Holding Tigers: Timing Announcements

The lure of news coverage can be the electricity and dazzle and heady good cheer of a Broadway opening. Or it may be a siren's song, enticing unsuspecting publicists into disaster. Colorful imagery isn't what makes the difference; it all depends on what effects you cause by letting the cat out of the bag. If and when that can do more harm than good, you've got to hold that tiger, no matter how hard it squirms, and sit on your news until the timing improves.

Income suicide.

For example, imagine you have an exciting new version coming of your best-selling product, with features that will blow the doors off your competitors. You want to tell everybody, right? Wrong. For a lot of reasons, including that the announcement of a next version almost always kills the sales of a current version. You don't want to turn off the income faucet before R&D on the new version is done and the launch budget is in the bank.

Delay costs.

What happens if there's a glitch and the new wonder-version gets delayed? You not only lose income, you lose credibility. With current-version packages sitting stagnant on dealer and distributor shelves, you may also lose channel representation. If you have to resort to cutthroat promotional pricing to move your current-version product, you lose margin, and maybe profitability.

Bean spills.

In fact, the more innovative and significant the improvements, the less you want to say until you can ship in production quantities. Your R&D team went to considerable trouble to create these wonderful attributes, especially if yours is the first product to offer them. The sooner you let news of them slip out, the stronger an opportunity your competitors have to be on the market with much the same thing at pretty much the same time. Publicity necessarily neutralizes secrecy, which is generally all part of the plan; don't let eagerness do a job of corporate espionage on behalf of competitors. The market can wait. The press can wait, no matter what they say. The news can wait. Don't spill the beans.

Not just products.

Sometimes the same damage can occur without a new product, with as little as a price change. We know a story that involves a large electronics chain, not far from our office. Through one or more slip-ups, word of a significant price reduction slipped out to the field sales force weeks before it was intended for dissemination. The alert and opportunistic salespeople called their prospects with advice not to buy until the date the price drop became effective, citing the price advantage. They may have made more unit sales, but they dearly cost company, since the sales were then made at the lower price. We heard that this one SNAFU bore a $6 million price tag. The company was not happy.

Questions.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when considering whether the timing is right for making an announcement. What effect will it have on dealer inventory? On your own inventory? On recent purchasers? How sure are you of production dates? Shipping dates? Delivery dates? Are your competitors planning any announcements that might prompt you to bolster your features list with a little extra design work before you release? How long will it take them to develop to parity? How long is your window of opportunity? Are there any events (like trade shows or contract deadlines) that might compel you to subordinate these considerations?