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 »

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 »

By Kirsten Robinson

We recently found that almost three-fourths of executives place radical innovation as a top priority. But, in the pursuit of such big ideas, where should employees even begin?

As we’ve found in our recent research on radical innovation, it’s critical for companies to hone in on high-potential areas of opportunity, and then clarify exactly what their goals are. Without defining an innovation strategy – one simple and understandable enough to get widespread buy-in – executives can’t gain company-wide support for the intended future destination of the business.

Recognizing this fact, Pfizer devised a system to map out the future by identifying potential innovation ideas, and then zeroing in on the steps needed to reach these goals. Their strategy is three-fold: 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 »

We know a number of our retail and consumer banking members are intensely interested in the mobile payments space, and with good reason: according to a study commissioned by MasterCard, 63% of the coveted 18-34 demographic feel comfortable using phones to make payments and about the same amount feel like their phones are more essential than their wallets. Mobile phones – particularly smartphones – are increasingly indispensable for any trips outside the home.

Given signs like these of increasing customer demand, it’s no wonder why folks are jumping in. But it seems like there’s a lot of wisdom to tap into in the membership, here – so we’re asking: what do companies see as the upside of embracing mobile payments in a broader way? We’re asking this question on our Digital Media Discussions forum, and we’d love your input. Read More »

It’s an experience we’ve heard from hundreds of marketers in countless subdisciplines: they have a great, disruptive idea, an actionable plan to get there, a receptive audience with money to spend, and internal enthusiasm for getting something done.

Then comes the dreaded question: what’s the projected ROI? And instantly, all the air gets sucked out of the room or e-mail thread – and the great idea is never to be heard from again. Because for any idea that’s even remotely risky or disruptive, guessing the projected ROI is largely a fantasy, right up there with unicorns, leprechauns and a working office printer. (IT folks – I keed, I keed)

So when Phillips’ Oral Healthcare, makers of the Sonicare electric toothbrush line, faced a mandate to double their rate of growth, they knew they had to find a way to neutralize the ROI question from the beginning. The result was the company’s Segment-Focused Innovation Roadmap, part of our revamped Product Management topic center. Read More »

MLC just completed two member meetings entitled Making the Case for Radical Innovation: Shifting to Fewer, Bigger, More Protected Innovations. Our members enthusiastically embraced the ideas presented and engaged in lively discussions on the topic.

For those who were not able to attend, here are some of the key takeaways from the meeting: Read More »

We often think of open innovation as one technique, when in fact it represents a range of techniques that serve different purposes. These techniques fall along a spectrum from the most open (anyone can submit any idea, the crowd selects the best) to the least open (pre-screened experts submit ideas on a specific problem, the company selects the best).  Three choices determine which tool you end up with: 1) who to include, 2) what to ask, and 3) how to select answers.  Answers to these questions will depend on your objectives: are you trying to boost engagement, solve an urgent challenge, or understand the most widespread customer needs?  A better understanding of the benefits and challenges of each technique in the toolbox will improve success rates and limit frustrations. Read More »

In these days of post-recession malaise, there are two things at the center of every consumer’s life: Money and cell phones. It’s only a matter of time before these two merge, and we’ll all be paying for our groceries with a wave of our cell phone.

Or will we? We know that consumers are eager to have some way to make person-to-person payments that doesn’t involve paper checks (still the single largest form of non-cash P2P payment), but the banking industry in its collective foot-dragging hasn’t yet built a global standard for mobile payments — though there are plenty of PayPal wannabes trying to get a piece of the mobile action.

Now it looks as if the financial services industry is finally coming on board with technological innovations like mobile banking and payments that promise to take consumers’ love affair with the mobile phone — especially smart phones like the iPhone and Droid — to new heights. Iconoculture looked closely at the convergence of financial services and Web 2.0 technology in a June 2010 trend we call Geeks Storm the Bank! Read More »