New Solutions

Polymaths and Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 16:12:00 +0000

Eric Schmidt (Google) recently criticised the UK education system for creating an unnecessary divide between the arts and sciences that was potentially hindering the imaginative breakthrough innovation in the UK. He went as far at to suggest that it would be worth taking inspiration from history where the mixing of arts, science and engineering was commonplace. "Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic tales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."

We may not all be polymaths to that degree, but we certainly recognise that success often springs from the rich mixing of disciplines, whether in one person or in a team. So creativity isn't just something that some people do - it's something that can come from throughout the organisation and from any function.

The economics of clean clothes

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 08:35:00 +0000

Innovation is so much more than invention – but invention is a damn good place to start.

Let’s take self-cleaning clothes as an example. Apparently the nano technology is already available that would allow the manufacture of clothes that don’t get dirty. In fact, that technology has been around for a very long time but it has never been commercialised.

Why not?

As things stand, companies, consumers and governments all have too much to lose. The economics of washing clothes is understood from the banks of the Ganges to the boardroom of Unilever and the technologists at Miele. In short – nobody wants change because the economics work for too well for existing stakeholders.

Until – that is – things get disrupted. What will disrupt the market and create a need for self-cleaning clothes? Eventually the environmental pressure will be too strong –water will become too valuable and the burden on the environment of detergents and old washing machines will tip the balance.

Self-cleaning clothes will come – and the business that can harness the technology will be bigger than Apple.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20306

Toxic Mix

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 14:07:00 +0000

The current vogue of mixing business with art and science probably has some way to go even now. But already the combination of the three disciplines is creating a hideous mix of pseudoscience, blather and nonsense that looks for all the world like a breakthrough.

It may very well be that vitamins, supplements and a healthy diet do each of us some good. We probably know that asbestos, smoking and too much alcohol do us harm by an order of magnitude more. So why, other than for profit, do we get this kind of nonsense about cancer-fighting foods:

The best way to defeat cancer is by eating healthy and adding a few anti-angiogenic foods to your meals daily. According to Dr. Li, there are 7 things everyone should consider implementing in making choices of foods that can lower your chances of having a disease.

Be picky - Make choices based on the quality of foods rather than the fact that it tastes good. For example why not purchase a Red Delicious apple that has twice as many cancer fighters as a Golden Delicious apple. Or buy San Marzano tomatoes because they have the most cancer fighting ingredients than any others. By having the knowledge that wine grapes grown in cooler climates have the most cancer fighters then you can make wine selections that will provide an added boost to your health lifestyle.
Chew Greens -Then cancer-fighting molecules are found within the leaves of greens; one must chew the leafy greens to help release enzymes to activate these molecules. Juicing the Bok Choy as I have done in the past may be somewhat beneficial, however chewing is so much better.
Choose a cancer-fighting food
for each meal. If an individual has 3 meals a day will add up to be over a thousand cancer-fighting choices each year. Just think how much better this should make you feel.
Cook Vegetables
–Cooking tomatoes in olive oil is better for you than having raw tomatoes.
"Do" Soy
-Fermented soy (used in miso soup) contains four times more cancer fighters than regular soybeans.
Dunk Teabags
- In order to get the cancer-fighting molecules to start working within the green tea, it is important to dunk the tea bag up and down within the cup rather than just letting it sit in the cup, like I’m guilty of doing.
Eat Sprouts
–Broccoli sprouts have more cancer-fighting properties than regular broccoli.
Dr Li is credited with re-conceptualizing global disease fighting. Well exactly!

Why great service is more like the Apple store than a Starwood hotel...

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:37:00 +0000

So traditionally great customer service is delivered by businesses that really understand how people interact with their business ie they know the customer journey. All too frequently this is done by analysts who pore through data in minute detail before unveiling in a miracle moment a range of specific new positionings, a range of “desired” experiences and the functional roadmap to deliver those experiences (via the myriad of touchpoints including web, loyalty programs and the service experience in all its detail)

What’s so sad is that these analysts have never really experienced at close proximity real people interacting with real service and being inspired by insights to creatively develop a better, more fitting service experience.

