Oct 30, 2013 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Engaged in an innovation portfolio management assignment a while ago, we struggled to define why one project should continue to suck up resources in preference to many other seemingly worthy opportunities.
We tried all sorts of models, financial and strategic, and really faced the dilemma that all were driven by assumptions, the accuracy of which was only clear with hindsight.
Not much help there.
We set about distilling all the data, assumptions, models, and diagrams we had collected into something simple, something that reflected more than the assumed commercial and strategic value of the initiatives, something we could engage with. We came up with one word, and three questions.
Value.
Who would benefit from this initiative?
Why was it better than anything else?
Why should anyone care?
Suddenly the task became clearer.
The discounted cash flows, competitive positioning, portfolio diagrams, and potential for stock exchange announcements became less important, and what become far more important was the simple notion, which of the projects we were considering was doing something important, solving a problem, adding value to someone unavailable elsewhere.
We developed a set of metrics covering these three questions we called the “Value Gap”
The value gap analysis between options to invest in new stuff became the benchmark for prioritizing projects, and we found there were only a very few from what had previously been a significant portfolio that were worth our effort.
Oct 29, 2013 | Change, Management, Social Media
There have always been gatekeepers, those people who make the decisions about what you see, what you have the opportunity to buy, and weather or not you can participate.
The supermarket buyer determines what goes on the shelves, a faceless committee determines what constitutes the levels of “obscene” and therefore what is able to be published, and the bloke running the big dipper determines that no-one under 5 feet can take the ride. The examples go on.
The web is usually cited as the medium that has democratised information, made it available to all with a computer, and that is true, but it has also introduced a new form of gatekeeper: the algorithm.
Algorithms are simply instructions that determine what computers do with a piece of information, or set of instructions, they are the guts of everything we now do with computers.
Facebooks “Edgerank” determines what you see on your newsfeed based on an algorithm, Google uses algorithms to determine the order of responses to a search, sign up to a blog site, and an algorithm sends you a “thanks for joining” note of some sort, and it is the application of algorithms to the mass of so called Big Data that is enabling the extraction of individual behavioral information.
Don’t kid yourself, the gatekeepers are still there, and probably more influential than ever, just better hidden, so you better understand how they work.
Oct 28, 2013 | Alliance management, Communication, Management
A story on myself.
I am in the middle of a small project that requires considerable collaboration amongst people not used to collaborating. Always challenging.
In a conversation over the weekend with an old mate, wise in the ways of start-ups, he offered me a gentle shove by saying:
“Sometimes people spend huge amounts of time and energy getting their ducks in a row. Pity it does not really matter what they look like, it is what you do with the ducks that counts”.
Ouch.
What are you doing with your ducks?
Oct 25, 2013 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
Sick of the avalanche of unsolicited email coming in to your inbox? Most of us are, and my kids have reacted by virtually turning email off, and using social media to communicate with those in their circles. The volumes however, continue to go up, as email simply works as a marketing medium when done well.
Clearly, there is a “Trinity” that is evolving in marketing as the 21st century progresses.
Social media
Email
Content.
All are different, all have a place, all require different skills to be successful.
Social media is a “pull” tool, voluntary, people are free to dip in and out at their discretion. The task of the marketer is to make it interesting, engaging, and provide the reasons for people to keep on coming back.
Email is a “push” tool. Find a mailing list, and send stuff out. However, with an open rate for unsolicited emails in the low single figures, the challenge is to not just get the mail opened, but to get the recipient to do something with it.
Content is the stuff that has to be interesting, and targeted to the concerns, problems, and competitive environment of the recipient, and is glue that holds email and social media together. Neither are likely to be any good without the glue of effective content.
So, to be effective, spend lots of effort getting the right glue, then making sure you use it properly.
Oct 23, 2013 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Innovation takes up a lot of my time, and whilst successfully bring a new product to market is a huge task, challenging as it does all sorts of personal, organisational and financial barriers, it can nevertheless be broken down into a few, simple two dimensional components.
- Needs that are unmet, Vs needs that are unrealised. Around us, there are unmet needs everywhere, and a better mousetrap can be successful. Unrealised needs are a different beast, as users do not know what they do not know, and it is only after they have seen a solution that they realise there is a need. Again, there are examples all around us products that were launched not as a competitor to an existing product, but to a need we had not articulated. Traditional market research works well identifying unmet needs, but is ineffective at identifying unrealised needs. In that case you need a tonally different set of skills, all too rare.
- Technology driven Vs Customer driven. Customers are constantly looking for ways to solve their problems more effectively, cheaply, and quickly, seeking as they do competitive advantage through the deployment of their limited resources. Getting close to customers in this endeavour is a core part of my marketing philosophy. Technology driven innovation by contrast is almost a solution seeking a problem, to unrealised need. Digital technology over the last 15 years has unleashed a huge wave of technology driven innovation, all seeking a place to be leveraged. The classic here, in view, is Jeff Han’s amazing 2006 TED talk, where he demonstrated what we would now call a touch screen, before anyone had thought of the numerous applications now so commonplace, we do not notice them.
In my view, the key organisational challenge is to have all the components of these two simple axes in the room at the same time. Customers articulating problems, technologists articulating the developments relevant to the conversation, from whichever domain they arise, intelligent, curious marketers, and a failure tolerant, ambiguity accepting, long term thinking management culture.
