About the session

When More Marketing Didn’t Fix Adoption: What 15 Months of Product Experiments Taught Me About Positioning

Before increasing promotion, determine whether your adoption problem is reach, trust, positioning, urgency, or the offer itself – then design an experiment that tests one assumption at a time.

Over 15 months, I experimented with positioning, pricing, direct outreach, lead magnets, and different versions of a professional learning product for managers leading change. Some interventions generated attention and praise but almost no purchasing behavior, while narrowing the offer around an immediate job-to-be-done produced a different response. This talk examines what those experiments taught me about diagnosing an adoption problem before assuming you have a marketing problem.

What you will take away

• Diagnose whether an adoption problem is really about reach, trust, positioning, urgency, or the offer itself.
• Use focused experiments to test one adoption assumption at a time.
• Recognize when more marketing attention is not translating into purchasing behavior.

About the speaker

About Adriano

Adriano Pianesi, MBA, ACC, is a leadership educator, executive coach, and founder of Manager to Changemaker. He has spent more than 20 years designing leadership and organizational change programs and teaches at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. His work focuses on experimentation, adoption, and helping leaders turn ideas into measurable progress.