Log home product development
I have written many a time about Luoman Log Homes (here and here). They came out to the market with a log mobile home and had great plans to take over the world and especially the North American market.
Like vrs. Love
I liked the TV ads, which they ran in relation to the mobile campaign and the product was functional. Unfortunately ”like” and ”functional” aren’t apparently deciding factors when people are making their mobile home purchasing decisions - try ”love” and ”beautiful” instead. What are your critical buying factors?
Failing to create a market
Looks like the pricing was a tad too high for this mobile home model and as they rolled it out as a product launch, they probably used reserved marketing budget before realizing any marked number of orders. It is difficult to innovate new products in log home industry.
Copycats in action
Think about it, isn’t it so that in any given style segment of log homes (rustic, modern, Scandinavian etc.) it is really hard to tell the difference between the manufacturers. Almost every day I come across the situation where customer comes and shows me the plans of some other log home manufacturer and asks to get a quotation of such a home. What do you think, can you distinguish between log home manufacturers by e.g. looking photos?
Collective development
It is virtually impossible to protect models, one can try, but then there are some slight changes in those final blueprints and hands are washed. This is just the way of the industry. But here we also find the secret of log home product development. Those tiny tweaks that we make to designs of other manufacturers, steadily inch the industry forward. We learn from others and with our fierce competition we collectively develop our product.
Lessons learned
What we can learn from Luoman Log Homes is that it can be costly to develop a brand new product category. One must have deep pockets to support the maturity of the segment and educating customers about new possibilities. I have no doubt that someday mobile log homes are a strong niche segment among log homes.
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