Aug 6, 2014 | Governance, Management, Marketing
www.strategyaudit.com.au
Developing metrics to measure the impact and ROI of marketing is becoming a game of choice around competent boardroom tables. Given the level of marketing engagement around many of those tables, it seems sensible for marketers to take the initiative.
Following are seven headline parameters that make some sense and can be further broken up to match the enterprise specific strategies that should be in place. Measure yourself on a five point scale.
- Do you have a clear, 360 degree understanding of the behaviors, mindset, product category usage and limitations of your primary customers?
- Do you create, launch and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns with the deep involvement of data intelligence tools
- Do you” listen” for customers behavior and respond in real time?
- Are you engaged in all stages of the customers product usage life-cycle, from first consideration of the potential benefits to the assessment of operational performance?
- Can you optimise marketing investment across all channels and activity types?
- Are all the KPI’s across the business aligned to the desired market outcomes?
- Is the boardroom “on board” with all the above. (bad pun, sorry)
If you score less than 30, you need to do some work. One of the easiest ways to keep track of progress is a simple spider graph. Making the assessments a normal part of your marketing audit processes, recording progress in a simple way, then evaluating the performance and capability gaps that emerge will make you a more competitively effective enterprise.
Aug 5, 2014 | Branding, Collaboration, Marketing, Strategy
www.strategyaudit.com.au
Design is often used as a noun, “I will do a design for you” is common. However, when you think about it, design is not just a thing, an end product, it is a process of moving from an idea, through iterations, to a final form.
It is a verb.
“To design” should be a verb to be valued. Steve Jobs knew that, and executed on it, and as a result Apple became for a while, the most valuable corporation in the world, starting from the position of basket case.
“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works” Steve Jobs.
The “how it works” phrase implies not just that the product itself works in ways that deliver great value, but that the way it works is in sync with the mind of the customer.
Need to better define how your customers mind works?
Chances are the experience of the StrategyAudit team can help.
Aug 3, 2014 | Customers, Innovation
http://steveblank.com/2014/07/30/driving-corporate-innovation-design-thinking-customer-development/
Steve Blank is one of the real thinkers in the innovation space who gets out there into the weeds and gets stuff done.
The illustration at the top of this post is one from a recent post on his blog that makes the very real point that everything should start with the customer, not the product, inventors vision, financial potential, or any of the other usual drivers of activity.
So often we forget this simple truth.
The Lean startup and business model canvas methodology are fantastic ways to articulate your business, but without a customer you do not have one.
Design thinking is all about starting with the customer in mind, using the tools that are there to discover ways to add value to them in some way, and as a result, make a return on the way through.
It matters little if you are a micro business on the corner or a massive multinational, the principals are the same:
Be agile
Focus on the customer
Solve problems
Iterate
Encourage the dissenters
Leverage the wisdom of the crowd
Encourage chaos, and build the processes to distil and manage it
Differentiate
Design thinking is really hard, challenging work, but nowhere near as hard as design doing.
