Why 2 in 5 launched products fail commercially, and why it's not about money or talent—it's about asking the right questions.

For example: Coca-Cola ran 190,000 blind taste tests before reformulating its flagship product. The research was rigorous. The result was catastrophic. They asked the wrong question.

Who this is for: Product managers, marketing leaders, and commercial strategists at life science tools and diagnostics firms who own launch success and want to understand why process matters more than budget or talent.

What the conversation covers: Matt and Jasmine explore why roughly 2 in 5 products that reach the market fail commercially, and why top-performing companies succeed at a rate of 76% while everyone else sits at 54%. The gap is not market conditions. It is process. Specifically, it is whether organisations ask the right questions of the right people before launch.

The key idea: Rigorous research with the wrong question fails just as badly as no research at all.

What you will learn:

• Why the commonly cited failure rates (90%, 3,000 ideas per success) are mythology, and what the actual data shows.
• How top-performing companies achieve 76% commercial success on product launches while competitors fail at 46%.
• Why failure in life science tools has a signature: customers never get pinned down, and evidence gets generated to satisfy internal reviewers rather than move purchase decisions.
• The mechanism of message drift: how products move away from the buyer as they move through approval cycles, and why people with the most approval authority are furthest from the customer.
• How synthetic customers built from your own win-loss data can surface what you have forgotten to ask, and where that approach falls short.
• Three tools for getting closer to the right question: articulating assumptions clearly, pre-mortems that stress-test failure scenarios, and small pilots before full product launch.

Chapters:

• [00:02] The Coca-Cola paradox: 190,000 taste tests, one catastrophe
• [00:25] The lesson everyone gets wrong: it is not about listening, it is about asking
• [02:54] Untangling the myths: 90% failure vs. 40% vs. 3,000 ideas
• [05:59] The 40% that actually holds up, and the 76% that separates top performers
• [07:16] Why failure is a process variable, not a market condition
• [08:30] How approval cycles pull the message away from the buyer
• [10:00] Grounded synthetic customers and the echo chamber problem
• [15:06] Why Coca-Cola asked a preference question when it needed to ask a purchase question
• [17:57] What to do at a stage gate review without synthetic customers
• [18:53] Pre-mortems: stress-testing assumptions through failure scenarios
• [20:24] Why pilots matter more than large-scale rollouts
• [21:09] Resources: The Buyer in the Loop and Strivenn's approach

Keywords: product launch failure, market research, product development, new product introduction, life science tools, synthetic customers, stage gates, voice of customer, buyer research, product definition, commercial success, Coca-Cola case study, pre-mortem, product roadmap

The full blog post is on Strivenn's website: strivenn.com/thinking/two-in-five-launched-products-fail-commercially

All citations for the data used in this episode are included there. Subscribe to A Splice of Life Science Marketing for weekly conversations on how to keep buyers in the room when everything else pulls you away from them.

Your scientific advisory board just told you the product works. It never told you whether anyone in that building is allowed to buy it.

Who this is for: Product managers and product marketing leaders selling into life science tools and diagnostics accounts.

Matt and Jasmine unpack why glowing feedback from a scientific advisory board so often gets mistaken for a buying signal. They walk through how purchase size changes who actually holds approval, why 40 to 60 percent of qualified B2B deals end in no decision at all, and how a simple pre-mortem exercise surfaces the objections a formal board will never say out loud.

Key idea: The real competitor isn't another platform, it's the buyer's inability to make switching feel safe enough to approve.

• Why a scientifically enthusiastic panel is not the same as a buying committee
• How purchase size, roughly the line around $100k, changes who signs off
• What Dixon and McKenna's research on B2B no-decision means for life science sales
• How to spot the gap by asking R&D partners pointed commercial questions
• Why a Gary Klein style pre-mortem gets more honest objections than a formal board
• How to reframe one advisory board agenda to include buyer's journey questions

• [00:20] Intro
• [00:49] The other half of the PM job
• [02:00] Where the gap shows up: the ELISA panel example
• [04:56] The case for a commercial advisory board
• [05:40] People problem or process problem
• [06:33] How to spot this happening to you
• [07:30] $50k versus $400k: does the same board reach both
• [08:58] Inside a CapEx committee
• [09:39] Dixon and McKenna: 40 to 60 percent no decision
• [11:01] Getting out of the office to find the real answer
• [11:51] The pre-mortem alternative
• [13:01] The one question that cuts across all of it
• [14:04] Where to find the full piece
• [14:39] The real competitor

Keywords: scientific advisory board, commercial advisory board, product management, life science marketing, buyer's journey, B2B no decision, switching costs, CapEx committee, procurement, pre-mortem, stage gate, buyer indecision

Watch the full conversation, subscribe for more life science marketing strategy, and visit https://strivenn.com/thinking/your-advisory-board-answers-science-questions for the complete piece. Book a call with the Strivenn team at https://strivenn.com/contact if you want help preparing for these commercial questions.

