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.
Jul 15, 2014 | Leadership, Small business, Strategy
The complexity of the world these days demands an approach to strategy that is counter intuitive, perhaps even a contrarian approach to the accepted best practice.
For decades managers have sweated and planned, and set out to execute, just to see the planning go to crap at the first hurdle, as things rarely happen as planned.
In the “MBA model”, you push on regardless, because it is planned, the resources gathered, prioritised and allocated, a “push” model of strategy development and deployment.
If the opposite were to happen with strategy, as it does with agile software development, how would it differ?
A continuous process of combining strategic hypothesis generation and A/B testing, going hand in hand with incremental resource allocation from a diverse pool of experts, rather than a from pool of available bodies? Seems to be a sensible alternative, so why don’t we do it?
Generally we people like certainty, clarity, and a minimum of ambiguity, and that comes with a detailed plan. Problem is, plans are only as good as our ability to read the future, which is generally pretty ordinary. The better way is to know the end point, and if we can manage the ambiguity and uncertainty, make our own away there based on the obstacles we encounter.
In this uncertain world, we need a compass, not a roadmap.
Maps tell us to move forward a defined distance, take a left, followed by a right, and so on, whereas a compass tells us the direction, not necessarily the detail of how to navigate the immediate terrain.
This counter intuitive approach to strategy is often what SME’s do, without really recognising it as such. They react to what is in front of them, rather than what they may have planned to do, often the plans do not even exist in a formal sense. Their challenge is to apply some focus on the longer term, not just the burning bridge they are standing on.
Jul 11, 2014 | Customers, Demand chains, Marketing, Strategy
Water will become the frontier of conflict and innovation in the C21
Few things are more important than how we feed ourselves, and get access to clean water. Without these, our species will not survive, our numbers are increasing rapidly, as the resources of the planet, particularly available water, are being consumed faster than replacement rates.
According to the UN, 6-8 million people die every year due to water related disease or disaster, 2.5 billion do not have access to sanitation, and nearly a billion do not have clean drinking water. I suspect water will be the root cause of much of the international power plays over the next 50 years.
During this last week, there was an international Peri Urban conference in Sydney. Much earnest discussion amongst the disappointingly low number of attendees went on, but there were some lessons that need to be learned beyond the gravity of the emerging crisis on water management:
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- For the message to get out beyond those in the room, the facts need to be told as stories to which the public can relate, and engage, creating pressure on decision makers to allocate some priority to the questions raised. Dry academic papers read by Professors with limited story-telling skills, accompanied by PowerPoint slides as comprehensible as the Rosetta stone will not cut the mustard. The presentations I saw reminded of Sir Ken Robinsons classic line that “the only purpose of academic bodies is to get their heads to meetings”.
- Marketing is not just useful, but required. Twitter is now routinely used by conference organisers to get their message out, and there was a handle for the conference, #periurban14, which attracted 1 tweet. Enough said.
- For Peri Urban agriculture to be a reality, it is required to be economically sustainable, as well as ecologically sustainable. Discussion of the barriers and challenges to economic sustainability would appear to me to be of vital interest to the topic, but beyond some minor consideration of the evolving organic market, little was said, the vital role of consumer demand ignored.
I presented at a workshop breakout session. A short presentation that set out to make the point that whatever happens in the growing part of the agricultural process, you still need a customer to make the whole thing commercially sustainable. There were so few people there that clearly the issue of commercial sustainability being a vital foundation of change has not yet resonated.
Conferences are a vital part of the process of creating and disseminating Intellectual capital. The presentations are just a small part of the mix, the relationships built with other conference attendees, and the opportunity to leverage the messages to wider audiences via social media are the real reasons conferences are worth the time and expense.
Jul 4, 2014 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Have you created the best content you can, original, insightful, and engaging, that demonstrates your domain knowledge, but it goes nowhere?
No impact, no interest, even your friends do not read it.
It is a bit like throwing a party and having nobody turn up.
Maybe you forgot to send invitations, after all, psychics are pretty rare, so people need to know the party is on.
Creating the content is just the same, the creation is only a part of the process, you also need to market the content, and having done that successfully, then the content can be judged by the response you get.
So, following are four simple, common sense marketing rules to apply to your precious content.
- Have a strategy that promises to deliver the objectives, creating the content is not enough.
- Use data, not just your gut. The data is freely available, and enormously valuable, use it.
- Learn by doing. The oldest and still the best game in town is to experiment and learn.
- Remember always that creating the content just gets you a ticket to the game, not the automatic right to play, that comes from elsewhere.
Jun 25, 2014 | Customers, Leadership, Strategy
courtesy Tom Fishburne. http://tomfishburne.com/2009/04/the-value-proposition.html
Customer Value has almost become a cliché, often trotted out to cover the lack of real marketing insight.
Effective articulation of customer value, and the business model and processes to deliver it remains at the core of those businesses that find success. It is particularly relevant to SME’s as they must ensure their very limited resources are focussed where they can best deliver outcomes, they do not have the benefit of scale to absorb mistakes.
Following is a list of questions frequently asked in strategy sessions that seek to identify, and give form to this most elusive notion of “Value”.
- Why do customers come to us rather than go to the competition?
- What customer needs are currently unmet or under met?
- How have customer needs changed in the last few years?
- If we project forward two years and look back, how have their needs changed now?
- What could our competitors do for our customers that we would like to be able to do?
- Where are new customers coming from, and why?
- Are there new competitors emerging that offer value different to ours?
- To what degree does our concerns for customers welfare really drive our =decision making
- What else could we do for customers?
- What could we do to attract new customers?
Each of these questions can and should generate a great deal of discussion, the quality of that discussion is a measure in itself of how well you understand “Why” you do what you do, rather than just What and How you do it.
The really successful companies do not wait for strategy session, they ask themselves these question every day, and the answers drive how they behave and interact with customers and prospects.
May 27, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Strategy
‘Rich red Fountain Tomato sauce”
Fountain Tomato Sauce used to be the market leader in NSW, daylight was second and third. This was a long time ago, and responsibility for the Fountain brand was my first real job as a product manager who had real accountability, and the power to make lasting brand and resource allocation decisions.
I walked into the job just as Franklins (remember them) launched a “No Frills” tomato sauce, at 0.69c on shelf against the 0.73 for Fountain. Our volumes immediately took a huge hit.
I still remember the details, and the near panic that ensued.
“No Frills” was the first real housebrand of the type that 25 years later would play a role in the demise of the Australian food processing industry.
The immediate instinct was to drop the price of Fountain, and compete aggressively, certainly that is what the sales people insisted on, but we took a different tack.
We increased the price, to 0.81c, improved the product a fraction by adding a few percentage points more of tomato paste, and advertised, giving consumers a reason to pay the extra. When it was just 3 cents, chances were the products were pretty similar, but when the difference was 0.12 cents, consumers recognised they were not the same, both might be tomato sauce, but they were not the same, and they had to make a conscious choice.
We set about telling people why Fountain cost more, and why it was a great choice over the “cheapie” delivering real value to them and their families, and they paid the extra, willingly. Our sales went up, margins were up, the MD was very happy, and I was over the moon.
Point was, we gave consumers a reason to buy Fountain, we told a story, entertained, informed, it was a significant premium, but not one that would break any budget, and the product was better, much better, and consumers felt better buying it and having it on their table.
“Rich Red Fountain Tomato Sauce, Australia’s finest red”.
Wish Youtube was around then, and I had copies of the radio ads, they are still the ads I am most proud of over a long marketing career, with many successful ad campaigns.