Great service isn’t designed by analysts – if it were then the Apple shop would greet different guests with subtly different iphones and ipads! But they don’t.

7 principles for successful brand engagement

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 10:43:00 +0000

Never underestimate the importance of top team engagement and buy-in

Agree the ‘why bother’ (and make it relevant for all internal audiences
Agree the balance between control and empowerment that fits the organisation

Enthuse the organisation about the opportunities and the benefits of brand excellence
Use best of class ideas from other categories to help inspire fresh thinking
Think through implications of brand in as many situiations as possible; determine the desired people behaviours and activities that fit with the brand
Hardwire as much as you possibly can into the business, into contracts and metrics
Establish feedback measures, create a learning culture and empower on-going change

New research techniques for innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:35:00 +0000

The latest advances in neuro-research are having a huge impact on marketing communication. Understanding and measuring, second by second, how communication is working in the subconscious brain is a powerful measure of effectiveness. It enables precision-guided improvement and the ability to predict the commercial impact of changing many of the variables that affect brand performance.

So much for neuro-research and marketing communication. What about the world of innovation and development? A team at New Solutions believes it can harness many of the same capabilities, as they address broader strategic innovation and brand development opportunities. The objective is to collaborate with consultancy Neuro-Insight to develop this in practice, with a particular focus on the following three areas in particular:

Making use of subconscious predictive markers of future preference
Building a more powerful brand experience across the breadth of a brand’s ‘touchpoints’…and understanding what makes the real difference
Enabling better diagnostics of prototype concepts

Dictatorship of the instant - or not?

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:58:00 +0000

So even email has apparently had its day as volumes of legitimate email (and spam) are falling fast in the face of social networking and instant messaging. Over the last two years, the number of emails handled by company executives each day has fallen by a third!
Are we all being duped into faster and less considered communication where speed is a substitute for truth, rigour and logic? Clearly Arsene Wenger, admittedly in a different context, has little time for knee jerk reactions (his so-called 'dictatorship of the instant')
Or is instant far nearer to real communication - more similar to the way that we actually speak to one another without the artificial strictures of title, greeting and sign-off.
Certainly spammers and teenagers seem to relish the new world of social networks - so for those whose job it is to communicate, it's a trend not to be overlooked as McKinsey have noted in their recent survey:

"The McKinsey worldwide survey of 3,249 executives across a range of regions, industries and functional areas found that two-thirds of respondents use Web 2.0 technologies in their organizations and the results are paying off.
More than two-thirds (69%) reported that their companies have gained measurable business benefits, including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.

This is great news for businesses and their shareholders as well as the economy as a whole. The widespread use of Twitter and Facebook is beginning to look like more than a passing fad, but as a valid way to leverage business opportunities. Blogging can now be used to reach customers more directly and establish stronger relationships."

So now we can Twitter and blog in the knowledge that it really is good for business.

Messing with truth...

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:20:00 +0000

... doing business is often about persuasion. But persuasion is exactly that and as we've seen this week in the BBC programme, The Apprentice, being economical with the truth is dicing with death. There's really no room for blagging at any level. People who over promise are no better than products or services that don't deliver . So next time you hear credentials that sound exaggerated or pumped up, just remember what happened to "Stuart the Brand". As Claude put it - "you're not a big fish - you're not even a fish!"

Really effective

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:11:00 +0000

The Hovis advert has just scooped the top award at the IPA Effectiveness Awards. On the face of it - good result. The claim is that it revived one of the UK's oldest and best loved brands and contributed to generating £90m Profits.
And therein lies the muddle. £90m profits may or may not be a great return. We just don't know. What we do know is that share price of the parent company, Premier Foods, has been declining for a while. So just how effective after all?
Effectiveness isn't just to do with neat ads - sometimes it needs to be about turning around the real business too!

