Oct 23, 2013 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Innovation takes up a lot of my time, and whilst successfully bring a new product to market is a huge task, challenging as it does all sorts of personal, organisational and financial barriers, it can nevertheless be broken down into a few, simple two dimensional components.
- Needs that are unmet, Vs needs that are unrealised. Around us, there are unmet needs everywhere, and a better mousetrap can be successful. Unrealised needs are a different beast, as users do not know what they do not know, and it is only after they have seen a solution that they realise there is a need. Again, there are examples all around us products that were launched not as a competitor to an existing product, but to a need we had not articulated. Traditional market research works well identifying unmet needs, but is ineffective at identifying unrealised needs. In that case you need a tonally different set of skills, all too rare.
- Technology driven Vs Customer driven. Customers are constantly looking for ways to solve their problems more effectively, cheaply, and quickly, seeking as they do competitive advantage through the deployment of their limited resources. Getting close to customers in this endeavour is a core part of my marketing philosophy. Technology driven innovation by contrast is almost a solution seeking a problem, to unrealised need. Digital technology over the last 15 years has unleashed a huge wave of technology driven innovation, all seeking a place to be leveraged. The classic here, in view, is Jeff Han’s amazing 2006 TED talk, where he demonstrated what we would now call a touch screen, before anyone had thought of the numerous applications now so commonplace, we do not notice them.
In my view, the key organisational challenge is to have all the components of these two simple axes in the room at the same time. Customers articulating problems, technologists articulating the developments relevant to the conversation, from whichever domain they arise, intelligent, curious marketers, and a failure tolerant, ambiguity accepting, long term thinking management culture.
Oct 17, 2013 | Branding, Category, Customers, Innovation, Marketing
Cottage cheese is a pretty dull category in supermarkets. A relatively tasteless, low calorie (therefore it must taste crappy, right?), price competitive, group of products.
Yes, so we thought.
Years ago, 25 years in fact, I was the GM Marketing of a major Australian diary company with the leading brand of Cottage cheese. I thought all of the above, and we struggled to make any return, let alone one that was a competitive use of the capital tied up.
We had very good data, for the time, remembering this is pre-internet. We knew who sold our, and competitive brands in what quantities, and pretty much to whom, as we had good U&A (usage and attitude) data. As a result we were able to segment the market pretty well by usage, demographics, geography, and basket. However, whatever we did, we had trouble moving the sales needle.
Almost as a last resort, we ran a small recipe competition on the side of the packs, easy, low cost, a prize draw of a holiday at a health resort on the Gold Coast. We got a few hundred entries, a failure by our pre-agreed metrics, so we thought we knew something else that did not work. However, because there were so few, we took the time (there was a young work experience person to utilise at the time) to write back to all the entrants saying thanks for entering, and sending them a few of the top recipes we had received, just to be polite.
The response astonished us.
A very high number wrote back saying thanks for the recipes, and telling us how they used the products, what was right and wrong about them, all sorts of information we did not have, or had not thought was relevant.
Turned out, cottage cheese was not a “calorie avoidance food” it had uses in all sorts of areas by all sorts of people we had not seen as in our market, in fact, had not considered. The job we assumed was being done by cottage cheese, deduced by looking at our data, from our perspective, was not the job that consumers were hiring the product to do.
Long story short, we slowly built a database, all done by hand and snail mail, so it was a significant resource sink, a cottage cheese club in effect that shared recipes, stories, and funny events. All pretty mundane these days with the tools available, but a major undertaking in 1988.
Our sales went up, our promotional spend with retailers dropped, our price sensitivity reduced significantly, and had several successful range extensions, and we suddenly were making very good returns.
The moral is, make sure you understand the job that consumers hire your product to do, make sure you see it through the consumers eyes, not yours.
Oh, and two more lessons,
1. Social media marketing is not new, just the tools now availabel make it easier, so now everybody is doing it.
2. Cottage cheese is really very nice, 20 years after leaving the company, i still buy and use the product, in all sorts of odd ways, learnt from the “clubbies”. Brand building by another name.
Sep 27, 2013 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
People instinctively like consistency and predictability, it allows them to be comfortable, and make judgments without too much risk of being wrong because the status quo has been maintained.
Helping out with a competitive pitch recently I was shown a list of the things that had to be covered, a checklist for the expected content of the presentations, a list of largely irrelevant , administrative crap, and we had only 45 minutes.
