Apr 27, 2010 | Category, Customers, Innovation, Sales
Running a qualitative consumer research group recently, one of the participants surprised me with a metaphor that made great sense.
She said that the web had taught her to “forage”, her term, looking for stuff of interest, checking out the Sku’s available in a category far more widely than previously, when she had a modest “basket” of regulars, with a pecking order, and that did not change much from month to month. This reminded her of the behavior of the farm dogs she had as a kid, always looking for something to eat, in different places, and always nuzzling something new when it became available, and then deciding if it had any interest.
The implications are pretty clear. Experimentation within categories, and into adjacent categories may have been encouraged by the transfer of the “nuzzling” behavior we undertake every day as we cruise the web, looking for tit-bits of interest.
Sku numbers in supermarkets have exploded over the last 20 years, and I always thought it was just the drive for shelf presence and often minor differentiation in an effort to attract consumers that had driven it, but perhaps there is something more primal in our reaction to variety.
Apr 26, 2010 | Innovation
Successful innovation rarely comes from a formulaic approach where the marketing department has a brainstorm, prioritises the outcomes, then they progress through a “gated” process culminating in a launch.
Usually it comes from three sources:
- A sufficiently close relationship with customers that you can see their challenges and opportunities, and are able to assemble your capabilities to assist them to compete successfully.
- A deep understanding of the strategic and competitive environment in which your customer lives, and a willingness and ability to change the rules as a result of that understanding.
- The culture in your organisation supports the innovation process automatically, it has become part of the DNA of the organsiation.
These three factors are mutually supportive, but scoring 2/3 is simply not good enough for consistently superior performance.
Apr 24, 2010 | Innovation, Uncategorized
Another of the management paradoxes littered through this blog , and this one is counter to almost everything I have ever written.
In the context of true innovation, listening to customers exclusively leads you to adjusting, improving, repackaging what you currently have.
Real innovation is about inventing the future, and you cannot do it just by playing with the present.
The following challenge is if you are smart enough to invent the future you also have to be smart enough to recognize it when you see it.
Kodak did not see digital photography, but they invented it, IBM struggled to see that the PC would take over from big box computing, Microsoft did not see the web, until it had almost passed them, but Steve Jobs did see touch as the replacement for the mouse, which he originally saw as the devise to democratize personal computers.
Apr 23, 2010 | Change, Personal Rant
It is a scary thought, but roughly 30% of our economy (Public sector expenditure) is subject to the disciplines of neither the market or democracy.
Bureaucracies are institutions that thrive on complexity, it is far easier to make an existing process more complex, than to take it apart and re-engineer it to make it more simple, and rarely is a process ditched, just leave it on the books in case it assists at some point, to frustrate somebody trying to do something useful that seeks to adjust the status quo.
This thought makes the addition of another bureaucratic process on to the management of the national health system, as agreed by our Federal and State pollies over the past week as a substitute for genuine reform of the system, even more scary.
None of the apparent root causes of the current mess have been addressed, they have just been moved around a bit, and political sweeteners (read, our tax dollars) have been added to provide the façade of improvement.
All that has happened is that a few more deckchairs have been added to the slippery sloping deck, and the colours have been mixed up a bit to make a better photograph.
Apr 22, 2010 | Demand chains, Leadership
Isn’t it interesting, when we pay for something, we have an expectation of what that transaction will deliver to us, but there is little sense of lingering obligation.
However, if we just do something for someone, any small piece of kindness or consideration, it creates a bond, and often a feeling of obligation that the kindness requires some reciprocal consideration on the part of the receiver.
This reciprocal obligation dynamic exists in the best demand chains, smoothing the path through the chain of whatever product or service the chain is set up to provide.
Any chain is a set of transactions, but the dynamics of a transaction are nowhere near as important to the individuals performing the transactions as the overall performance of the chain, and so they use initiative, alter the status quo, innovate, and generally go that bit extra, recognizing implicitly the value of the action to the performance of the chain, and it is their contribution to the performance of the chain that is the motivation, just completing the not the immediate transaction.