Retail 2.0 and charity shops

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:42:00 +0000

Reading an excellent survey of post-recessionay consumers by BDO (http://www.bdo.uk.com/), one particular insight emerged from the mist....

Long forgotten in every second-rate shopping centre, charity shops might just be about emerge as one of the surprises of the decade and at the same time help rejuvenate the high street environment in the process.
Of course, the odd Oxfam shop has had its moment in the spotlight before, but never have all the indicators looked so positive as now:
1/ Sceptical and distrustful consumers - especially distrustful of big business
2/ A need like never before for value and function
3/ A desire to do good for the environement and recycle
4/ A growing respect for charity in a world tired of conspicuous consumption and waste
5/ and a longing to be treated as an individual

The net result is socialising mix of giving and taking - a rich experience that delivers emotional well-being and pragmatic redistribution of goods. Mere shopping by comparison starts to look decidedly transactional and boringly out-moded. A bit like the internet before Facebook!

On this basis - it won't be long before charity shops become Retail 2.0

The most difficult step...

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:28:00 +0000

...is often the first step and in our business that's usually the 'brief'

What's really important is being able to set out clearly and concisely the underlying issues and key objectives so that you get the very best response from people like us. As an independent “outsider” we are happy to challenge a draft brief to help make sure that the right questions are asked and that your information and assumptions are sense-checked early on. Doing this face to face in an open session makes for a valuable (and hopefully enjoyable) session - without committing to a particular methodology or team before you're ready.
If this sounds familiar - please don't hesitate to get in touch and we can arrange a pre-pre-pre-meeting with one of our team.

Looking back for a change…

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:02:00 +0000

Looking backwards isn’t the normal kind of catchy business mantra that we’ve learnt to expect. But there might just be a logic in forgetting about the business cycles, good and bad that have affected everyone over the past 3 years: think back to those big opportunities that you saw in (say) 2006 and take stock. There were lots of opportunities back then that MIGHT have been forgotten in the upheavals since. Which are opportunities are still out there? Which needs that were painstakingly identified have really been met? Which have been overtaken by events?

Take Tesco’s. There was a time before Northern Rock when the shelves were bulging with new Finest extensions – now every Metro bears a passing resemblance to a discount store. Is this a permanent shift or are the opportunities of 2006 there to be taken?

Who knows but it might be worth dusting down one or two of those research reports from 2006 and taking a look at what we thought then. It could be the future.

Plain Speaking

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:56:00 +0000

In the week that David Cameron ruffled a few feathers with 'straight-talking', is it time that consultants, marketing people and the world of PR followed suit and cut out some of the worst excesses that blight our written powerpoints?

Language can be less manipulative and our arguments stronger.

So what will it look like - projects will be 'good value' not 'affordable'. We'll be telling less 'stories' and offering more 'evidence'. Less guff and more substance, so no more 'quest' for insight. No more 'creating opportunites' - what consultant would ever not create opportunities... and so on.

Why "closer" matters

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:35:00 +0000

The advantage of looking at things from far away is that they seem so much simpler. When you first start a new assignment or job – everything seems much clearer than 6 months in!
In time, getting into the detail takes you deeper. ‘Getting Closer’ gives granularity. But gaining depth and granularity don’t guarantee automatic clarity. A recent article in the Financial Times explored how the so-called “Niagara of Information” was often having the inverse effect from that intended: instead of enabling greater insight and delivering the right data, it was leading to such a wealth of confusion that people were leaping to over-simplifications just to deal with it all.
Anyone living through the UK election campaign will know all about simplification.

So does this mean that getting down into the weeds is a waste of effort? Would it be better to stay out of the fray and look down on things with perspective and overview. The answer surely lies somewhere between the two extremes - the real power of rich detail comes from how and when it is ‘used’; how it is analysed, how the connections are made and how the ‘patterns’ amongst the data are allowed to emerge.

