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.
Jun 18, 2014 | Collaboration, Customers, retail, Small business
Strategyaudit.com.au
Chain stores dominate our grocery shopping environment, they have developed all the advantages of scale, and use them to the advantage of their shareholders, by delivering returns, and to customers by delivering low prices.
The model works, in Australia 75% of the grocery shopping dollar goes to one of two retailers, and small retailers have been decimated.
However, small retailers are making a comeback, the ones left are good, good enough to deliver value to their customers in different ways to the chains, and they are making a good bob.
They compete with a variety of strategies, all of which have elements of the following 10 rules.
- Make the store look warm, friendly, inviting, and, importantly, current. The last Valentines day, a client put in huge volumes of roses on which he put some very cheap prices compared to the highway robbery employed elsewhere, but he also had a promotion of Chocolates and a voucher for collaborative promotion with the grog shop two doors down, on sale. He did sell a lot of roses, a pile of chocolate, and got a slice from the bubbles the grog shop sold.
- Collaborative retailing is a really effective way of building sales and relationship s with customers. The example above worked really well, as have others that group retailers of differing women’s apparel, dresses, shoes, hairdressing services, et al together.
- Experiment, with everything under your control. Store layout, range, price, stock weight and position, proximity of complementary products, promotional activity, it is a long list limited only by imagination and energy. However, experimenting is not the only game, you need to track results, now easy via the electronic tills, and if nothing else, Excel pivot tables. Understand what works, and improve it for next time, eliminating the things that prove not to work. It is a simple formula, challenging to implement consistently, but in principal, simple. Learn as you go, and as the you experiment more, you will also find your depth of tacit knowledge also increases. A small business can put in place an experiment, have the outcomes and a resulting tactical outlook while their bigger competitors are still trying to get a meeting together to decide if it may be a good idea.
- Use technology widely, not just in the tracking of sales, but in the management of your operations, and most importantly, the engagement of your consumers. Make your website the co-ordination centre of your marketing efforts. Mobile, email, social media platforms, blog posts, all potentially have a place, but mostly you cannot do them all, so make informed choices. However, you need to recognise that digital is not free, there are both operating and opportunity costs attached, and for most SME’s, a capability gap. Outsource all you can, which is getting easier by the day, and importantly, track the results of everything you are doing on line
- Make sure you have a website that does you justice. A mate sent this to me this link to Victor Churchill, a butcher in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and now I just want to go there.
- Personalise, personalise, personalise. The chain retailers have “mass market” business model, they cannot easily personalise their offer to the customer base. They may have a technology edge because they have the resources, but how often does the casual filling the shelves greet a customer by name? Enquire after their kids, and ask how the fruit basket you supplied last week for the centre-piece of your dinner party work out?.
- Specialise in what you do best, deliver “depth” to consumers where the mass retailers can only deliver “breadth” to a mass market.
- Be the expert in your category. If you are a produce retailer, know where the best strawberries come from, and when they will be available , similarly, a fashion retailer needs to be current with the trendsetters, to know what is coming, what will accessorise easily, and how the fashion can be tailored to the market they are serving. Most people want to deal with, and seek the affirmation of experts, be the expert, and they will keep on coming back.
- Apply the disciplines of Category Management to your inventory and space management. In its simplest form, Category Management is a mindset that seeks to allocate finite and valuable shelf space on the basis of maximising the customer experience, while delivering optimised profitability and long term commercial sustainability. This can get as complicated as you like, but for an SME, building an excel database leveraging the capability of pivot tables, tools virtually every business has sitting on their PC already, is sufficient to get started.
- Watch the cash. This one always gets a run. Retailers greatest cost, and biggest risk is usually inventory, and inventory is a raging consumer of cash. On the other hand, the oldest adage in retailing is “stock sells stock”, so there is a tightrope to be walked. Perhaps the most valuable, and in SME’s underused, performance measure in retailing is stock turn. Use it aggressively to fine tune your range, and inventory.
None of these “rules” are of great value separately, but together, they offer a potent competitive tool set for small retailers.
Jun 11, 2014 | Collaboration, Customers, Social Media
There are many contenders for the most effective social media too around, and just as many promoters.
“Email marketing” and “Content marketing” usually occupy the first and second places, but to my mind are one and the same. Email does not work without content, and vice versa.
Further down the list you get bombarded with the names of platforms, facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, et al, then tools and services like SEO, landing page optimisation, affiliate selling, yada, yada, yada.
The one tool we know for sure that maximises the chances of success is a real conversation.
Remember them?
Two people sit down, exchange views and ideas, interact as humans have throughout our history, and determine if there is mutual value in doing business.
Personal communication can be confronting, is extremely resource hungry, hard to schedule, and is still a punt, but perhaps those real hurdles are why it still works best.
The management challenge is to deploy the limited and expensive resources for a return from this most effective of social media investments, your obvious commitment to the other person.
Jun 4, 2014 | Branding, Collaboration, Leadership, Marketing
Debate and argument fills a vital role in all parts of our lives, it is what makes us human, this capacity to be able to think and communicate, rather than just react.
For an extended period with two different employers, I reported as marketing manager to a bloke with whom over time I developed a rapport that enabled us to achieve some great things, creative and commercial. We won awards, opened some new markets and redefined others, and importantly, delivered market share, brand credibility and profits to the employers.
