Half a million taste tests.
Exhaustive market research.
The world’s BIGGEST brand.
A bulletproof strategy.
And then, New Coke became an iconic case study in face-planting spectacularly.
Here’s what makes me worry lately: I’m hearing from more and more brands who are using ChatGPT to generate their product launch strategies. They’re asking AI to create roadmaps based on historical successes.
The whole strategy is coming from what’s been done — because that is all generative AI knows.
That’s like asking a historian to plan tomorrow’s battle. They can tell you to avoid the Maginot Line’s rigid defenses or not to march elephants through the Alps the way Hannibal did, but may struggle with drones and cyberattack tactics.
Even using the most successful product launch in history as your template WON’T work – because that world doesn’t exist anymore. The market shifts constantly. Ad costs surge and plummet. (But mostly surge.) Algorithms change without warning.
What worked yesterday could be worthless tomorrow.
Recently, a client’s top-performing ad creative suddenly flatlined. Why? Meta tweaked something in their algorithm. We pivoted fast because we were watching the metrics. An AI-generated plan would have kept throwing good money after bad.
In I Need That, I talk about how our analytical tank brain loves templates and formulas. But successful launches need our intuitive dog brain too – the part that spots opportunities, senses shifts, and adapts on the fly.
Your winning strategy will be uniquely yours, for your specific moment of launch. Yes, it needs proven tactical elements:
- Brand awareness building
- Platform-specific content
- CPC optimization
- Ambassador relationships
- Influencer partnerships
But these are only ingredients.
The recipe?
That takes experience, creativity, and expertise to get right. (And the ability to adjust when someone opens the oven and the temperature suddenly changes.)
I’ve seen launches succeed with tactics that “shouldn’t” work, and fail with supposedly foolproof plans. The difference? Having real humans who understand both the fundamentals AND the current landscape.
Want to know the real secret to successful launches?
It’s not the initial plan. It comes down to how quickly you can spot what’s working and double down, while recognizing and cutting what isn’t.
It’s also the ability to think of new segments and other opportunities, and the creativity to hit them with fresh, truly new approaches.
Show me an AI that can smell opportunity, sense market shifts, or read a room.
Show me an AI that loses sleep over your launch (and uses that awake time to come up with angles no one has tried before).
I’ll wait.
Action for today: Review your launch strategy. How many assumptions is it making based on past successes? What’s your plan for when those assumptions prove wrong?
Because they will. They always do.
What’s your strategy for staying agile in your launch?
Laurier
P.S. Fun fact: You know that famous “1984” Apple Macintosh launch commercial? The board of directors hated it so much they tried to sell off the Super Bowl air time. When they couldn’t, they ran it anyway. Usually the best strategies are seen as dangerous and radical — until they succeed.