At MLC, we’ve been harping on innovation for a few years now – why its important for marketers to be active participants – if not leaders – in the innovation process, bringing to bear important consumer perspectives that only they can offer. We hope you were listening, because for many industries, the time is coming fast where innovation won’t be a luxury but a necessity to stay afloat.

For an example, look no further than the auto industry. The recession years saw a few automakers nearly go out of business, while others, like Hyundai, Kia, and Subaru, posted double-digit increases in sales and market share – albeit in a seriously depressed market. In particular, Hyundai accomplished this by offering an excellent price-to-value proposition and with a few catchy campaigns that engendered a ton of consumer trust, like their Hyundai Assurance program – which allowed buyers to walk away from their car loans if they lost their income or were disabled during the term. Read More »

As marketers, we’re doing a lot to get closer to our customers. It’s partly because we want to sell better to them – tailor messaging, that sort of thing – but it’s also because we want to do a better job of designing the offering to their needs. But what’s much more difficult to accomplish is making customer insight a key driver of strategic internal processes, an asset that animates key decisions across the firm.

Facing a mismatch between internal processes and the things they had learned from their customers, health care products company Cardinal Health had to do just that. Looking at sales data, the company’s marketers realized that customers – seeking to dampen costs and not seeing the value in Cardinal Health’s complete offering – often purchased one element of what was intended to be an integrative solutions deal. Not good! Read More »

Even with deep customer understanding, companies still need to use creativity to look beyond what consumers say to create the best new products.  One often-told example of this is the iPod.  In the late ’90s, most consumers – anchored by their existing CD collections and players – thought they wanted a better Discman.  Thankfully for the hundreds of millions of iPod users worldwide, Apple had a better idea.  They realized that consumers, while they may have said that they just wanted a better Discman, would actually value a smaller device that can hold more music.  Because they coupled creativity with deep consumer knowledge, Apple was able to revolutionize the music industry through its creation of the iPod.

Just like Apple, automotive dealer software and services provider Reynolds and Reynolds has used more customer-focused insight generation to improve their new product development.  They realized that their marketing research practices had two major weaknesses: the current insights were anchored to existing products, and they were ambiguous and open to interpretation.  To get solve the problem of new ideas being limited by current offerings, Reynolds and Reynolds developed a better understanding of their customers’ true needs by identifying the results their customers are seeking to achieve (irrespective of existing products and services).  This reframing of insights from product- to job-based allowed Reynolds and Reynolds to figure out how it should best allocate its resources to meet their target’s needs; this new process increased the number of solutions-worthy insights seven-fold.  MLC members, learn more about how Reynolds and Reynolds shifted to this results-based insight generation and tackled the problem of ambiguous insights here. Read More »

Improved technology, policy intervention, and the recession have led to broad structural changes in a number of industries we write about on Wide Angle, but probably none so much as healthcare. In the past few years, we’ve seen a major health reform effort in the US that will bring millions of new patients into the system, growing consensus around a reformation of the patent system abroad, and technological shifts that may soon allow for a very rapid scaling in diagnosis and other medical services.

So, how should marketers expect their jobs to change? We came up with a few ways; let us know more in comments! Read More »

It’s been a week since Apple’s co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs passed away, and we’ve seen all sorts of tributes and analyses of his impact on the corporate and broader worlds. One interesting one, from our colleagues across the hall in CEB’s Tech practice, echoes a number of themes we’ve seen in other recollections of Jobs’ legacy – that his focus on the customer and user experience was the thing that made him different from other tech execs, who were content to focus on computing efficiency and power, instead.

I don’t think this is wrong, per se. But do I think it misses a key paradox. Jobs and the company he created did invent wonderful user experiences, but they did it in the exact way that most companies wouldn’t.

For most of us, a focus on the customer means that we make a commitment to go above and beyond to address customer complaints and needs, and that we find smarter ways to incorporate their feedback into all aspects of our business. So, a customer focus initiative might raise customer planning to the level of other important enterprise planning processes, like Tesco did. The basic model? If we listen better, and do a better job of incorporating our learnings into our products and services, we’ll resonate more with customers and sell more stuff.

By contrast, Jobs and Apple succeeded by having a compelling vision. They ignored their users almost entirely – at least in the product design process – and focused on an integrated, streamlined design – an enlightened, benevolent tyranny of sorts. Jobs was famous for a kind of perfectionism that most executives would think absurd: for instance, he once asked engineers working on the original Macintosh to re-design the computer’s motherboard – a part most users would never see – because it looked inelegant. OS X, Apple’s current operating system, was delayed by six months over Jobs’ dissatisfaction with the way the scroll bars worked. Taken individually, these are elements of design that very few users would notice or care about; but together they created the famous Mac user experience.