The pipes for AI are already in the ground. Everything slowing the seventh wave down now sits inside your organisation and inside your buying group, and none of it is a technology problem.

Who this is for: life science marketers, product leaders and commercial teams being asked what AI actually changes about their go-to-market.

Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Bar-Kochva work through Matt's blog post, Marketing's Seventh Wave Has a Buyer Problem, mapping seven waves of marketing from mass production in the 1880s to generative and agentic AI in 2023.

They cover why the installation phase for this wave is so much shorter than the ones before it, what is really blocking adoption inside businesses, and why personas built by internal consensus stopped being fit for purpose. The conversation ends on change fatigue and the emotional context that decides whether a deal closes.

Every organisation knows what groupthink looks like. Fewer have a name for group forgetting, which is what happens when months of buyer research collapse into a single customer quote that supports what the team had already decided.This one is for marketing leaders, product leads and commercial teams in life science tools and diagnostics who own the positioning and have to defend it upward.Matt Wilkinson joins Jasmine Gruia-Gray to talk about the origin of his new book, The Buyer in the Loop, and the decade of frustration behind it. The conversation moves from persona decks that get read once and never reopened, through the approval chain that chips away at buyer language edit by edit, to what it actually takes to build a synthetic customer grounded in evidence you already own. It closes on the practical question of where a team should start.KEY IDEA: Every function in the building carries its own private mental model of the customer. A grounded synthetic buyer gives the whole team one shared buyer to interrogate instead.WHAT YOU WILL LEARNWhy voice of customer research survives collection and then quietly disappears through the project that commissioned itHow the approval chain removes buyer language one small edit at a time, and why no single person is at faultWhere the idea of organisational gravity comes from and why naming a condition is the first step to treating itWhat grounded means in practice, and which evidence sources belong inside a synthetic customerThe tell that separates a grounded synthetic customer from a model roleplaying a job titleWhy sales holds a deep and narrow view of the buyer while marketing holds a broad and shallow one, and what happens when you combine themCHAPTERS[00:42] Buyers forming opinions inside AI conversations[03:40] Why the first book was abandoned[05:20] Group forgetting and the one quote that survives[07:46] Personas that serve one project and vanish[10:08] The question that changed in client conversations[11:05] The approval chain as a chisel[13:13] Where organisational gravity comes from[15:22] Naming a condition before you can treat it[17:33] What grounded actually means[20:08] Telling grounded from ungrounded[21:27] Two places to start tomorrow[24:14] Where to find The Buyer in the LoopKEYWORDSsynthetic customer, voice of customer, buyer personas, life science marketing, organisational gravity, product positioning, go to market strategy, buyer research, product launch, B2B marketing, grounded AI persona, The Buyer in the LoopWatch the full conversation and subscribe for new episodes of A Splice of Life Science Marketing. The Buyer in the Loop is available on Amazon worldwide. More on keeping the buyer present at strivenn.com.

Matt Wilkinson explains organisational gravity and why his new book, The Buyer in the Loop, exists to stop the buyer's voice getting sanded out of marketing.

Every persona gets built with real insight, then filed in a drawer within a month. Matt Wilkinson has watched it happen to his own clients for a decade, and he finally wrote a book about why.

This episode is for commercial leaders, product marketers, and anyone who has sat through a persona workshop that never got used again.

Matt joins Jasmine to mark the publication of his book, The Buyer in the Loop. They cover organisational gravity, the pull of legal review and internal habit that strips a message down until it sounds like everything else the company has ever said, and how synthetic customers can keep a buyer's real voice in the room long after the research wraps.

The buyer never left the room. The room just stopped paying them any attention.

• Why personas lose their grounding within weeks of being built, and what behavioural economics has to do with it
• The difference between a grounded synthetic customer model and one that is just an elaborate way of talking to yourself
• Jasmine's seven-layer cake analogy for what proper grounding actually requires
• Why cognitive surrender is less the risk than voice of customer amnesia
• How organisational gravity operates like legal review, leadership sign-off, and old habit pulling every message back down before it reaches the buyer

Get a copy of The Buyer in the Loop, out 22 July: https://strivenn.com/the-buyer-in-the-loop

• [00:18] Cold open
• [00:57] Organisational gravity introduced
• [03:20] Alison, the composite persona
• [06:31] Dune and the stakeholder review
• [08:08] Legal, regulatory, and the sandbag problem
• [09:08] Synthetic customers versus talking to yourself
• [10:37] The seven-layer cake of grounding
• [11:57] Cognitive surrender
• [16:28] Voice of customer amnesia
• [16:56] The vow at the end of the book
• [18:52] Speaker bureaus and knowing your audience
• [19:28] The one line for dinner parties
• [20:15] Where to get the book

Keywords: organisational gravity, synthetic customers, buyer persona, voice of customer, cognitive surrender, B2B marketing, life science marketing, The Buyer in the Loop, Matt Wilkinson, persona grounding, marketing approval process, customer obsession

Watch the full conversation, subscribe for new episodes of A Splice of Life Science Marketing, and visit strivenn.com to get your copy of The Buyer in the Loop https://strivenn.com/the-buyer-in-the-loop

Why most product teams cannot tell a dead project from an early one, and the three tests that separate a clean kill from a case worth tabling.

