Author: Simon Attard
We fall in love with the reveal, not the result
There is a particular kind of energy in a business the week before a launch. The countdown, the teaser posts, the new photography, the sense that everything is building toward one big day. I understand the appeal. The reveal feels like the finish line after months of work.
The problem is that the reveal is not the finish line. It is barely the starting line. I have watched businesses pour their entire budget, and most of their emotional energy, into a single moment, only to feel the silence that follows when the applause they expected never quite arrives. The launch went off exactly as planned. The results did not.
That gap between a launch that goes well and a launch that lands is worth understanding, because it is rarely about the quality of the product. It is almost always about the thinking around it.
Buyers do not owe your idea the excitement you feel
Here is something most founders underestimate: the customer does not share your enthusiasm, and there are good psychological reasons why.
In a well known piece of research titled Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers, the Harvard marketing professor John Gourville described what he called the nine times problem. People overvalue what they already
own by roughly three times, simply because they own it. At the same time, the people who create a new product overvalue it by roughly three times, because they built it. Multiply those two together and
you get a gap of nine. The seller sees something nine times more attractive than the buyer does. You can read the summary on Harvard Business Review:
This is not a marketing detail. It is human nature. We are loss averse. Switching to something new means giving up something familiar, and the pain of that loss feels larger than the promise of a gain. So when you launch, you are not walking into a room of excited buyers. You are walking into a room of people quietly asking why they should change anything at all.
The lesson is simple and slightly humbling. A launch has to do more than announce. It has to lower the cost of changing, reduce the risk the buyer feels, and make the new option feel safer than staying put.
The product is rarely the reason a launch fails
If the product is usually fine, what goes wrong? The answer is uncomfortable, because it points back at us rather than the market.
In their Harvard Business Review article Why Most Product Launches Fail, Joan Schneider and Julie Hall found that the majority of new consumer products do not succeed, and that the cause is usually the launch process itself rather than the product. Companies launch before they are truly ready. They mistime the moment. They overpromise and let hype outrun what the product can actually deliver, which sets the customer up for disappointment on first contact. Or they quietly assume that a good product will market itself, and put almost nothing behind the moment it goes live.
I find that last one the most common among smaller businesses. The energy goes entirely into building the thing. The launch is treated as an afterthought, a single social post and a hopeful wait. A strong
product with a weak launch will always lose to an average product with a deliberate one.
Sometimes the launch that lands is the one nobody heard yet
Now for the part that complicates the usual advice. Not every launch should be loud.
There is a genuine argument, made well by teams who live through launches at Appcues
and by operators quoted in Entrepreneur, that the big splashy launch is often the wrong instinct. A soft
launch, released quietly to a smaller audience first, lets you learn what actually confuses people, fix it, and build proof before you spend on noise. The loud launch is a bet placed before you have any evidence. The quiet one is a bet placed after.
I do not think either camp is fully right. A soft launch with no plan to eventually go loud is just a product that never gets discovered. A loud launch with no learning behind it is expensive theatre. The real
skill is knowing which risk you are carrying, and sequencing accordingly.
What a launch actually is: a system, not a spike
The businesses that launch well have quietly stopped thinking about a day and started thinking about a system. Research first, so you understand what the buyer currently believes and holds on to. Clear
positioning, so the new thing feels like an obvious upgrade rather than a leap of faith. Content and proof that reduce risk. A plan for the weeks after launch, when the real buying decisions are actually made.
We saw this directly with Mobil 1, delivered through Lubricom. The work was not a single
reveal. It was brand identity, a proper website, and expert content built around a product launch, and that launch did not simply make a splash and fade. It became their main lead generation engine long
after the launch week was over. That is the difference between a spike and a system. A spike ends. A system keeps working.
If you take one idea from this, let it be this. Stop asking how to make your launch day bigger. Start asking how to make the weeks around it work harder, and how to make it genuinely easier for a cautious
buyer to say yes.
How MYC Delivers This
At MYC we treat a launch as commercial architecture, not a single event. When we ran the multichannel campaign for Mulino Bianco through Francis Busuttil and Sons, the point was never one dramatic moment; it was a coordinated push across paid media, social, video and offline that carried the message
well beyond launch week. If you are preparing to bring something new to market and you want it to land rather than simply go live, take a look at our work and let us build the system behind the moment.