The user experiences of Apple products – from iOS devices to Mac computers – reflect the user experience Steve Jobs wanted, not the one his customers would have told him they wanted, if he’d bothered to ask. And it worked – but there are pretty big risks with going this route. Apple relied on Jobs’ design vision to make its products work, and if his vision had been faulty, or hadn’t resonated with the market, they’d be in trouble. His vision raised costs, both for the consumer and for the company itself. His insistence that the user experience be uniform across all applications significantly limited the developer pool for Apple devices (at least, at first, until the iPhone became an irresistible hit). The relative inability to customize the experience limited – and still limits – Apple’s penetration into the business market.

But Apple’s focus on top-down design – rather than the needs of customers, as they might report them – is a counterpoint to a growing trend in the corporate world of finding new and inventive ways to find out what customers want, and do exactly that. It’s a vote for visions over data, and that’s a dichotomy we’ll probably explore a bit in this year’s research.

Do you have thoughts on the right balance between vision and data? Let us know in comments.

It can be said that employees know your products and customers best; they are the ones, after all, who design the products, work the manufacturing plants, and interact with customers.  So it is natural that marketers would want to capitalize on all of the relevant knowledge employees have gathered, and many companies have invested in programs that help share all of this data.   But even with today’s technologies like salesforce.com that help share institutional knowledge, it is challenging for Marketers to gather the best ideas from their teams (and it is even harder to source ideas from the company at large).  Here are ways two companies have tackled this problem: Read More »

We know that B2B marketers have a huge effect on the organizations they sell to – they help customers operate more efficiently, less expensively, and with greater levels of confidence. In a business environment that’s becoming more complex by the day, B2B marketers help their customers simplify the world by taking things off their plate and giving valuable insight into how other customers are using their products.

Now, you’ve heard this before: every marketer reading this post has their company’s value proposition memorized or internalized. But sometimes the value prop becomes such an integral part of what we do, that we never question whether our customers are actually seeing the same value. MLC research from a few years back shows that B2B customers typically don’t perceive supplier differentiators – at least, not to the degree that marketers expect them to – and we should be sanguine about how well the marketplace understands value propositions, too.

Informatica, an American enterprise data integration software firm, ran up against this problem when they realized that their innovation-oriented messaging wasn’t working. It wasn’t that the messages were poor – it was just that, although the company enabled groundbreaking innovation at its customer firms, they had no credibility as an innovative supplier.

To solve the problem, the company created an annual Innovation Awards series that recognized the innovative ways that companies were using Informatica products. The result? Happy customers, lots of great press, and a newfound reputation for innovativon.

MLC members, check out the full case, and for more, see our tips on marketing to innovation-oriented buyers.

Marketers and technology have a long and tortured relationship filled with both good times and bad.  It seems every few years (or sometimes months) there is a new tech-based trend that has big implications for how Marketing interfaces with consumers and customers (websites, social media, mobile) and how it manages its pipeline (Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems – first in software form, now “in the cloud”).

The latest tech trend that is generating a lot of buzz among marketers is “marketing automation.”  For the uninitiated, in the B2B world, marketing automation is the umbrella name given to the software and other technology tools that allow marketers to systematize and mechanize tasks like lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead qualification.  It can be as simple as automatically sending out a segment-focused monthly newsletter to a list of prospects and current customers and as sophisticated as an algorithmic model that segments, targets, and scores potential leads based on a combination of tracked web behaviors and information collected through web-forms. Read More »

The announcement that Borders, America’s second-biggest bookstore chain, would close its remaining stores hit the retail and tech worlds hard this week. While the company’s demise was long-expected – a series of what can only be described as management blunders left the chain in a weak position to compete with online and brick-and-mortar rivals – there was still a fair bit of nostalgia about the closing, and smart analysis as to what this means to the retail and information industries.

To me, what’s notable about Borders closing is that its another loss for the forces of “good” against the forces of “good enough”. Contrary to what a lot of people think, the essence of disruptive innovation isn’t necessarily whiz-bang technology. Rather, its about providing a product or service at a radically lower cost, without a serious – as defined by the preferences of the buying public – concomitant decline in quality. In practice, this means the creation of “good enough” products and experiences that provide a radically different value proposition to the consumer. Read More »

In the B2C world, it’s pretty easy for Marketing to insulate itself from the world of actual consumers. Innovation guided by internal constraints and demands, anecdotes mistaken for data, and all kinds of other tripwires stand in the way of true consumer understanding, even for progressive organizations.

Facing a growth slowdown, Unilever realized that a key hindrance in creating brands and products that resonate with consumers was that there was no systematized, organized way of deriving consumer insight. Its “Path-to-Growth” strategy – adapted to combat the slowdown – comprised five steps; the first two were focused entirely on innovation driven by deeper consumer insight. At the same time, the company was paring down its brand portfolio – so finding great ideas for growth became even more important.

To overcome the challenge of developing consumer insights that break away from conventional wisdom, the company developed their Customer Insight Laboratory – a three-step process that separates the stages of insight generation, allowing marketers, researchers, and R&D staff time to develop breakthrough ideas. Read More »