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 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.
Apr 29, 2012 | Change, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
It is simply a fact of life that digital media is evolving faster than the existing institutions around it, particularly the regulatory ones.
The decision during the week to reverse the Federal Courts decision on the streaming of “almost live” NRL and AFL games by Optus, determining that after all, it was a breach of copyright, is a case in point. Regardless of the merits of either sides case, and the logic that the continuing success of the professional codes relies on funding from TV rights, the world has moved on, but the business model of the professional games has not.
We will wait around for another year or so until the high court comes down with a decision, and there will be a winner and loser, but from a long term perspective, both will be losers, simply because another year has been wasted trying to shore up the gunwales against Digital Darwinism, and we all know how successful that has been in the music industry, newspaper publishing, and a host of others.
If both games wish to engage with youngsters, those who will be around for a while to fund the games by watching, buying branded gear, attending events, they need to consider how these youngsters consume entertainment, and adapt.
The current copyright law was conceived in the 1700’s, and whilst it has evolved, it no longer is a reflection of society, but a distorted shadow vainly trying to keep up with technical changes happening at digital speed.
Apr 23, 2012 | Change, Innovation, Social Media
This is a term coined by Clay Shirky to describe the ideas, skills, knowledge that resides in peoples minds, and on enterprise shelves, unused, ignored, and sometimes actively avoided.
His argument is that there has been a huge shift in behavior, no longer are we passive consumers of media, our expectation now is that we are also able to produce and share, and we all want to, hence the growth of social media. The story of the little girl looking for the mouse behind the TV screen towards the end of this talk on his notion of Cognitive Surplus, says it all.
It seems to me however, that we can push the idea a bit further, fragmenting it, focusing our thoughts a bit more, to recognise the potential value of the pieces.
A product development brainstorming is nothing more than an effort to identify the knowledge, that sits around in peoples heads, research labs archives, unwanted prototypes, incomplete projects, solutions to customer problems suppliers have but do not recognise, and so on, but they are wasted because nothing is being done.
An Innovation surplus?
An idea that has exploded around Australia is that of “Mens Shed” an organisation that uses the skills of older blokes to make a contribution to their community, some retired, others just wanting to do something useful . This may be an example of a “Social Surplus”.
When you look around, there are many situations where unused brainpower and skills can be used better than they are now, finding a way to do that is leveraging the surplus that exists, and we all benefit.
