Real Talk - What makes a product go viral?

Real experts. Real ideas. Real conversations. Protolabs presents… Real Talk.

Welcome to Real Talk, a thought leadership audio series that delves deep into the transformative changes and challenges within the manufacturing industry.

This series of conversations explores how industries will confront and overcome the biggest questions facing them in 2024 and beyond. Three of the most influential voices within a given topic cut through the noise and deliver a debate rooted in practical insight, not speculation.

What makes a product go viral?

An audio feature from Protolabs for the Real Talk podcast, in partnership with FT Longitude

The Speakers

Synopsis

We are living in an age of viral products. It’s giving customers the power to demand more – and better – from the brands they buy. And it’s forcing companies to design and develop products faster than ever before.

This creates a huge opportunity for brands to attain widespread recognition and scale quickly, but the task is more challenging for traditional industries.

What can these companies do to make a product go viral? And is virality the only way to remain competitive today?

In this audio feature, host Meg Wright, Head of Innovation at FT Longitude, asks how traditional industries can create, launch, scale and market viral products.

Joining her to explore this topic are:

● Ruben de Francisco, Founder & CEO, Onera Health

● Jenn Gbur, Head of Product Marketing, Road

● Namrata Sarmah, Founder & CEO, Women in Product UK

Transcript

VO: You’re listening to The Real Talk series of conversations from Protolabs, produced in partnership with FT Longitude.

Meg Wright: We’re living in an age of virality.

How could we not be? At any given moment, we’re only one click, one scroll, one like away from an entire world of products and services just waiting to be discovered.

On TikTok alone, global consumer spending reached 3.8 million US dollars in 2023 according to Statista.^[1]

This is changing consumer behaviour, but it’s also reshaping product development.

And while it presents an attractive opportunity for brands to become widely known and scale fast, the task is a little more challenging for traditional industries.

Jenn Gbur: Companies that are unaware of what their consumers are doing or what the markets are doing and don't react fast enough to those changing dynamics and the customer demands are not going to compete effectively no matter how viral they go at launch.

Meg Wright: New research from Protolabs reveals^[2] that 53% of companies are developing products faster than ever before and 82% are constantly looking for ways to speed up development.

In a market that’s increasingly tech savvy, the longer traditional industries take to stand out, the more outdated they risk becoming.

Namrata Sarmah: Developing products today versus a few years ago is very different. Even if you're a new founder and you want to create a product and you want to test it with your customers, five years ago you had to code, you had to build a platform.

It's much easier now to become a founder or to start a business because now you don't have to do a lot of these things. So as long as you have a tangible business idea and a solid proposition and you've identified your target addressable market, I think you can go out there and launch a product in a very short period of time, which means there's a massive decrease in costs and time as well.

Ruben de Francisco: It's so important that your innovation cannot be done within four walls and a whiteboard. And it all needs to happen outside of the office and very, very close to your customer and to your users. It's continuous improvement on how it gets used, the product itself, whether the digital parts of it or the physical parts. So continuous iteration is key.

Meg Wright: So how can traditional industries overcome their own barriers to develop, launch, scale and market viral products? And is this the only way they can remain competitive?

I’m Meg Wright, Head of Innovation at FT Longitude. In this audio feature I’ll be exploring how traditional sectors can compete in an age of viral products—and whether ‘going viral’ is all it’s cracked up to be.

Chapter 1: The Art and Science of Virality

Meg Wright: Let’s start at the beginning.

What exactly is a viral product? And how does a brand go about ensuring theirs is the product that everyone is talking about?

Jenn Gbur: The clearest definition of any product or service that quickly gains new customers usually via referral from other customers is virality. I think it was a Harvard professor, Jeffrey Rayport, who determined this term in the mid-90s, and really drew the analogy to the way a virus propagates across a population, how it grows exponentially and really changes the behaviour of its hosts.

Meg Wright: Meet Jenn Gbur, Head of Product Marketing at Road, an EV scale-up in the Netherlands that’s on a mission to make EV charging transactions easier for everyone.

With an extensive product marketing background, Jenn certainly knows a thing or two about what makes a product go viral.

Jenn Gbur: What makes products go viral is when a company delivers the right story to the right audience at the right time. And at that moment, the actual value that a product delivers, at least in the initial hype stage, is not really necessarily important. And I get that this right story, right audience, right time really sounds overly simplistic, but in reality it's hard.

