May 17, 2012 | Innovation, Marketing
Years ago I worked for a Marketing Director who took his job seriously. That meant that every pack design, advertisement, poster, publicity shot, research proposal, all the day to day business of a busy marketing function had to be OK’d by him.
Not only did this lead to a huge bottleneck, it virtually stopped anything worthwhile, or a bit different getting through the approval processes.
We had a bad, almost terminal, case of the “Marketing HiPPO’s”, highest paid persons opinion. Its sibling, highest paid persons wife’s opinion (HiPPW’sO) is the only condition affecting marketing management that I can think of that is worse.
The antidote is a dose of marketing by analytics, using data to guide decision making. When dealing with innovation, things that are genuinely new, data can be misleading because assumptions are easily fumbled, but for all other situations, data is king.
Edwards Deeming said years ago that “in God I trust, all others bring data” and that still holds, it is just that we are now able to gather and analyse so much more data, much better, giving us the potential for huge increases in the productivity of marketing investments.
The emergence of A/B testing via the web is in the process of transforming the way marketers approach their markets, by enabling lots of small scale experiments, differentiated offerings tested against a standard whose performance is understood. It is a technique used for years in labs, particularly in applications like optimising manufactured food products that are a mix of flavours, densities and textures, and has become routine in software development in the last decade.
Now with the advent of theflexibility and tools on the web, the potential for use is far wider, and the returns tangible.
May 14, 2012 | Branding, Marketing
Selecting the best branding option is a topic that always attracts debate, in any business I have worked with. What is usually missing in these conversations is a framework for the thinking, boundaries against which to measure the options.
This post from David Aaker offers a framework with considerable merit, and the webinar link in the post expands on the ideas.
Original thinking on marketing is hard to find, Aaker is original.
May 13, 2012 | Innovation, Strategy
For anyone interested in the evolution of the web, and the businesses that inhabit its ecosystems, particularly the big four, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, this Fast Company article is a must read.
The astonishing thing for me, is that the “big four” does not include Microsoft.
If you went back just a decade from today, Apple was virtually broke, Amazon and Google were barely on the radar, it would be another 4 years before Facebook would emerge from Mark Zuckerbergs dorm room at Harvard, and it would be only a year after Microsoft won a reversal of the court decision to force a breakup of the company under the US anti-trust legislation.
The pace of change has been astonishing, and it is scary to acknowledge that it is still accelerating.
May 11, 2012 | Change, Innovation
Creativity at its heart is a process of either something entirely different, or coming at something currently around by an entirely different path.
Weather it be a painting, piece of music, a new bit of electronic wizardry, or just a different way of combining inputs to generate an outcome, it is creative, on the edge, risky.
Risk assessment is by its nature a quantifying process of the past and projecting it forward. The conclusions are usually inhabited by assumptions of little change in the way things work, and come together, the future will be similar to the past, and we all know how well that works.
When we set out to commercialise creativity, we usually try to apply a risk assessment, hoping that oil and water will mix, this time.
Henry Ford, probably the most creative industrialist ever, when asked about the potential acceptance of his new fangled Model T, quipped “If I asked my potential customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster buggy”. He allowed creativity to have its head. I’m sure he considered risk, but never in the context of projecting the past into the future, he was able to see an entirely different future.
Creativity is by its nature risky, and without risk, we get no progress.
May 10, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Strategy
Nick Hortovanyi’s blog led me to this terrific short video on the “Pivot” a concept articulated by Eric Ries in his book “Lean Startup”.
The notion of the “Pivot” has always been there, I have seen it many times, and the willingness to fail, learn from the failure, and go again is the foundation of innovation success. However, it took Ries to articulate it so simply in the book, and to then make it more accessable by offering the examples in the video.
Everyone who has successfully brought an innovation to market, has project managed a successful commercialisation, or is responsible for a continuous improvement process will see bits of their projects in this notion of a Pivot.
