We just came back from an innovation session kindly hosted by W.L. Gore and Associates (best known by consumers for the GORE-TEX fabric).  We spent a half day discussing the challenges of pre-funnel product and service innovation, and we were treated to a tour of Gore’s Capabilities Center.

One of the big lessons for me was the importance of organizing for innovation – but not the way you think.  Yes, one of the big questions we hear is about organizational structure, but what became clear during our session was that changing the way you look at your world, including your existing products and services and assumed customer needs, is a critical step to being more creative — even more than how you organize your people. Read More »

(Note: This is Part 1 of a 4-part series on marketing planning. Check back here every Wednesday in August for a new installment!)

Don’t know if it’s time to spend more on marketing?  Unsure how to convince the CFO?  Pat LaPointe – managing partner at NPV Marketing, a leading marketing measurement firm – recently spoke to our members about how to justify spend increases. Read on for a summary of his top tips.

NPV’s research shows that ‘historical spend’ is still the number one means of allocating marketing budget, but lacks both rigor and credibility with the CFO.  What CFOs want isn’t certainty about the ROI of marketing spend (no business investment has a certain ROI, e.g., building a new plant in a developing country), but rather clearly stated assumptions and a sound understanding of risk factors. You can make a solid business case that will pass the CFO ‘sniff test’ by taking the 5 steps below. Read More »

Sometimes the cornucopia of plenty in American grocery and general merchandise stores can be, well, a bit monotonous. The bread aisle is a monochrome light brown (occasionally accented by, oddly enough, brown shelves), the dairy case a washed out sea of white plastic bathed in a pale fluorescent glow, the men’s undershirts an undifferentiated mass of white, brown and light gray. It’s no wonder, then, that consumers crave a little variety in packaging and presentation. It’s not just to make the scenery a little less boring; it also makes products dramatically easier to find. Read More »

By Rob Hamshar

WD-40, the famed degreasing and rust-preventing agent, is widely known for its versatility.  As the story goes, it was originally designed and marketed in the aerospace industry to aid in airplane maintenance. But through the years, thousands of new applications were found and problems solved.  Everything from lubricating door-hinges to de-squeaking bedsprings to freeing tongues stuck to frozen metal in wintertime.  The value of a can of WD-40 has undoubtedly increased in the mind of consumers as its perceived utility increased.

The reality is, most B2B companies are much more capable of doing something very similar.  One example that we’ve found is from Dow Chemical.  Like many B2B companies, Dow has a broad array of products and services and interacts with their customers in many different ways.  But, through surveys and conversations with their sales reps, they’ve found that there are often pockets of customers within every customers segment that tend to value a particular part of Dow’s offer far more than other customers in the same segment. Read More »

Chunky aloe vera cooler, anyone? According to a recent Reuters article, Coca-Cola is trying “drink texture” innovation along these lines, in hopes of finding the next billion-dollar brand.  In another development, earlier this summer, P&G launched its eStore, enabling it to sell everything from Fusion razors to Regenerist micro-sculpting cream (whatever that is…bet it could double as a dessert topping).

Seemingly unrelated developments—but if you look closer, there’s an interesting link in these two anecdotes that reveals an opportunity for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to think differently about innovation.  That is, the rise of digital and social media should enable CPGs to relax some important constraints on their innovation strategies—namely, the tyranny of fixed shelf space in retail stores.

That’s where the P&G anecdote comes in.  What if you relaxed that shelf space constraint, along the lines of what P&G is doing with its eStore? If you do that, you have to worry less about giving up some of the shelf space of tried-and-true, mass appeal, high earnings products in return for stocking untried, new products that may not deliver the same earnings per-square-foot.  That’s because with a virtual storefront, warehouse space for stocking physical product is cheap and plentiful.  This opens up the opportunity for brands to increase the mix of ideas in their innovation portfolios that are of a more niche profile, because they can stock the product without the fixed shelf space constraint. Read More »

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One of my favorite things to read about and experience is how quintessential American brands have localized themselves around the world. It’s odd, for instance, to think of American mainstays like McDonald’s and 7-11 offering radically different products and services in their outlets abroad, but they do: McDonald’s, for instance, serves porridge in Singapore and Malaysia, and 7-11 sells video games and consoles in Japan.