Meg Wright: The reality, in fact, is twofold.

On the one hand, virality can be a financially efficient way for a brand to grab customer attention, establish a position, and capture initial market share.

On the other hand, it’s quick. And it’s this speed that requires brands to leverage product virality for long-term success.

Jenn Gbur: Your product's moment in the TikTok spotlight is over almost as soon as it starts, and so then you really see that your product needs to deliver beyond that initial emotional gratification in the story that got it to the consciousness of your audience. Otherwise, you're just going to be a passing fad that doesn't really deliver sustainable results for your business.

Namrata Sarmah: One of the goals for me as a chief product officer is to always have fans of my customers rather than just users. There’s a big difference between fans and users. The word fans is used by sports a lot. In the world of sports, they always call it fan engagement. They never actually call it user engagement. But in the world of just normal B2C or B2B products, we call it user or customer. We never call them fans actually.

And I think the word is very powerful because a fan is someone who not only uses your product but is an evangelist of your product. They are actually the sales team that you never had or you never needed because they are going to talk about your product, evangelise your product so much in the communities that you don't even need an active sales team or even a marketing team anymore.

My name is Namrata Sarmah. I'm a chief product officer. I've been working in product management for the last 15 plus years.

I also run Women in Product UK, which is a community of 3,000-plus female product managers. And very recently I've also started a community for product leaders because I think there is a big gap in the market for leadership communities right now. And that’s a unisex community, it's about 500-plus product leaders across the UK, US, Europe, and UAE.

Meg Wright: Namrata says there are a number of reasons why a product may go viral.

Namrata Sarmah: Number one I would say is if the customers cannot live without something. So let's say the product solves a really big consumer problem, there is a very high chance that that product will go viral.

Secondly, we are all social animals ultimately. We live in communities, we thrive in communities. So if five of your close friends use a certain product, there's a very high chance you will end up using it as well, whether you like it or not, because they are using it.

It's also about fast adoption ultimately. So we see certain products that are launched and adoption is super fast, everybody starts using it and it becomes viral. It might not necessarily be a very good product, but just because the people have adopted it so fast, it can be tagged or termed as a viral product.

Meg Wright: So how does this formula translate across industries? And what are brands doing to maximise their success?

Ruben de Francisco: I'm Ruben de Francisco, I'm founder and CEO of Onera Health. We are a sleep diagnostics and monitoring company based here out of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. What we do is that we make the gold standard sleep diagnostics test available for every patient at the comfort of their home.

Meg Wright: Onera Health analyses sleep patterns through medical devices designed to be used by patients in the comfort of their own home.

The company’s customers include patients who use their physical products, as well as referring physicians, hospitals and clinics that utilise the data the products provide.

This is helping to deliver improved healthcare services for patients and physicians, by disrupting a facet of the healthcare sector that traditionally required a clinically and resource-intensive study.

Ruben de Francisco: When we bring in such innovative and in a way disruptive, because it's just so different, product or service, we need to make sure that it's like a win, win, win, win.

The patient needs to win. The healthcare system needs to win, it needs to be more cost-efficient, better outcomes. The healthcare providers need to, everyone needs to win. So in essence, we need to make sure that whatever we bring for us and any other medical device company, that's a win, a clear win, right?

What you want at the end of the day is that your product or service gets adopted. So our continuous approach is we look at barriers. Anything that can be a little hurdle or a barrier, we need to remove that. And that's what we've seen that in sleep diagnostics, sleep monitoring, there are differences, geography to geography, customer to customer, clinic to clinic.

Chapter 2: From Concept to Reality

Meg Wright: The idea of creating a viral product may sound straightforward.

But where do you begin, when it comes to conceptualising a product that has the potential for such rapid and widespread adoption?

And how can companies take good ideas through to being gamechangers for their customers, their brand and, perhaps even, their entire industry?

Namrata Sarmah: For product development, we always start with the customer. So we always start defining the persona. We call it the ICP, the ideal customer profile. So what are the different personas that's going to use this certain product and how are they going to use it? What might be the frequency of usage, and at what point they might stop using it?

Meg Wright: For EV scale-up Road, which has both B2B and B2C customers, considering the entire context of the EV landscape has been critical to success; whether that be the work involved in managing a charge point or how to deliver easier access to charging facilities for drivers.

