Go to the Gemba

“Gemba” is a Japanese term, literally “the real place”  and is a term used extensively in lean management, meaning, in effect, go to where it happens and look to understand. This originally meant the manufacturing floor, but just as easily translates to anywhere real work happens.

So often I see people doing dumb things, not because they want to, but because that is the way the process was designed, usually by someone who had not done a “gemba walk” but who had relied on a model that seemed sensible for some reason, but bore little relationship to the way things worked in real life.

Most things I see that lead to problems are caused by self indulgence, ego, and isolation, not incompetence or lack of care, so next time, stop yourself, and do a “gemba walk” to see how the users will interact with and use whatever it is you are designing.

 

Trade-offs required

“We will reduce the carbon going into the atmosphere, but it will not cost anyone (who votes) anything”. Sound familiar?

How about “The budget calls for increased sales and margins, which means we will have to do more with less people and put prices up “.

Never have I seen anything achieved without some sort of choice being made, even in the school yard, if you wanted to be friends with Bill, you could not be friends with Sam. Problem is, we all want it all, are unwilling to make the choices that enables stuff to get done, someone else can make the sacrifice, but not me Jack!

In 2009 Frit-O-Lay relaunched “Sun Chips”  a brand of potato crisp in bio-degradable packaging, something consumers, advocates, and uncle Tom Cobbley had been calling for long and loudly, but the trade-off was the bags were noisy! so noisy sales dropped, there was a facebook page set up to whinge, and U-Tube videos collected thousands of hits. The packaging was changed back to the old, environmentally destructive poly film.

Achieving anything requires that the objective be pursued, choices, sometimes tough ones, be made, compromises be struck, but nothing is achieved by pleasing everyone all the time.

 

“Advertainment” and brand building

The line between advertising to build brands and entertainment continues to blurr, and a whole new  arena for creativity has emerged in our marketing mix, unheralded amongst many  of those who run the corporations  that create most of our old fashioned mass marketing.

Last week in the UK, just talking to some kids on fancy bikes in the high street of Chichester, it was clear they were a band of brand apostles for Red Bull, but it wasn’t the exploits of Sebatian Vettel and Mark Webber in the F1 cars, but a bloke I had never heard of, Danny MacAskill, and his exploits on a push bike captured on u-tube that hooked them.

 Red Bull, a brand that has been rapidly built on extreme, aspirational, sports performance, does not make an appearance until the credits on this clip, a  7 minute “bike trip” but the impact on these kids was powerful. Advertainment, not advertising, created the powerful connection between the kids and the brand.

 

Innovation top 50 performers

Fast Company’s innovation list is out again, the top 50 for the year.

It includes the usual suspects, Google, Facebook, Linked-in, and so on, but also 2 retailers, Californian Trader Joes at 11, and Britain’s Marks & Spencer at 36. Both are surprising, although TJ’s is well understood in food industry circles as one of the real innovators, and everybody watches them, but M&S was a surprise to me.

A 100% housebrand retailer, one who does not accommodate the innovation efforts of its suppliers by enabling a proprietary brand margin for them, but who is a copier, albeit a very good one, is listed!

Conventional wisdom would say that the innovation efforts of a 100% housebrand retailer would be seriously compromised by the unavailability of the innovation powerhouses of FMCG, the multinational suppliers to get their brands on the shelf, and who are therefore not in the slightest bit interested in  assisting M&S to improve their position with consumers. Coventional wisdom it seems, is once again, not the most reliable measure.

Just for the record, Apple was number 1, no surprise there.

 

Social “Apponomics”

Apps are a part of our lives,  a very recent innovation, and they are not going away any time soon.

The commercial challenge is how to monetarise them, make a return, build a business. We have learnt since the tech bubble a decade ago that if you build it,  no matter how virtual, the rules of commerce still apply, you need to add real customer value before anyone will fork out their hard-earned on it.

Some of the best minds around are experimenting with ways to turn an buck from Apps, some like Amazon, Zappos, Apple, Groupon, and a few others have been sensationally successful, but for every success, there has been perhaps thousands of failures.

It is relatively  easy these days to get someone to “like” your post, or site, getting them to “buy” from it is much, much harder.