With some trepidation, we threw out the list, and built a presentation that demonstrated that the agency I was working with had the experience, and capabilities to break the challenges faced by the “pitchee” down into manageable chunks that could be addressed creatively, responsibly, and with a budget that was less than the one nominated, (which we knew was not gong to be forthcoming in any event)
We knew during the conversation that followed that the business had been won, despite the ignoring of the stated ground-rules. The sorts of comments that were made were that our approach had been “fresh” and “creative” and that we had “thought outside the box” all cliché’s, but nice nevertheless. However, what it really demonstrates is the we won because we were different.
Our competitors had followed the rules, and been boring as a result, we were not boring, had taken a risk that with hindsight was not a risk at all, so we won.
So, any time you hear something that sounds like “the client made me do it” translate it as “I did not have the balls or imagination to be original, different, and interesting”.
Sep 3, 2013 | Governance, Innovation, Marketing, Operations, Strategy
I have just been a part of a post investment review with a client, looking at what a significant investment in capital equipment has delivered, compared to the planned outcomes, that underpinned the Capex.
Not a pretty sight, and now they have to learn the lessons to avoid repeating the mistakes.
Over the course of the exercise, the marketing manager consistently blathered about the accountability of the engineering staff in the process, but when cornered on marketing accountability to the product and market specifications against which the investment was made, and the effectiveness of the launch, and post launch activity, he had nothing.
Marketers have cried forever that the money spent on marketing is an investment, not an expense, but often this has a hint of self preservation about it.
However, if we are fair dinkum (Aussie for honest with ourselves) we should also be prepared to undergo a rigorous process to measure the effectiveness of our marketing investment.
Marketing however, has substantial elements of the “qualitative” about it. Creativity, being different, a better approach, all of which are best measured in hindsight.
Having measured, and with the benefit of hindsight seen a better way, surely the gap could be termed a “Marketing Debt”, the amount pissed away because the idea, execution, CVP, or something else was not up to scratch.
If we figure out how to keep a running score, weighted by hindsight and the continuous improvement enabled by the analytics and A/B testing now possible, we might even convince the beanies that marketing really is an investment.
Jul 15, 2013 | Innovation, Management, Marketing
Public programs are great, they redistribute the largess of success to the less successful or fortunate via taxes. Every civilised society has some, of varying value, but necessary none the less.
Public entrepreneurial programs are a bit different, despite the best efforts of well meaning public servants everywhere, they just never work.
Entrepreneurs simply do not show up at public show and tells, they keep their ideas to themselves and those who are able to add some skin to the game, and feel the loss if this skin gets scraped off.
That is part of the reason we Aussie tax-payers pump millions into innovation via the various well meaning agencies, but get stuff all back. The vast majority of this well meaning but misdirected assistance ends up in the pockets of consultants (thank you) snake oil salesmen, and those with institutional ties, not with the people doing the real work of innovation.
In saying this you must consider R&D and innovation to be different, one is the development of the science, the other is using it. Public funding of the infrastructure of science is essential, although subject to political whim and manipulation, the leveraging of the science should not be the domain of the public sector beyond harvesting royalties to fund the continuing effort.
The only way to engage with entrepreneurs is one on one, with the absolute trust that what gets discussed, stays with those in the discussion, and is not spread around for some ephemeral notion of equity and greater good.
Real entrepreneurs find new spaces to inhabit, places others have not seen, all others then follow them in.
Jun 29, 2013 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Small business
We have a Department of Innovation in Canberra, and similar departments or at least functions in every state jurisdiction, and piles of industry bodies and associations, all mouthing clichés about Innovation being the savior of the economy, and the way of the future. “Innovation leads to new industries, and more jobs” type of windbaggery. Whilst it is absolutely true as a headline, without the substance of an answer to the question: “How” it remains just a press release, and worse, a consumer of public resources with little real potential to add value, and ther promised jobs.
If innovation is step one, and jobs is step three, there must be something in the middle, a step two that enables the creation, growth and commercial sustainability of the enterprises that create the jobs.
This video of Steve Blank, one of the motivators of the Lean Start-up movement likens the efforts of government to innovate to the South Park episode where gnomes are collecting underpants in the expectation of profit.
I see this so often, a leap of faith which is really a failure of logic. To get to phase three, and profitability takes more than a good idea, available resources, and fast talking, you also have to have a process to deliver value to customers superior to their existing service or product.
