Canadian Business has a piece called The downside of overnight success which talks about a paper called How Adoption Speed Affects the Abandonment of Cultural Tastes. (Fortune also covers it here.) The main argument of the research is not that certain products (like Crocs) don’t fall out of favor as fast at they do because of an inherent flaw in the product, but because they rose so fast.

This has HUGE implications for startups. Especially those starting to emerge from stealth mode. Here is three and a half paragraphs from the article.

*In other words, once something reaches a certain threshold of popularity, people no longer want to identify with it. And anything that reaches this threshold quickly has the added disadvantage of little built-up goodwill.

“This has important implications for businesses,” says Wharton professor Jonah Berger, who co-authored the study with Gaël Le Mens of Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra. “They think they want a thing to catch on quickly — we’ll have greater word-of-mouth, greater product awareness,” he says. But the findings suggest these products will have a shorter lifespan and be less successful overall.

The study’s results pose an interesting problem for companies: how do you launch a product and hit it big, just not too big or too quickly? One place to start, suggests Terry O’Reilly, a marketing consultant and the host of CBC Radio’s The Age of Persuasion, is to think less about the life of the product and more about the life of the brand. “My mantra to clients is to think long term,” says O’Reilly. “A brand is a long story, not a bunch of short bursts. You want to tell the same story with consistency, but in fresh ways. Clients are always looking between here and Christmas, or between Christmas and the March break, and they need to look beyond that.”

The brand story — the messages it evokes for the consumer — should stress a product’s quality and functionality so that its lifespan will extend long after any novelty wears off, says Claire Tsai of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “We need to give consumers a reason to stay with the product,” Tsai says. “People are not going to abandon something like President’s Choice chocolate chip cookies just because they want to disassociate themselves from someone else who eats them — the quality is not affected.”*

What’s your company’s messaging and strategy like? Is it going for flash-in-the-pan? Are you building products to meet today’s buzzwords? Or are building something for the future?

I’d be logging bugs on the former.