaten by other blogs which are not really essentials in life like sports, entertainment and so on.

Talking about entertainment, it is not really an essential need of humans but has a market size much, much greater than the market for many products that are essential for human survival or functioning.

This is the reason why there are many entertainment themed blogs and websites. A proof that entertainment is a very successful product and could even be profitable. This is also the reason why the movie industry gets away with making the same sort of movies year in, year out.

We might also add fast food meals as a type of successful product. The number of fast food chains continue to grow but consumers can’t seem to get enough of them. Also, fast food meals are getting to be a regular part of daily human diet.

On a lesser note, iPhones and other Apple products are expensive but Apple enthusiasts still keep buying them year in, year out. There seems to be a category of products that would always sell to consumers.

There seems to be. For example, I told you that entertainment sells and from my experience I can attest to this. The earnings from my earning money themed blog is dwarfed by my earnings from my ebooks which are themed more for entertainment.

Of course, I can repeat again that fast food meals as products are a very good bet. This is because humanity as a whole have voted that they like deep fried foods and other similar fast food meals.

Classics stories also sell. Disney for example has been rehashing old fairytales and literary stories over and over again and consumers still watch them. This may be partly due to the fact that these same stories were ingrained in our minds even as children.

The same can be said for superhero movies. While printed superhero comics have mostly lackluster sales, their movie counterparts have been blockbusters. This must be because we also have grown up with the stories of these superhero characters.

Also, there would always be a market for Star Wars, Star Trek and other types of entertainment products. These types of entertainment have managed to ingrain themselves to us since we were children. This is proof that there are specific consumer buying behaviors.

For a company, it usually takes a very long time to find a successful product. Usually, a company must try out a number of product ideas to see which ones would be successful. This is the reason why many new businesses fail: no early successful product.

If for example a company has a few moderately successful product, they then have to decide which moderately successful product they would concentrate on. Making the wrong decision at this stage can result in the instant collapse of a company.

The company would then gamble on their moderately successful product with their money and time. This is the reason why there is for example the venture capital industry. An industry which makes money on runaway investment successes to cover their much greater number of failed investments.

Then the harder part comes when the moderately successful product fails to sell. The company can either gamble more money and resources to it or just give up and try to invest their remaining money and resources on a new product to gamble on.

If the moderately successful product somehow manages to be a complete success. The company is now faced with the problem of how to keep the successful product a continuing success. As you can see, it’s a never ending escalation of problems.

The reason why I’m using the entertainment industry is because they have very visible examples of how companies keep concentrating on their successes instead of their losses. I think any business owner who’s managed to find a successful product can relate to them.

It’s old news for example that one way Hollywood makes more money with a successful movie is by making sequels of the movie. I don’t think for example that George Lucas intended to make more Star Wars movies if the first Star Wars movie bombed.

Continuing with our Star Wars example, when it was acquired by Disney, the true monetization happened. More Star Wars movies were made and more spinoffs were created as well which introduced more and more characters to sell more and more merchandize.

Truly, Disney is one entertainment company of which we can learn a lot off. They are not the biggest if not one of the biggest entertainment company if they weren’t masters of their industry. For example, They did the same thing with their Marvel entertainment line:

They have sequels, spinoffs, more characters introduced and so on. This proves that there are consumers that would buy the same entertainment product theme over and over again no matter what you sell them.

Normally, there would be purists who would shout out that Disney and related companies are nothing but sellouts who are not really into the business of taking care of their customers but of making the most money off them as much as possible.

What these purists don’t understand is that business is not a charity or a social cause. Business exists to make profit and gamble always with their capital and other resources in order to make profit so they can pay their employees, suppliers, taxes and so on.

That is why when a company finds a successful product and service, they try to make as much money off it. With the money they earn from it, they can use it among others to fund other new product or service developments which are more than likely to lose them money.

As has been said already, a product or service needs to make money for the business. Just because a few customers like a product or service it doesn’t mean that the company should produce it if the company ends up with no profit at all because there’s too few customers.

Also, there are products and services that have been proven that customers want and would pay for. Why mess with something that already is proven? If you are not thinking this way, perhaps you shouldn’t be in business.

He might be known worldwide as the king of horror novelists but he didn’t really start out as a horror novelist. Just like many aspiring writers during his day, he was looking for a footing for his career as a writer.

He for example wrote: “The Running Man” which was an action story that was later turned into a movie with Hollywood icon Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role. This was before he became a success as a horror writer.

When he did became known as a horror writer, he stuck to it for a long time before branching out into other story writing themes besides horror. But by then, he was such a well known writer that his fans would almost buy anything he wrote whether horror or not.

You can compare Stephen King’s career to a company like MicroSoft which for a long time only had one successful product which is the DOS Operating System. These days, MicroSoft still continues to sell operating systems but has branched out into other successful softwares.

It must also be said that This is the reason why you should keep delivering to your existing customers the existing product/service they want.

Finding a successful product that your potential customers would want to buy for you at a good profit is a very hard thing to do. You are basically gambling your money and resources everytime you do it.

That is why when you do find a successful product, you must do your best to profit from it as much as you can without feeling embarrassed because you may never have a chance to make money from any of your products ever again. This is always a reality in business.

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