You have rebuilt the business case three times, the customer calls went fine, and it still feels like you are polishing a tombstone. The problem is rarely a missing kill decision or a missing budget, it is that a dead project and an early one look identical from the outside.

Who this is for: Product managers, R and D leads and gate committee members deciding whether to kill, fund or table a business case in life science tools and diagnostics.

Jasmine Gruia-Gray gives Matt Wilkinson a three-test diagnostic for telling a genuinely dead case from one that is merely early: is the data gap objective or epistemic, what does your most resistant buyer say, and is this a product problem or a timing problem. She then defends the framework against three sharp objections, including the honest admission that tabling a case can quietly become a way to never decide. The episode closes with the two moves a nervous product manager can make on Monday and the one question that exposes a narrative dressed up as data.

Key idea: Most teams do not have a kill problem or a funding problem; they cannot tell a dead project from an early one, and three tests separate them.

What you will learn:

• How to tell an objective data gap, which belongs in an assumption log, from an epistemic one, which means nobody has asked the right question yet
• Why running the case against your most resistant buyer surfaces adoption costs a favourable panel will never show you, using concordance data as the worked example
• How to separate a product problem from a timing problem, and when tabling with a dated re-entry trigger beats killing
• Why the synthetic buyer panel replaces the broken step of rebuilding the model rather than adding a fourth checkpoint
• Where the framework is exposed: a tabled case with no external owner tends to fade rather than die
• The two Monday moves and the one-sentence evidence test that tells you whether you have a business case or a story

Keywords: stage gate process, business case, product management, kill or table decision, synthetic buyer panel, voice of customer, life science tools, diagnostics commercialisation, R and D pipeline, market timing, PersonaAI, go-to-market

Watch, subscribe and go deeper: Read the full piece, When to Walk Away: Kill the Business Case or Just Table It, at strivenn.com under Thinking. If you want help running this diagnostic on your own pipeline, including the synthetic buyer panel, Strivenn offers a free thirty minute PersonaAI consultation with concrete next steps either way. Subscribe to A Splice of Life Science Marketing and find the details at strivenn.com.

For life science PMs: at the gate, treat dissenting customers as evidence. Enthusiast quotes only confirm what you hoped.

Most stage gate reviews are built to help a product pass. Whether it should pass is a different question, and the gate rarely asks it. That design produces confident decks and expensive mistakes.

Who this is for: product managers, commercial leaders and gate committee members in life science tools and diagnostics companies.

Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray examine why gate processes reward building a strong case, and why that skill has little to do with whether the product should exist. They walk through a falsification approach that asks what would kill a programme, then get specific about revenue forecasts, customer research and the one question that exposes a weak case. The falsification shift changes the question the gate asks. It leaves the template alone.

What you will learn:

• Why a skilled PM can pass a gate the product should have failed
• How to apply a falsification test to technical claims and to revenue forecasts
• The three questions that decide whether a forecast survives the room
• What to write on Monday when your gate template has no field for failure conditions
• Why one customer who already solved the problem tells you more than ten enthusiasts
• The one question to ask R and D, and why a pause is the signal you want

Chapters:

• [00:18] How gates end up rewarding optimism
• [01:38] The system is working as designed
• [02:15] Can the committee catch a well-built case?
• [03:04] The falsification shift: prove yourself wrong
• [03:48] Technical claims and revenue forecasts
• [05:03] Experience does not immunise a committee
• [05:41] The transparency penalty for honest PMs
• [06:30] The culture problem and the post-launch debrief
• [07:35] One experiment before the feasibility gate
• [08:23] Getting R and D to test what they believe in
• [08:57] Your first move on Monday
• [09:31] Rethinking the customer research section
• [09:54] The one question that cuts across all of it
• [10:19] Where to go next

Keywords: stage gate process, life science product management, product commercialisation, falsification testing, revenue forecasting, gate review, pre-mortem, buyer evidence, life science tools marketing, go-to-market strategy, product feasibility, commercial due diligence

Watch the full episode and subscribe to A Splice of Life Science Marketing.