And this is fundamentally the same for experts working in the field of insight and consumer closeness. It’s not enough to just get close – it’s so much more to do with utilising the richness to avoid the error of over-simplification that stalks every business.

The Innovation Checklist

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:48:00 +0000

In a recent article in the New Scientist, Atul Gawande is quoted as saying that 'Lists have saved patients and saved me'. Atul Gawande is both a surgeon and best-selling author of The Checklist Manifesto so we can assume he is speaking from personal experience!
The assertion is that any complex system is fallible because the complexity makes it impossible for an individual, however knowledgeable and experienced, to deliver results correctly time and time again.
Applying this to innovation suggests that many errors and blind alleys could be avoided by developing and applying proper checklists throughout complex projects. One of the key concepts of a checklist is the pause point. For example, before the aircraft engines are started, we make sure the list is checked 100%. If we fail at any individual checkpoint, the engines aren’t started.
How often do project leaders battle on regardless and how much more effective could they be if they used a list to save time and money?

The love of numbers for Valentines Day

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:34:00 +0000

One of the most common criticisms of qualitative studies is that somehow the results are all a bit unreliable and that it would be much better to have huge sample sizes (like in quant).

The mathematics shows that nothing could be further from the truth. Remember what qualitative research is actually doing – it’s looking for a viewpoint (or an opinion or a perception or maybe an insight); unexpected viewpoints perhaps but nonetheless in the total analysis something of importance.

We absolutely don’t want to measure how many people have a (minority) viewpoint – that would be done by a nice large quant study. We simply want to make sure that we discover this viewpoint.

So what’s the chance that qual let’s us down and we fail to discover something we should?

Let’s make some assumptions: we properly recruit 4 groups of 8 consumers to type (and to make it realistic, 2 get stuck in traffic!)

Let’s also assume that at least 10% of that group hold the intriguing viewpoint we want to discover (so already we are looking for a minority viewpoint!)

The mathematics demonstrates that, assuming the group have been properly recruited, the chance of doing the 4 groups and having 30 respondents, none of whom hold the minority viewpoint is about 1 in 24! For anyone with a mathematical inclination, this is simply (0.9 x 0.9 x.0.9……..30 times ie 0.042391)

This - I think it is fair to say – is much more robust than most people intuitively believe. So this Valentines Day – we can love the numbers of qual just a little bit more.

FEI Principles

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:38:00 +0000

When AG Lafley was CEO of Procter & Gamble he famously said that “Innovation must be the driving force for any business that wants to grow and succeed”

We enjoyed hearing that at the time and still think it’s still true now. It’s also what the people at New Solutions are all about. But not all ‘innovation’ is the same. In the short run, much ‘innovation’ is achieved through improvements and line extensions that start from an established product in the market and offer some genuine but incremental addition. Even when these innovations first started, most of the pieces of the jigsaw were already in place – the brand team know which new piece of the puzzle they are innovating around, and consumers already understand most of the picture.

Front End Innovation is more complex
Longer term success requires more: innovation that explores ‘White Space’ (or even, to continue the colour metaphors, ‘Blue Sky’) typically starts ‘further back’ from its final execution. At this early point, far fewer pieces of the jigsaw are a given and many more options are open. For that reason it is often referred to as the Fuzzy Front End (or Front End Innovation for short).
Innovation is rarely straightforward; by definition, it is trying to create what does not yet exist. But Front End Innovation raises particular challenges. If innovation, generally, is complicated by the higher level of ‘uncertainty’ to deal with, then Front End Innovation (FEI) has to accommodate more uncertainties than any other. And not only is it more difficult for the project team and the organisation, but much more difficult for consumers within the research process too.

Examples of Front End Innovation
You have a technology that is different and in many way better than others available. But how should you apply it?; what new competitive space could you open up with it?; how could you build it into products to best ‘fit’ with consumers’ lives, goals, and priorities?
You have identified a growth category that you want to enter and are looking to develop the optimum product and consumer positioning to do so.