Reflecting on the experience, now a long time ago, it seemed to me that there were 7 factors at work:
- Play devils advocate. We seemed to just fall into this habit of taking the opposite view of the one expressed, to debate the point by seeking the holes in the data, logic, and assumptions, irrespective of our own starting point. We usually ended up somewhere other than either of our respective starting points.
- Never allow authority to override or diminish the views of others. At no time during a debate was my view overridden by his organisational authority. From time to time after the debate was over, with some level of disagreement still present, he had to make a decision contrary to my expressed position. However, when those occasions arose, I was happy to go along, and execute he decision, as the process we had gone through was thorough, and my views had been listed to, and taken into account prior to the decision. Some form of “due process” had occurred.
- Recognise when you are wrong, and be very open about it. What more needs to be said? Very few things build respect quicker than someone being able to concede that they were wrong, and respect is vital for an open, non personal debate.
- Encourage absolutely open communication. This requires lots of trust, and goes with the point above, as respect is a vial element in trust. It is behaviour that engenders trust, not words. People watch the behaviour of others, and over time make a judgement about the level of trust they are prepared to offer. Trust is hard won, but easily lost.
- Openly question the foundations and logic of your own position. Being prepared to not just have others question your position, but being prepared to shoot your own scared cows, and we all have them, enables others to do the same thing with confidence that the commentary is never personal, and is welcome.
- Be prepared to enable, more than just allow, projects and ideas you disagree with to proceed. From time to time, when a project is allowed to proceed that may fail, and the “boss” thinks failure is likely, but gets behind it the impact on the creative energy is enormous. I recall one project that would completely disrupt the category the launch was aimed at, was allowed to proceed on the basis of my instinct. We had done lots of research, tested to the wahzoo, but this was a genuine innovation, something consumers had not seen, so asking them what they thought was encouraging but inconclusive, as they had no actual context against which the idea could be judged. There was considerable capital investment involved, and the “boss” went in aggressively to bat for the project, whist quietly being less than convinced. For an organisational subordinate to have that level of support is enormously empowering. Luckily, the launch was an enormous strategic and financial success.
- Be prepared for failure, but be determined to learn from it. We learn more from than we do from or success, so being prepared to experiment, adjust assumptions and try again is fundamental to learning. As part of the preparation for the launch referred to above, I had a range of plans prepared that would ensure that in the event of failure, the financial losses would be outweighed by the organisational learning that occurred. This was just good prudential management practise, and fortunately those plans were not necessary.
An unusually long post this morning, glad you go this far. It was triggered by a post I read earlier in which Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar reflected on the reasons for his creative success. Many were reminiscent of mine, and his notion of a “brainstrust” is extremely attractive.
Such is the source of blog post ideas, a spark, combined with personal experience. This answers one of the questions I am often asked as I continue to find stuff sufficiently interesting to me, and hopefully to a few others, to post.
May 28, 2014 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Leadership, Small business
Mojowire.net.au
Tonight is the first Origin game of 2014, and so I expect to hear lots of people using sporting analogies over the next few weeks, particularly football.
Sporting analogies abound in business, “A team of champions does not make a champion team”
How many time have you heard that?
As management layers are removed, and the management culture evolves rapidly towards recognising the value of teams in a commercial context, we often use the sporting team as the foundation of the commercial team .
Familiarity, known skills, interpersonal relationships, all that stuff gets considered as a team is put together. Sometimes of course, in the real world teams are put together with whoever is to hand, has some spare time, is at the water cooler too often.
We confuse this simplified sporting stuff, useful in its own context, with the key components of a commercial team faced with commercial challenges.
In that case, you need a range of technical and domain skills, a questioning mentality, and a willingness to try things, and usually some diversity, some new or unusual blood being injected to create a sense of discomfort that always precedes game changing ideas and insights.
Unlike sporting events, which last for a hour, more or less, commercial challenges are way longer term, when the micro interaction is important more as a learning event than a game breaker.
Apr 17, 2014 | Change, Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
The most successful people I have seen over 40 years of business share one crucial characteristic.
Curiosity.
The successful are insatiably curious, it spans all aspects of their lives, not just the parts that are spent working at what pays the mortgage, but across all aspects of their private and social lives as well as their commercial ones.
Curiosity also in independent of the size of the enterprise, and often happens in clusters, as one curious person infect those around them. The Medici effect.
Supporting the curiosity are a number of specific behaviours I have observed, that to a greater of lesser extend are exhibited by all, they are in effect the enabling behaviours of their curiosity.
- They are always asking questions, some whilst knowing that the receiver has no idea of the answer, or even if one exists.
- They seek alternative views everywhere, encouraging others to play devils advocate
- They network relentlessly, seeking a diversity of views, not just on their areas of specific interest, but across the span of human activity
- They read widely, then test what they have read against their own experience
- They are curious about advances and ideas outside their area of immediate focus
- They observe, play “fly on the wall” looking for “jobs to be done” by all the products being used in the environment they are observing.
- They experiment relentlessly, often in very small ways, and explicitly set out to understand what worked, what did not, and why.
- They record everything, by making notes, using a Dictaphone, and more recently using the plethora of mobile devices to great benefit.
Perhaps you can add some more, but at least ask yourself how many of these you display, and are they displayed by those around you.
