Our top selling NMN has fatigued

We are witnessing a stagnating sales for out top seller, the NMN. This provides me an opportunity to talk about product lifecycle management - Launch, demand generation, demand sustenance and fatigue.

👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. This is Shan and I write every Sunday on business and marketing. Today we will talk about a recent challenge we are facing - stagnating sales of the top seller.

Hey, listen to me this week. Okay?

I decided to skip the video part today, for lack of time. I need to get my attire sorted for a wedding this weekend. Scoot screwed my schedule and I am having to fly on 30th morning instead of 1st Nov morning. So I need to rush the prep work earlier today (yes today evening, no more time left). On the good side, I will get to spend two extra mornings on the Jeju beaches. This is my first time in Jeju, so I am quite excited, haha.

Sleep tomorrow, but tonight, go crazy, All you gotta do is just meet me at the??

On the other hand, I am stressed out given our inventory situation. We are running on less than a week of inventory left before the Singles Day sale begins. This entire week we will be rushing new inventory production to meet the demand during 11.11. Any more delay and we have lost the demand. It’s a high-stress situation.

Back to the topic - the brand started out to be a “NMN” brand but since has branched out to new products. Two of our products bring in most revenue - NMN and Magnesium glycinate (MG). NMN is high AOV and hence has higher revenue mix while magnesium brings in higher unit volumes. We have gone through these stages

1. NMN Powder, 500 mg scoop - Priced most affordable, we won over TikTok audiences in Q4 2023.

2. NMN capsules 450 mg - Consumers started moving from powder to capsule for the ease of consumption.

3. Pure NMN capsules at 500 mg - This was a recent change in August 2024. We removed rice flour from the capsules, used a smaller capsule to improve experience and increased dosage to 500 mg from 450 mg. This was packaged in a brand new bottle design.

Next few things coming up for NMN, beside the super blend Protocol X (launching in Dec 2024)

1. NMN powder in a new packaging and spoon. Consumers have been complaining about the small spoon and mouth of the bottle, making it difficult to scoop the powder. Releasing in Nov 2024.

2. Liposome NMN - this will be a better capsule delivery technology. The absorption levels will be 4-5x higher. Expected release Jan-Feb 2025.

3. NMNH - This is still under consideration. The cost is way too high and benefits vs cost does not make sense as yet. Release date - uncertain.

But the question is why are we changing and upgrading so many things? Because the market is catching up to us. I am seeing this in ads, and sales. Every supplement brand has now launched NMN, and some have launched NAD. Now it is a question of who has got better distribution, reach and marketing dollars.

Let’s structure this discussion. We will talk about these things today.

1. What’s product lifecycle?

2. What’s fatigue and how to identify it?

3. How can you win over fatigue? (at least try)

Before I begin - you could replace our product with any other well-known product you know and it will be a similar story. It could be Nike Air Force One, Crocs clogs or Berkenstein’s. I have no idea why I got only footwear examples. I can think of names in perfumes and fragrances but their scale is smaller than footwear. Designer bags could be another case (still very small compared to shoes). Apparels designs have no shelf life - maybe 2-3 months at max. What do you think?

#1 What’s product lifecycle?

This is how a typical product life cycle looks. Read the description in the image - it is quite well described.

Most descriptive view of product lifecycle, source

A product goes through these stages

1. Take-off - Initial period, trying to get new consumers, more education is needed, users are not convinced and consumers ask - “what the hell is this?” and “why should I trust your claims?”. The product is bought by already curious ones. In our case, this was the biohackers who were influenced by Dr. David Sinclair and other key figures talking about NMN.

2. Growth - The friction goes down, more consumers start trying, they hear good reviews and start looking for trustable brands. Then they introduce the brand and product to their family and friends. Users start searching for the brand and the product. This would show increasing sales of other products in the lineup. You will see competition copying you since they start looking at sales and reviews.

3. Maturity - Your sales are steady, no new competition has come up, upstarts are dead already and you have survived. Consumers remember you for your hero products.

4. Decline - Either the customer interest dies down, or a better ingredient has been found (in supplement space). Or their could be regulatory change like NMN ban by FDA in United States. One of these reasons starts showing slowing sale number and possibly sudden shutdown.

