Nov 29, 2009 | Change, Innovation, Marketing
Firms are successful when all the elements of strategy development and execution are ‘aligned”, when functional management works in a synergistic manner, and when personal best interests are best served by serving the best interests of the firm.
When this happens, the whole “system” is working in an optimized manner.
The real challenge is to design a new system, one that redraws the rules of the business model, one that creates a new system.
The opportunities that will emerge out of meeting the challenges of climate change are going to be new systems, not a modified version of existing ones. It has always been this way with disruptive innovation.
Shai Agassi has evolved a new system to replace the car. He is testing with the assistance if the Israeli government a system of electric cars with points that replace the batteries, rather than just recharging, but you pay for the miles driven, not to buy and maintain the car.
Familiar?
If you have a mobile phone on some sort of a plan, that is the system that as been adapted by Agassi’s “Better Place” to provide transport, just the way a phone provides communication.
Nov 26, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Small businesses often do not spend the time to develop strategy, agreeing priorities, developing a point of difference, and a plan to execute in the marketplace, and as a result find themselves running harder and harder just to keep up.
Developing a Value Proposition to a defined group of customers is as important to a small business as it is to a large one, perhaps more so as an SME does not normally have the resources to waste on efforts that do offer a return, and they generally have less “fat” in the system to absorb mistakes.
Time spent planning up front always pays dividends in time and resource expenditure down the track.
Nov 25, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Small business
How do you engage with hundreds of people as “friends”?
On a personal level, you may engage deeply with a few, maybe a few dozen, electronically, there may be a group with a specific interest, and you engage with them in a club-type situation, 100 perhaps,150?, but any more and it is not engagement, just some sort of casual interaction, in no way engagement.
The depth of personal relationships simply do not scale.
Our social networking tools have opened new avenues of connection, they are wide, but the width is not a substitute for the depth that can only evolve through a personal connection.
This is one situation where numbers simply do not count, where less is often more, so do not confuse the numbers of contacts with quality of interaction.
Nov 23, 2009 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
The evolution of the commercial and legal frameworks within which we live has left us with the notion of the firm as a legal entity, responsible for its debts, its own destiny, and to its owners for a return on the capital risked to fund activities.
In all those capacities, a firm is like a person, but unlike a person, who has an existence as a result of its parents, a firm does not live in the abstract without a value proposition to customers.
Firms grow and prosper only while their products are in some way superior to those of their competitors, and when the products become stale, so do their prospects of success.
This simple fact of life should drive the innovation efforts in all businesses. As the guru Peter Drucker once said, “the only competitive advantage that is sustainable is the ability to out-innovate competitors”
Nov 19, 2009 | Innovation, Marketing
The innovation process has many faces, the one becoming increasingly accepted is that of constant, small scale experiments to see what works in the market, and what can be learned to improve the next iteration.
Sometimes when you experiment, something completely unanticipated comes up.
In the 80’s pharmaceutical giant Pfizer was conducting clinical trails on a drug they had called Sildenafil, which was designed to address the chest pain associated with angina.
It was only marginally successful, and never went to market, but during the trials, a curious, and completely unanticipated side effect became obvious, and Viagra was born.
Nov 18, 2009 | Branding, Change, Marketing
Market research now has a pretty sophisticated set of tools, all sorts of ways to tell you what to do, to provide a crutch for decision making, to take away the responsibility for making a courageous decision.
However, it boils down to the option of qualitative, collecting behavioral patterns, and quantitative collecting numbers.
Many years ago, as the one responsible for the marketing of Ski yogurt in Australia, I struggled with the reality that we were number two in the Australian market, just ahead of a swag of alternatives and the leader had nearly three times our share. Whatever we did, however much we spent, the number did not change much. One day, in a supermarket talking to a young Mum buying yogurt in a 1kg container, I noticed she had to use both hands to pick up the round container of Ski, complicated by the fact that her youngster was insisting on being carried. The solution was blindingly obvious, use a rectangular container, she could pick it up with one hand, and the side benefit was that it now fitted in the door of a domestic fridge, and gave retailers better shelf space efficiency.
The result of the launch of the new rctangular pack was a huge increase in Ski’s market share, and an appetite for innovation that enabled several other ideas to hit the market, resulting in leadership in a relatively short time.
The lesson is that the quantitative data did not tell us this stuff, it told us consumers, both the ones who preferred Ski, and those whose loyalty was to Yoplait, the market leader, were happy with the product, loved the taste, consistency, packaging, and so on, but the approval of the product just did not translate into sales beyond a modest market share. However, the behavioral insight coming from just watching how the product was handled, qualitative data, gave us the insight, it answered a question we had not thought to ask, and with which the consumer had no experience, as all tubs to that point were round, and nobody had suggested any alternative.