Here’s Road’s Jenn Gbur again.

Jenn Gbur: So much of the winds of change and political change as well as market dynamics really influence how well the business does. When you look at the European market in particular, which is where we operate, for years, there have been incentives for consumers to purchase electric vehicles. It's been part of the EU directive to electrify consumer electronics, to move away from fossil fuels. So, the incentives have been quite heavy from a government perspective, they've been dialling back year over year. You look at the macroeconomic environment where you have new taxes and tariffs going in on EVs that make it more expensive.

So, from a consumer dynamic standpoint, there's still the appeal of an EV, there's still the demand for it, there's still the value that's being created by it, particularly with unpredictable fuel prices. But from selling to consumers and selling a charge card, it's about making it easy for them. It's about making it easy for them to figure out where they're going to charge when they're driving. It's about making sure that they know that they are going to be able to, that it's going to work when they tap, and that when they get their bill it's going to be managed correctly.

Meg Wright: Considering the customer doesn’t end there.

To be truly revolutionary, requires brands to consider how their product addresses a need or solves a problem. The upshot could be a product that transforms an entire sector, as Ruben de Francisco explains.

Ruben de Francisco: For us, what we identified is that the patient journey was horrible. So basically before Onera, if you did it, you didn't sleep well, you go to your GP and you say, "Hey, I don't sleep well." You complain enough, let's say, and then at some point you get referred to a specialist to do a sleep study. And that was a little bit the beginning of the nightmare for that patient. First of all, you need to go into a hospital not in your home, and you go there, you are in a bed and they wire you up like a Christmas tree pretty much. So you can imagine, you try to avoid that as a patient, but on top of that, it's a really expensive process. It requires a lot of supervision. So technicians, nurses, preparing you, removing it. So basically it's not scalable.

We thought we could do so much better. In essence, the key problem we are solving, which became a bigger and bigger problem over time, is the huge pressure that we have in our healthcare systems. And we see this globally, we see it in Europe, we see it in the UK, we see it in the US. We don’t have enough healthcare personnel to help us do this, and that’s a problem that’s here to stay. Ageing population, basically we don't have enough people to "take care of us", quote, unquote, so we need to do it in smart ways, right? Use of AI, bringing technologies to the home whenever possible. However, what was super key for us is that clinical grade element. Yes, make it an amazing user experience, but that clinical grade is central if you want this to be adopted.

Meg Wright: What else should companies consider when it comes to designing, developing and launching their products for maximum success?

As an experienced chief product officer herself, Namrata says there’s one thing companies still fall short on.

Namrata Sarmah: Testing an idea early on is very powerful and very sadly, a lot of companies still don't do it. They assume quite a lot. I think assumption can really kill products in the long run.

So I would say validating your idea is very important, never assume anything. But also keep the customer close to you as much as you can so that it's not a transactional relationship that you just reach out to them when you need something. That's a transactional relationship. A more community-focused relation is when your customers are part of your community. And there's different tools, different platforms to make sure that you develop that community environment with your customers.

Ruben de Francisco: You need to understand very well who are the users you're designing for. So in our case, it's a doctor, it's a nurse, it's a technician, so people that are on the provider side and it's the patient, it’s the family of the patient as well. And then there are a whole other kind of stakeholders that are the reimbursement side, the payers, the insurance companies. So there are lots of boxes that you continuously need to make sure that you tick. And of course the regulators, by the way, so all sort of boxes that you continuously need to keep on check as you move through all of those iterations.

Together with my co-founder, Pieter, we had this idea about what this ultimately needed to be. What the physical product ultimately needed to be.

But the first prototypes were really clunky, so they were a box with electronics and big batteries and rather than sticking it to the chest. What we were doing was we were sewing actually little bags that you could wrap around your chest so that you could carry those. We did all sort of user testing with that. So we use those to really understand how we were getting the right quality of the data that we needed and in which part of your body you would need to apply this. So it had, from an engineering perspective, provided us really strong input for what then became the actual product in the right form factor, taking into account other elements like manufacturability. But it took us quite a few iterations to go from that early clunky prototype to the first generation of the product that we launched into the market.

So the more you iterate, the more you continuously test, feedback the results of that test into your development, the better. The less surprises, the shorter the timelines to get your product in place and so on.

