If you want to create a product that won't be beaten by a competitor the first day it's launched: the safest way to success is to make a creative strategy with an understanding of the challenges and changes that occur during a product’s lifespan. Here is a list that should be established on just about every project. The list is not numbered since most of these principles work in synergy.

Understand Your Market: How do you create a strategy based on your market? Should you be differentiating by the least expensive, the most profound, the first to market, the most durable or the highest quality product? To know this, you must understand your market thoroughly. What are the needs? What core advantage is your potential client looking for, and in which ways would he/she benefit from your product in the long term. A creative strategy don't come from nowhere, it's much easier to create a unique brand/experience when you have taken the analysis with much consideration and significance. Understanding the market is like predicting the future of the industry, when you've discovered a strong will, it's up to you to make a new and wanted category out of that understanding.

Diverse Forms and Materials Say Different Things: Various experiences are already inside of peoples' minds. An easy example with design is that classical & ideal colors and finishes with durability are great when designing a product expected to have a long lifespan. These products should bring perpetuity to the experience so that they don’t become promptly out of date. Although, if you're aiming for a product with a high turnover rate, then you need to make an immediate impact and inflame an emotional purchase decision.

Technology: If the technology of the product becomes time-worn quickly, the product will obviously have a short lifespan. Products that are durable for many years are those which are beneficial to the client's needs and wants. If you want to make the technology for a long lasting product, you need to think big and create a strategy that is difficult to copy and improve. The harder it is to copy the longer it survives the market.

Functionality: Your design should be a reflection of your client's natural behaviours, it should be modelled for their patterns, not the other way around. People don't like to waste time on learning how to manage a new product when there're other products that are managed for them. Whether or not a product can be easily and intuitively taken apart and put back together becomes an essential feature if marketed right. Functionality is all about making your prospect's life as easy and time saving as possible!

The Market is the Battleground: If your new product has rapidly been replaced by a newer and "better" model, it shows that your work have not made an impact in your client's mind. And that mind is the most crucial component of the business. Speed of action is important but if your product doesn't have enough value in the prospect's perception, it will soon be replaced with one that does have enough value. This brings us back to the importance of understanding the industry you're in and the person you're communicating with.

Conclusion:

If your strategy is to create a product that is going to have a long lifespan, then a great way of doing this is to create a plan that focuses on high quality and exclusivity in perception.