And as China’s economy and level of personal wealth has exploded, so too have the number of Western companies doing business there. Unsurprisingly, Chinese consumers have made their imprint on companies like Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and, believe it or not, Pabst Blue Ribbon. Here are some funny, insightful, and just-plain-weird examples of stuff they sell in China:

5) Pig faces at Wal-Mart

Picture me, sitting at my desk in MLC World Headquarters, perusing an off-topic link sent to me by a colleague. “16 Items They Only Sell At Chinese Wal-Marts“. Imagine my horror as I scroll down to find pictures of pig faces – not the heads, just the faces – stacked in a bin.

Apparently pig face isn’t just a delicacy in China – in Spain, it’s called careta – and, in any case, I’m not one to criticize. I’ve eaten even more disgusting things on a dare.

4) Pabst Blue Ribbon – for $44 a bottle

Catering to the growing Chinese business class is proving to be quite a boon for some American manufacturers, including Pabst. Long known as a blue-collar (and later, a hipster) beer in the United States, Pabst Blue Ribbon has a special edition in China called “Pabst Blue Ribbon 1844″, is sold in a bottle that’s reminiscent of a high-end vodka, and advertisements suggest that the beer be served in – what else – a champagne flute. Retailing for an astonishing US$44 a bottle, the beer is marketed to the Chinese public as similar to scotch, brandy, and Bordeaux because all four are aged in wooden casks.

In a country where per-capita income remains just over $3,500/year, Pabst probably doesn’t move many units of this premium brew yet. But it’s an interesting anecdote illustrating an empirical truth – Chinese consumers are gaining purchasing power, and quickly. Read More »

By Martha Gimbel

Running a commercial organization is hard – no one denies that. How do we come up with a unique value proposition that will resonate with customers? How do we coach our reps to become commercial teachers? How do we keep our employees focused on their jobs now that the fourth season of Mad Men is on?

But you would think that one of the easier parts of running a commercial organization would be knowing who owns what tasks. You put Employee #1 in charge of voice of the customer, Employee #2 in charge of sales support, Employee #3 in charge of customer portfolio management, and you take care of commercial strategy. Sounds simple enough, right?

Actually, no. The results from MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic show that:

• 67% of companies don’t know who is in charge of Voice of the Customer
• 63% don’t know who is in charge of Commercial Strategy
• 64% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Portfolio Management
• 54% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Segmentation
• 50% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Experience Management. Read More »

Here in Washington, the community is abuzz with news that Wikileaks, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing whistleblowers a safe place to publish sensitive information, has released a gargantuan store of documents related to the war in Afghanistan. The documents paint a picture that is decidedly at odds with more official portrayals of the war.

The same day, the Library of Congress’ Copyright Office determined that “jailbreaking” the iPhone – a process that allows users to access apps not available in Apple’s App Store – does not violate copyright laws. Apple contends that jailbreaking can harm the phone’s user experience, and leave it vulnerable to viruses; the company voids warranties of jailbroken phones. The Copyright Office, however, said in its ruling that jailbreaking is “innocuous at worst and beneficial at best.”

Regardless of your opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the ethics of leaking sensitive information to the public, or the use of products in ways that weren’t intended, these examples serve to illustrate one principle of the changing information economy: You are not in control. Read More »

It’s that time again – we’re spotlighting the top 5 case studies, event replays, and MLC studies as accessed by our members in the travel and leisure industries! Read More »

By Whitney Satin

American Idol has dominated the airwaves for a number of years now.  While Simon Cowell’s outrageous lambasting of singing hopefuls is a draw for some, sales reps and marketers should pay attention for another (somewhat surprising) reason: Idol’s crowdsourcing of talent through multi-round competition is a powerful way to improve the delivery of your sales pitch. Sound far-fetched?  Stay tuned…

Read More »