Front End Innovation raises some classic conundrums

Let’s take the very first question from any marketing text book: ‘Which consumers should you focus on and recruit in your research sample?’. Although an eminently reasonable question, it may actually be that the answer seems be that it depends on the nature of the benefit or product that you develop….which of course has not yet taken shape. Unless you know the target, it’s difficult to develop the new innovation for them. But unless you know what the innovation is already, you can’t be clear who the ideal target is. Chicken and egg…or egg and chicken?
Still trying to be consumer-centric, you might try a survey to uncover consumers unmet needs. The problem with that is that the answer is very likely to reflect either the obvious (more of the same but better), the impossible (e.g. super indulgent plus slimming), or the vague (e.g. better designed). Indeed, in today’s crowded markets, it is almost impossible for a consumer who is filling in a survey to pinpoint something as powerful as a new and unexplored dimension of competition.

By understanding the problem, we can define the solution
There is no single panacea for these conundrums. These and more are just some of the world of variables and uncertainties that exist in Front End Innovation. But this is not intended for a moment to be a counsel of despair. On the contrary, we have always believed (and I’m sure we’re not alone) that the better able you are to see the obstacles in front of you, the better able you will be to find a way to negotiate them.

There are two interdependent areas to address to succeed in Front End Innovation; the ‘process’ and the ‘people’.

‘Process’ Principles for winning in Front End Innovation
· Process Principle 1 - Continuously Adaptive
Front End Innovation requires a continuously adaptive approach. Simpler innovation may be a more direct and linear journey from start to end point, but FEI does not start with that clear definition of outcome. In our experience, fundamental insights occur along the way that can shift our thinking on core issues such as consumer target, relevant brand, and dimension of competition. And as thinking changes, the subsequent process needs to adapt in line.
· Process principle 2 – Consumer-Centric, not Consumer-Led
More than a semantic difference for most FEI. The term ‘Consumer-Led’ implies that the consumers will tell us the answer and our task is to deliver. With FEI, the likely scope of possible answers is too broad, and most won’t yet have been thought of. So, more than ever, we need to understand the realities of our consumers lives; their goals, priorities, feelings, and needs to give us (the team) the abilities to use our creativity and business knowledge to design new possibilities for them; possibilities that they might not have even conceived of. Please don’t hand the ‘consumer’ part out to a 3rd party intermediary (ie a research agency) because this is where the project team will learn most by being deeply involved in ‘research’ themselves. You can delegate to researchers once oyu have some concepts to test…but that’s later down the line.
· Process Principle 3 – Must Maintain Momentum
Uncertainty can lead to stasis (the innovation equivalent of a rabbit in the headlights; it doesn’t know which way to run…so it doesn’t run anywhere). If you can’t take a step forward until you’re certain it is the right and only one, you may never achieve any momentum in FEI. Instead, huge amounts of time will pass as the issues are rehashed and reargued. By contrast we have found that intense accelerated processes actually work very well, if we remain alert, adaptive, and accommodating of some uncertainty. But this is only possible if there is the right team involved in the project….which takes us on to the people part…

‘People’ Principles for winning in Front End Innovation
· People Principle 1 – The confidence to think and re-think
FEI requires more bespoke approaches and intelligent adaption. It’s not a comfortable place for project leaders who are just following a ‘book’. Open-minded, critical thinking combined with the experience to draw on to adapt at speed are enormous assets. And as new insights and perspectives are emerging through the journey, it’s important to have the confidence and status to allow you to change your mind and do what is best going forward – even if that differs from what you’d told the boss a month ago.
· People Principle 2 – A Team that represents the holistic success criteria
FEI will be shaped by many critical business considerations (as well as consumers of course). FEI Innovation throws up challenges for all aspects of the business. Having team members who understand those issues can turn those challenges into opportunities (or at least, find ways to minimise the problem). A team drawn exclusively from brand and research departments, or only from the technical team, is unlikely to have the broad expertise to shape the innovation to really work for the business
· People Principle 3 – Involvement, not ‘observation’
Most companies are beyond the old mentality of “I’m in Operations (etc.) so I can’t be creative”. In FEI especially, everybody on the team is part of the solution. And everybody is involved in creating ideas that have the real potential to work for the organisation (and not to discover 3 months later that the great new idea didn’t fit with the brand strategy, or relied on an ingredient that the factory couldn’t process). The most successful FEI projects we’ve worked on have involved truly multi-disciplinary teams where every individual has really pitched in and got involved. Irrespective of normal role or rank, they’ve gone and talked to consumers personally, they’ve generated and worked on ideas, they’ve shared their own perspectives with the team to try to find better solutions. What they have not done is ‘step back’ from the process and retreated to the comfort of a fortnightly update meeting where someone else proposes solutions that can then be criticised (leading immediately to a violation of Process Principle 3 above, and an onset of Innovation Stasis).

