Jun 24, 2010 | Change, Innovation
The current debate, such as it is in Australia in relation to climate change, is all about the sort of tax regime that is required, and the need to change peoples behavior, and thus their attitudes.
What all this misses is the fundamental nature of the change that is needed, and the only way to get that is to recognise that commercial opportunity and activity will eventually deliver the answers (although it is likely we will not like all of them) by providing the incentives and long term funding of technical development, then commercialising it.
The role of governments here should be to assist in creating the field in which the technology, typically with 20 year horizons, can evolve. Playing with today’s tax regime is just putting a band-aid on a gaping wound, useless as anything beyond a gesture.
This argument is put very convincingly by the clip “Reinventing Fire”, that has come from the Rocky Mountain Institute, a very smart think tank and technology developer in the US. It deserves some air-time.
Jun 22, 2010 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing
How often we confuse the reasons our customers buy products, how easy it is to get carried away with the technology, the newness, the features of the product, and never consider the real, usually unstated drivers of consumption.
Great marketing is always about the benefits a product brings to the consumer, and whilst the features play a role in delivering the benefits, consumers do not really care about features, they want what the product delivers for them.
Defining the benefits is marketing, translating them into images and words consumers can relate to is advertising, and is only a tiny slice of marketing, at the end of the process.
Poor products, no matter how well advertised, do not succeed, great products with poor marketing that fails to identify the benefits of consumption, usually fail, but even poorly advertised products with clear and distinctive benefits usually find their way, because consumers are generally smart enough to make the connection. It is this last distinction that may appear at first glance to be semantic, that is often the biggest hurdle. This great clip from Mad Men says it all.
Jun 21, 2010 | Management, Sales, Social Media
In this digital age, the first contact in most situations is digital, where the marginal cost is approaching zero.
This simple fact has changed the sales cycle, as this contact can evolve into an offer to become closer, or it can become a barrier, but each party understands implicitly that the rules have changed.
The question now is not one of how quickly can a sale be closed, or indeed, the process brought to an end, there is more dancing involved, largely because the dancing is cheap, non threatening, and easy. For a sales organisation, there are a few simple questions:
- What sort of digital tools do we need to engage key prospect groups?
- How much time and effort should be spent on developing a sale before we reach the go/no go point?
- How much do we need to give away?
“Give away” now more often than ever strays into the arena of proprietary IP, as efforts to differentiate and add value in a commoditised world accelerates
Jun 20, 2010 | Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
As the web makes the marginal cost of anything that can be delivered electronically too close to zero to measure, the world of marketing changes. Convincing the boss that the capacity of the rack of servers he has just shelled out for should be given away is often a challenge, but the reality is that the world is chasing itself down to free, and many businesses need to figure out how to make money in different ways. The solution still escapes most in the music industry (although Radiohead have done OK) but it is early days, or is it?
The original “free” product was the safety razor blade, given away by King Gillette in a whole array of ways, but a blade is not much good without the razor, and an industry was born, so this dilemma is not new, just different, and far more pervasive.
Jun 17, 2010 | Management, OE, Operations
It is pretty easy copying the machines, layouts, and the physical things that go towards producing something, and there are consultants by the thousand who will help if you need it.
What you cannot duplicate easily are the management systems that are deployed. You might get some, or even most of them, but copying their deployment in your circumstances, they will not work the same way. All the connections will not be the same, this is why you can read all you like about Toyota, or 3M, or Google, go and see the way they do things, and copy all you can, but it will not work the same way when you get it home.
Time and time again, I am asked to assist deploying the tools of Lean, 6 Sigma, TPS processes, and other tools, and to an extent it will deliver positive outcomes, but never as much as there is potential so long as it is an outsider driving the delivery.
This stuff has to be internalized and modified to suit the culture and processes in a business, and by the modification, carve your own path. Therefore, I find that most times, when there is a genuine wish to change, and thereby improve, rather than just a financial imperative to reduce costs, which is often the starting point, I find myself digging around in the bowels of organizations, looking at accounting systems, performance measurement, customer facing processes, and innovation processes, in an effort to modify behavior to accommodate the philosophies of improvement, and deploy the appropriate tools in a manner tailored to the needs of the organisation.
