There is a popular opinion among some people that only creating a unique product leads to building a successful company. Personally, I do not consider uniqueness of a product as the main factor of its success, I think that marketing play much bigger role in business’ growth.
First, product’s originality does not always means its success because new product means risks which not every company wants to experience. For instance, in 1995, Japanese company Nintendo released its brand new console called Virtual Boy. It was the first game console using technology of virtual reality which means that this product was pretty unusual for its year of release. However, very few people decided to buy this console due to its very uncomfortable helmet and controller. The lack of games was the reason of its failure as well, there were only about 20 games while others Nintendo consoles as NES and Game Boy had hundreds of different games.
However, if originality is not the key factor for company’s success, marketing is. Nowadays, there are lots of smartphones and all of them are the same for ordinary users, however IPhone by Apple remains the status of the most popular phone brand in the world. The secret is simple, the American company has a very smart marketing strategy, they use method of product placement to promote their brand. If you watch any recent movie, you will probably see fictional characters using the popular product by Apple. You will see not only iPhones but other ABesidepple’s devices like MacBook and IPod. Indeed, Apple is not only company using the product placement techniques, you can see some soda drinks like Coca-Cola and Pepsi in movies as well.
In conclusion, unique product does not always mean the success, there is very clear example of Virtual Boy by Nintendo. However, some companies as Coca-Cola and Apple use some marketing techniques and achieve increase of their sales.