Conclusion about Front End Innovation
Front End Innovation is critical to the long term health of an organisation. It’s also one of the more difficult (and rewarding) core tasks. But faced with the inevitable complexities involved, the three principles of Process and People show how the journey can be navigated successfully.

Fusion out of confusion

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:27:00 +0000

Developing business ideas often looks messy. The confusion is scary.. but that's something people at New Solutions get used to. The purpose of planning isn't to make the process fixed, tidy and predictable - but to be prepared for confusion. Confusion is a vital component as it affords time – time for the team to dissemble and re-assemble parts of the idea(s) over and over again. The result of all this activity is the fusion of ideas. In due course, with effort and imagination, something of real potential will emerge that consumers can get their heads around,.
If time is the key, then the following are nearly as vital: 1) the right people, 2) the right environment, and 3) the right stimulus
And the most common pitfall – premature evaluation. So many new product ideas fail because they are taken straight to testing and compared to “old” norms. Nurturing is a critical part of the process-taking each idea, sharpening the description and cleaning off the fluff - gives new business ideas the best chance to chance to evolve rather than be binned! And afterall - that's the point.

Going backwards...

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:07:00 +0000

If anyone ever sends you the transcript of a twitter event - here's what it looks like!

Arguably, there are lots of moral, emotional or publicity-seeking outbursts that can be written in 140 characters - but that doesn't extend to a rational, coherent, argumentative discussion.

Of course, it doesn't help as nobody really knows who's who. The variety of Twitter aliases makes for a muddle that is barely comprehensible.

"Closeness" delivers results

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:36:00 +0000

This can be a difficult point to make in a business world used to linear thinking. For some, planning consumer research is about getting all the right questions ready, each of which has an answer that has direct relevance to the business.

When making the most of consumer closeness, this is only part of it. Closeness enables more of a dialogue; it enables consumers to take us where they want to go; it enables us to see the significance of things we had not realised before, to hear answers to questions that we might never have asked. The new insight is often to be found in the unexpected; the sudden revelation that we had been looking diligently in one direction, whilst the consumer opportunity lay in the other. Consumer closeness removes the shackles of our unintentional myopia.

‘Closeness’ is of course a vast umbrella which covers a variety of interactions. There is a whole wealth of stuff written (and done) on real-time monitoring of twitter, blogs, and anything that appears in cyberspace. If people out there are writing their thoughts and reactions to your brand/comms etc, then it seems too tantalising to let it go unnoticed. This may throw up useful tactical nuggets (although spotting them amongst the vastly greater amount of simply ‘nice-to-know’ stuff is a challenge).In itself, this sort of tactical reactive closeness is no bad thing. But it should not be confused with the ways that closeness that can be used to proactively drive strategic, developmental goals such as positioning, innovation, ‘re-staging’, and concept development. Just monitoring cyberspace does not ‘tick the box’ on using consumer closeness; its power is still waiting to be tapped.

