Two Rivers mall ‘hard launch’ kicks up a buzz among the consumers

Kenya’s largest mall, Two Rivers, was launched last week amid fanfare preceded by months of advertising, in a ‘hard launch’ approach that has been found to create consumer excitement, attention and demand before a product is released.

“Hard launches create a huge amount of buzz and excitement before the product is launched. In fact, sometimes the product release becomes an event in and of itself.

“Huge anticipation surrounds the launch and consumers are genuinely engaged and paying attention to the brand thereby creating a demand for the product,” this is according to entrepreneur Jeff Walker in his book Launch.

In this, the brand aims to spread awareness of the product, reach its target market and convince them to purchase it on the day that it is launched.

Technology firm, Apple is an example of a brand that has successfully embraced hard launches as its marketing strategy. When it first launched its handest, iPhone in June 2007, the announcement was made in January. During the period of announcement to launch the firm garnered about $400 million in publicity, from coverage by traditional business publications to online pundits.

“Apple created a strong overall marketing strategy for the iPhone and managed every aspect of its launch very effectively. It was able to develop a unique product for tech-savvy consumers and make them aware of the product through well-managed marketing efforts and publicity. By creating excitement about products among its fiercely loyal customer base, it kept their attention focused on the company, and then justified it by delivering a high-quality and desirable product,” this is according to a case study conducted by, Augustana University, Norway titled, ‘Apple’s iPhone Launch: A Case Study in Effective Marketing’.

Indeed, four months after its launch it reported selling 1.12 million units and one year later it was the fourth most popular handset in the US with a 19.5 per cent market share of the smartphone market having sold four million units. Additionally, a survey conducted in 2008 showed that it was the top choice among those planning to buy a new phone in the following months.

However, despite the demand generation that hard launches create, soft launches offer the brand a chance to gradually introduce a product to a small market, test it and gather information on how to improve the product before it is introduced to a larger target market.

“The purpose of a soft launch strategy is to allow the brand to focus on product development rather than marketing in order to make the product a success. This is a testing phase before the official launch,” said Bruce Gumo, marketing analyst at Biztrace, a marketing solutions agency.

An example of a brand that embraced the soft launch strategy successfully is Google.

In 2004, it launched its email service Gmail to limited release as a way of testing it in the market.

“Some of the big problems email users were facing at the time we launched were having to delete messages for lack of storage, not being able to find messages and a lot of spam emails,” said Alex Gawley, the product manager at Gmail in an interview with Time Magazine.

The creators resolved these problems by building an email service that is durable: It launched with 1GB of storage space, with a spam filtering features and search bar for emails.

It then took Google five years before it removed the tag ‘beta’ — a term reserved for prototype software that is ready for testing- from its service because it was still updating, tweaking and adding new features to the email service after years of testing. Today it has more than one billion users.

“What made the product what it is, comes from the continuous focus on the types of problems we tried to solve for our users. We were focused on making it more action-oriented with new features,” said Gawley.

- African Laughter