The announcement that the UK is to regulate electronic cigarettes as non-prescription medicines from 2016 merely underlines their rapid and spectacular success as a less harmful alternative to smoking. Indeed research suggests that that around 1.3 million people currently use e-cigarettes in Britain, up from 700,000 a year ago.

The battery-operated devices, which enable users to inhale a nicotine-laced vapour, are the latest in a line of transformational products that not only engage with consumers but actually change their whole pattern of behaviour. You don’t have to think back too far for other examples: who, prior to the launch of the iPad, would have thought that the combination of a laptop and a mobile phone wouldn’t be sufficient for our needs? Who before Amazon introduced the Kindle really thought we’d be ditching our paperbacks and downloading novels onto an e-reader? And if you had told me 20 years ago that I would be paying to download music onto an MP3 player and not getting a physical product for my money, I would have thought you mad. Such is life in the digital age.

These are the success stories. The salient point, of course, is that for every iPad or Kindle, there are tens of thousands of products that never achieved their inventor’s goals. Planning for the moment when a revolutionary product achieves acceptance is, by the nature of the beast, really difficult because in many of these cases, target consumers will not be able to envisage using the proposed product until they actually do.

This makes conventional research approaches less than reliable because you are asking consumers to imagine behaviours for which they have no point of reference. Equally, however, a brand cannot commit expenditure to the launch of a left-field product without some insight on which to base its plans. Perhaps the starting point is not the product but the gap the product is intended to fill. Research about the problems consumers experience with the status quo will give an indication of whether and where there is a gap to be filled. It is then up to the ingenuity of the product designers to come up with something to meet the need. 
Thereafter, it is about selecting the likely early adopters and giving them the time to test the product properly as part of their everyday life. This is likely to involve smaller scale samples and for a longer than average timescale in order to benefit from the insights secured by consumers living with and using the product for an extended period. 

Choosing these people correctly is critical to success. There is a need to not only find “cool status” people whose desirability is likely to transfer to the product as a tacit endorsement, but it is perhaps just as important to find communities of people who are most likely to become eventual brand advocates. These are the people sufficiently passionate about the product and the problem it solves that they will want to become almost evangelical in their passion for it. These are the people who will have such an emotional attachment to the product that they will do much of your initial marketing for you. 

And when that’s all happened and news of your product is spreading virally, that’s the time to sit back, listen to your iPod and have a long draw on an e-cigarette.