Segmentation: both clarity and myopia

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:31:00 +0000

McKinsey have been sending around a thought piece on a different way of segmenting for electric car manufacturers. It reinforces a point that we have wrestled with so often, that segmentation is truly a double edged sword - a powerful one, but no less double-edge for being so.
The McKinsey example is a simple one, but there are probably parallels to be found wherever segmentation is used. They start with observing that electric carmakers currently segment their potential audience to identify segments such as the environmentally conscious, the technically enamoured etc. This makes good intuitive sense. But they then go on to suggest a different way of looking at things, which a) makes lots of sense, and b) would so easily be missed by thinking only in terms of the normal segmentation. They make the simple point that you can segment by the type of usage the car has (especially in 2 car families, where there is a greater distinction between the ways that the cars are used). Where this becomes more than just an interesting observation, is that designing and positioning cars against different usage types leads to very significant differences in manufacturing cost and marketing focus.

The solution: use segmentation; but don't worship any single one - it may be the best way of seeing things given the objective against which it was originally developed…but seeing things so clearly in that way only, encourages blindness to other perspectives. Insight comes from looking for different ways to segment; not just always going deeper within the same boundaries.

That article can be found at https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Automotive/Strategy_Analysis/A_new_segmentation_for_electric_vehicles_2464

Inaudible Communication

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:04:00 +0000

Here's a thought about just what it takes to get though to people with communications.
Let's start with a couple of seemingly reasonable assumptions:
1. the news that, after years of underinvestment, billions more pounds would be spent on hospitals and schools would register in the public mind.
2. If you had managed to achieve PR coverage for your message that had you prominently covered on the front pages of every newspaper and TV news for days on end, you'd expect to be noticed.

But I've just been reading Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. He recalled a time from shortly after Labour's 1997 landslide, when the media was hanging on to the new Chancellor's (Mr G. Brown) every word about the new billions on vital projects. Wanting to see evidence for the inevitable seismic shift in people's awareness of this important issue, he commissioned some research. And here's the thing; it all hardly registered at all; people just hadn't noticed.

He also quoted Michael Ashcroft writing about the Conservative campaign for the election of 2005. In the final run up to polling day, and despite huge media coverage, awareness of "the central campaign messages of cleaner hospitals and school discipline peaked at 1 per cent". Yes, one per cent.

So, of course we can respond to this with observations that people are not as engaged in politics as the media likes to think. But just look at the media coverage they're getting. Look at the issues mentioned. And however low down in the publics interest level they are, are people really so much more interested in what a loaf of bread has to say, or a fizzy drink, or…almost anything that plays an ephemeral role in a life of almost continuous consumption?

Must be a hard job if one's brand is not as significant to people as hospitals and schools, and one's budget will not achieve blanket coverage for days on end. How do these marketing people do it?

link to the Daniel Finkelstein article http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article6920714.ece

Fast and cheap

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:27:00 +0000

The truth is that the future may well be a lot faster and cheaper than anyone thought. Even while the traditional research agencies look nostalgically at 10’s of thousands of research studies costing $20,000 each – without telling anyone, stakeholders in business are voting with their feet and aligning themselves with the giants of the technology world away from the traditional market research world. Cheap, off the peg tools, practically unlimited “right-minded” consumers, and unimaginable directness are available like never before to help shape the brands and businesses of the future.

Halloween Shocker

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:00:00 +0000

A recent survey of Fortune 500 and Global 500 businesses revealed that 66 percent of senior executives believe Innovation is a top-three strategic priority.That means a scary 34% of senior executives just don’t get it. They are frightened off by the thought that “innovation” is people working together to develop and implement new, irresistible ideas that create value. They are terrified of their own people expressing their maximum creative potential.

That’s a real horror!

Why disrupt?

noreply@blogger.com (Strategic Innovation) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:34:00 +0000

By definition it's almost impossible for a team to keep generating fresh new perspectives to existing innovation challenges and opportunities. Over time, the team starts to think alike and embed certain ‘sacred cows’ or assumptions in everything they do. Every innovation team at some stage needs to break out again to avoid bashing into the greatest barrier to innovation – too much existing knowledge.