How could eTailers revolutionize the Product Business?

I spent a day this week with a very large etail company (who happens to be a customer so I won't name them). I am really impressed with the initiatives that this company is working on. They clearly know their strengths and are focused on things like analytics as they understand its key to building competitive barriers to less pure clicks-and-bricks competitors. That being said, I think etail could dial up their game a bit on game-changing initiatives. Amazon with their Kindle (which I love by the way) is a clear difference. But how are they really game-changing how they sell things?

I really believe etail is under-leveraging their online nature. Etail partnering with more sophisticated PMs could engage customers with prototype concepts and develop a much deeper relationship in the process. For example, all the product pages that I have seen on the big etail sites are of actual products with "Buy" being the key focus. What about concept pages with "Definitely Would Buy" on them? Most etail customers are highly-involved folks who love products and would love to scout out for the latest and greatest "New Thing". Keep the discussions underneath the product, the price (perhaps even do some interesting pricing models on the page?) and everything else. If a concept gets adequate interest, make it and provide it perhaps at a discount to the initial folks who showed interest.

The trade-off for product companies would obviously be awareness by competition of new concepts (though this could be obviated through IP protection and speed-to-market). But the pros vis-a-vis in-depth concept testing with involved consumers could be strong. And you could build product pipelines at earlier on in the product lifecycle to assist with monetization.

For etail, concept selling could be incredibly potent. It leverges significant competitive advantages against brick-and-mortar, drives people to your site to see what's new and builds a sales pipeline BEFORE the product is on the market. Pretty darn cool if you ask me.

Google AdWords for Concept Testing / Consumer Research?

One of the most frequent complaints I hear from Product Managers is about the lack of available dollars for consumer research. Here's one potential option that may have value to you if you're nearing release of a product and need to fine-tune your market positioning: Use Google AdWords!

The idea is simple: Create a landing page for your new product, along with an option for users to sign-up to hear more information when the product is available. Throw together several ads which test several different product positioning options. Use Google's relevant keywords to quickly define who might be looking for your product. Then horse-race the ads.

I know this is not representative and may yield issues when confidentiality is critical. But I really think the potential for AdWords for research is pretty interesting. You can learn a lot from click-through of the ads itself. You can have the ad not shown in geographies where your competition is based. You can even have your landing page change for folks coming from competitive websites if competition is an issue. Furthermore, I suspect with some solid work on this methodology by some intelligent market research people that it could be made representative and operational norms could eventually be developed.

Bigger benefits: Set-up time and costs are low and it can be as expensive or as inexpensive as you desire. And so long as you don't mislead (no "buy-now" stuff), you could use your landing page to develop a community of loyal users before the product is even launched. So long as you listen to them of course!

So far, my use of this methodology has only been as one tool to test a product name on a product improvement, though I think it has broader merit. Thoughts?