Jasmine's full article, including the two-track Evidence Tier Framework and the gate-by-gate evidence standards for Feasibility, Development, Launch and Lifecycle, is at https://strivenn.com/thinking/stage-gates-should-ask-for-evidence-not-optimism.

If you have a gate coming up, book a growth consultation at https://strivenn.com/contact or find Jasmine on LinkedIn.

A tied poll becomes buyer segmentation once you read who chose each option and why.You run a poll and the result lands in a dead heat.

Most people mark it inconclusive and pick the option they already liked.This is for life science marketers and commercial leaders who run preference tests on positioning, covers, campaign assets or messaging hierarchies.

Matt Wilkinson ran three cover designs for his first book, The Buyer in the Loop, past two audiences at once: his LinkedIn network and a synthetic customer panel built from real buyer evidence. The headcount tied almost perfectly.

This conversation unpacks why that tie carried more signal than any single winner could have, and how re-reading the votes by role exposed four separate markets hiding inside one count.

Key idea: stop asking which option wins, start asking who chooses each option and why.

What you will learn

• Why a tied vote is a sign that you are looking at more than one marketHow to segment a poll by the role of each voter rather than the headline count
• What a synthetic customer panel can tell you before a single human votesHow to spot the option your audience wants that you never put on the table
• Where the honest limits of a small qualitative sample sit, and how to use it anyway
• The first move to make in the two hours after a tie lands

Chapters[

00:20] The shrug that misreads a tied poll[01:50] Fifteen covers down to three[

02:32] Nearly filing it as a failed experiment

[02:47] Four markets hiding inside one count

[04:03] Buying a signal as much as the content

[05:00] The panel that mapped the disagreement first

[06:16] Three objections a life sciences marketer would raise

[11:03] What to do in the first two hours[

11:32] The option nobody put on the table

[12:32] What this changes about preference testing

[13:46] Where to read the full blog

Watch the full conversation, subscribe for more life science marketing strategy, and read the original blog at https://strivenn.com/thinking/your-audience-poll-came-back-split-read-who-is-hiding-in-the-tie

Pride in the output is the human test AI cannot replace, and it is what protects life science brands.

Somewhere in your marketing stack right now, an AI is publishing faster than anyone can check it. This episode is about the quiet way that speed erodes trust before you notice it has gone.

Who this is for: CEOs, commercial leaders and marketers at life science tools and diagnostics companies who are scaling content with AI and cannot afford to be caught wrong.

Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray unpack why brand is trust, why a single drifted claim costs more in front of a scientist than in any consumer market, and how a claim-by-claim fact-check table, discernment and synthetic customers keep AI output dependable rather than merely fast.

Matt also shares the story behind his Marketing Week CX50 recognition as one of the top ten life sciences marketers in the UK, and why his first instinct was to assume it was a phishing scam.

For life science marketers: why AI engines judge your pages on structure and schema, and how to stop yours being misread.We ran an AI search audit on its own website and the tool recommended building three pillar pages that already existed. The cause was five characters at the end of a URL, which made three of the company's most important pages invisible to the AI engines that buyers now use to build shortlists.This conversation is for life science marketing leaders, brand managers and commercial teams who are investing in serious content and want that content to be found by AI search.Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray work through a real diagnostic on strivenn.com, from the misclassified pillar pages to the slug and schema gaps behind them. They cover why AI engines read structural signals rather than content quality, what citation compression means for visibility, and how to move the fix out of the SEO backlog and into a revenue conversation.Key idea: AI engines classify pages by structural signals like URL slugs and schema, so even your best content stays invisible if the architecture reads as tactical.What you will learn:How a single branded URL suffix can make an authority page read as a throwaway campaign asset to an AI crawlerWhy content quality and content visibility are coming apart as AI search growsWhat citation compression is and why being absent from a three to five brand result set matters more than rankingHow to run the diagnostic yourself with Claude Cowork instead of paying for an SEO agencyHow to reframe a schema fix as a revenue visibility project so it clears the developer backlogThe first move for a brand manager who runs the test and finds their pages missingChapters:[00:19] The audit that made us stop and think[01:53] What the SEO audit got wrong[02:43] Five characters at the end of a URL[03:20] AI reads a different set of signals[04:07] The minority-behaviour objection[06:01] Why the ROI case is future-looking[06:47] Confidence in the audit and fixing schema at scale[08:15] The backlog failure mode[09:19] Reframing the fix as revenue visibility[10:08] The brand manager's first move[10:56] The unconsidered set[11:26] Building in publicKeywords: AI search, AI discoverability, life science marketing, citation compression, schema markup, URL structure, generative engine optimisation, buyer consideration set, answer engine optimisation, HubSpot, B2B buying behaviour, StrivennWatch the full conversation, subscribe to A Splice of Life Science Marketing, and read the full blog at https://strivenn.com/thinking/i-ran-an-ai-seo-audit-on-my-own-site