The most important part of growth and maturity period is to generate cash for future reinvestment. Once you are in the decline with no big cash stash, you are waiting to die.

Are we in the decline stage? Absolutely not. We are in the take-off stage (and somewhat growth stage) since the market has heated up.

#2 What’s fatigue and how to identify it?

Fatigue is when you see stress in sales or conversion. Okay sorry, let me use simpler language. Fatigue is when

1. Product sales stagnate or don’t grow fast enough. The growth trajectory slows.

2. Consumers stop responding to your ads or offers. Low CTR on ads or conversion on website.

3. You need to invest more in marketing to get the same sale value. Alternatively, marketing ROI goes down.

Another simple definition - When you stop growing month on month, there is fatigue. There are only two stages of growth - Growth or fatigue. 😏

Fatigue also comes when you are unable to break out of your initial consumer base. You may have high repeat rate but not enough new users are convinced to buy your products.

Identifying fatigue is simpler once you understand the concept. Statistically, you can look at -

1. Total revenue generated by the product each month (daily and weekly as well).

2. Conversion rate of website and other platforms.

3. Marketing ROI (I look at MER)

4. Consumer enquiries on sale platforms or #calls on your business phone

There are more ways to identify fatigue, however, the interesting thing is - fatigue shows up in top level numbers. You don’t need to dig deep. You will dig deep to find out when it started and why is it happening?

Fatigue can be solved. It can be solved if you understand what’s causing it. Fatigue can come due to (excluding regulatory and compliance reasons) -

1. Competition - More brands selling the same thing. You missing the “differentiation”.

2. Fading interest - Benefits don’t hold up, or consumers move to next fad

3. Price - not necessarily lower, higher prices also attracts

4. After-purchase experience - Unhappy customers, delayed shipping or unresolved concerns (losing customer trust)

5. Addressable market size - You have tapped into more than 50% of the users who buy products similar to yours.

Can you think of more reasons? Let me know. 😁

#3 How to get over product fatigue?

We are fighting fatigue in NMN sales because the whole market is flooded with NMN from different brands, online as well as offline. When we started, there was no offline NMN brand. We failed to enter offline retail and that has hurt us.

However, you don’t choose to die because one channel did not materialise.

Three things that a brand can do to kill the fatigue are

1. Bring a new story to the product - could be the packaging, product itself, dosage, technology, collaboration, channel. This plays qualitatively into the product and brand story. This could also be new forms of ads or merchandising.

2. Upgrade the product - Functionally and objectively, upgrade the product. Make it better than every other product out in the market.

3. Reach new audience - Find new audience, they could be a new age group, a new city, and a new community. This could be achieved through hard work of networking and reaching out personally or by burning cash in marketing. I would say do both if you can.

What are we doing?

Stagnation is death. We don’t want to die. Here is what we are doing -

1. Increasing the product assortment - We believe in science and that guides the brand. To further strengthen the story, we are launching two new products which are “academic partnerships”. One is Protocol-X and another is LPC-DHA Omega-3 krill oil. These products cannot be easily copied by the market since such authority is difficult to get.

2. Product upgrades - We have updated the design and dosage of the existing line up. We are finally releasing the upgraded NMN powder with a better scoop. We increased the dosage of NMN capsules and made the capsules smaller and without any filler. We are launching new NMN formats - Liposome and NMNH.

3. New formats - We are also limited by the market size of people taking capsules. So, we are now going into sachets and jelly (oops, that was a secret).

Beyond this, we are rejigging our social media. We have done a lot of work in the last 6 months and it has seemingly worked. We need to get to the next stage of social media followership and engagement. We also need to learn to communicate better with prospective audience.

In short, lot of efforts to get over this fatigue.

Have you noticed any other signs of fatigue? Let me know. 🤞

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Thanks for reading again. Please do like and share if this helped.

I was hoping to finish today’s writing by 5 pm and then go out for dinner and shopping. Instead, I chose to nap and now it’s almost 7.30 pm.

Rose has broken records and Jisoo loves her 💖

You are kidding if you haven’t danced to Apt yet. If you haven’t shake your head Like Rose now! 😁

Okay bbye now! Have a great week ahead! Drink enough water and pee on time. 🥛🥛🥛🥛🥛