Chapter 3: Trends and future outlook

Meg Wright: From the impact of AI to the growing need for sustainable products and services, there is a lot on the horizon for product developers to be excited about.

So which trends in particular are likely to have the greatest impact on industries as they look to develop tomorrow’s viral products?

Here’s Jenn again.

Jenn Gbur: Climate and clean tech is really the most exciting area for product innovation. I think that old adage of necessity is the mother of invention is still true today. I think climate change is impacting every aspect of our life and it's disrupting every critical industry.

We talk about how different verticals are really being upended by innovations to make them more sustainable. You see this in water, you see it in agriculture and energy, clothing, transportation, and forcing us to really come up with real solutions.

You could argue that the likes of Elon Musks revolutionised the way that we perceive electric vehicles, revolutionised the way that we look at them, and really forced the broader EV, or the broader industry to take a different look at EV and to start really heavily investing in it and making it not only more accessible for the everyday consumer, but more appealing. And so, as a product marketer, it's a really interesting challenge or a really interesting, not even challenge, opportunity to bring out in the public imagination what an EV could be. That it's not just this stodgy little box that barely goes a certain distance. So, I think there's tremendous opportunity for further innovation within the automotive space, particularly when you think about electrifying and making it more efficient.

Meg Wright: When supply chain disruption and materials shortages have had such a sizeable effect in recent years, how can companies approach the product journey most effectively?

Namrata Sarmah: Co-innovation has become very popular. I strongly believe in that actually. So what that means is rather than a company innovating themselves internally, they have an idea and they put it out there into the wild with their consumers if you're a consumer business.

If you're a B2B SaaS business, you do the same. You basically share your ideas or you collect ideas from your customers, your big corporate customers, and you co-innovate. Rather than saying, "I came up with this idea," or, "My team did this," you say, "Well, we came up with this idea as a team, as an ecosystem." And in the same way we are also seeing quite a lot of companies, Microsoft I think is a great example, that has amazing linkages with universities, communities, everyone really. They try to have everybody in their ecosystem as much as they can.

And I think that's a great idea because rather than getting information or ideas from one talent pool, which is your employee base, you're actually tapping into your customers, you're tapping into your partners, your suppliers, your communities. So I think that kind of a multifaceted way of doing things where multiple parties are involved, and I think that is the future of innovation.

Ruben de Francisco: You need to have a team that actually brings you that diversity. I think the secret is in the people, I mean your company is technology, right? It's IP, patents, whatever, but it's people. That's the single most important thing. So if you want to create a product that's going to combine those things, data-driven development, but at the same time creative and a very appealing product to the user that goes even beyond the base functionality, then you need a team that's very diverse and that actually it becomes part of the DNA. So it's very creative people, very analytical, engineering driven, manufacturing driven people, all of those are elements that come into the design continuously.

Conclusion

Meg Wright: So what does make a product go viral?

Although there is no one specific answer here, scale, value and speed are all crucial ingredients in the recipe for product success.

Ruben de Francisco: If you bring scalability into your product development also from day one, then you'll make sure that the entire solution, whether it's a digital product or physical product, every layer of your stack takes that into account. If I have to decide between solution A or solution B, is one of the two more scalable? Is the cost going to go down as I produce more, as I manufacture more? If I make a thousand, will it work just the same when I make a million or 10 million?

Namrata Sarmah: I would say the long-term value of a product matters more than instant virality.

I mean if you look at companies like Microsoft, now Microsoft is ubiquitous, but when was the last time we were obsessed about Microsoft Word? Maybe never. You can't call Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint or any of the Microsoft suites as a viral product, but it's ubiquitous. We always use it.

I don't browse my banking app. It's not a leisurely task for me. But actually, if that app vanishes tomorrow, it will have a big impact on me actually. I'll be extremely annoyed and frustrated because I'm not going to call a bank and visit a branch anymore. I want to do everything digitally.

So these are products we can't live without actually, but these are not viral. We can't call them viral products.

Meg Wright: And if the speed of product evolution is anything to go by, brands need to be quick off the mark if they are to capitalise on opportunities.

A final word from Jenn Gbur.

Jenn Gbur: It is a cautionary tale. You may have product-market fit, you may have market dominance today, but the world is not a static place. And if you rest on your laurels and you really don't pay attention to those changing consumer needs and demands, somebody will come along and eat your lunch.