Melodies in Marketing

How do individuals and businesses develop new products and services?
It all begins with a trip into the Ocean of Opportunity and charting the waters.

Before we set sail, we need to know where we’re going. Shall it be the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, or the South Atlantic? The relational concept we need is a Product Innovation Strategy, which defines the territories of strategic focus for our efforts. Although ideation and concept development should be an open-minded process, borders remind us of what ideas are ‘in and out of bounds’ and improve the quality of ideas we produce in the time we allocate to the Discovery process.

I’ve organized this list of techniques according to whether we’re looking outside or from within.

External Environment

• Use Voice of the Customer (VOC) research. This involves conversing with your customers, trying to identify their problems, unmet needs and simply asking for suggestions where you can improve. Additionally, try to understand their business or operation and its workflow. Using and maintaining customer profiles will not only focus your communication beyond the generic and subjective, but it will elicit more candid responses now and in the future. Specific techniques include interviews, brief surveys, customer visits, and running a weblog.
• Work with “Lead Users” - organizations and individuals that are passionate and active users of the function and benefits your product provides, whose needs extend far beyond an average user, and who are generally well ahead of current market trends.
• Analyze your customer’s industry for shifts and disruptions that affect the activities in their value/supply chain. Where there are problems or trends, lie opportunities for emerging markets and products.
• Develop alternate scenarios of the future that reflect best and worst cases, as a tool for creating and revising your product innovation strategy. The future is uncertain. Knowing how to react in advance of unexpected changes is at the heart of all strategy be it commercial, military, or personal.
• Analyze your competition for their strengths and weaknesses, in addition to their keeping an eye on their activities up and down the value/supply chain.
• Look into your suppliers’ activities and ventures. Talk with them. Are they currently engaged in or pursuing other activities and areas from which you may take advantage of, now or in the future?
• Attend trade shows, read trade publications (foreign & domestic), read academic/scientific journals and weblogs, and watch the activities of universities with departments engaged in R&D related to your innovation strategy.
• Acquire professional intelligence services that can provide you with specific industry trend reports or research, analysis, and recommendations customized to your particular needs.

Internal Environment

• Conduct primary research & development that is based on stages separated by critical review sessions. These sessions (aka ‘gates’) will examine progress to date, determine technical and commercial viability, and decide whether to proceed to the next stage, return again after more study, or cancel the project altogether. Such discipline results in research projects that are directed, focused and more productive than those based on sheer curiosity.
• For special organizational conferences and events, organize multiple breakout sessions that foster open discussion of the organization’s industry and trends, their strengths and weaknesses, and lastly suggestions where opportunities may lie. Organize and present the generated ideas to management, openly discuss to weed out unfit concepts, and have attendees vote.
• Develop in-house suggestion schemes and idea repositories. Specific tools may include intranet discussion boards or weblogs.
• Employ in-house Ideation Evangelists whose sole job is the coordination of all activities related to idea generation, collection, and dissemination.
• Use ‘Plussing’ - taking an idea intended for one line, and asking other line managers how they could apply the base concept to their department.
• Give personnel time allowances for scouting and personal creative development projects.
• Use creativity tools and conduct staff exercises such as storyboards and skits. You may consider commissioning outside professionals to come in for special sessions.

Results & Sail Plan

The purpose of all these techniques is to identify opportunities in the form of:
Unmet needs, problems, emerging areas, profit areas, and voids and gaps

With these opportunities in hand, we’ll shape them into:
Major initiatives and ventures, research projects, customer solutions, new line extensions or even platforms, and lastly revised product roadmaps.

When you’re ready, continue on to the first review session in the ‘fuzzy front-end’ of product development: Idea Screening

For more information on the various phases in NPD, visit the master page on The Stage-Gate Model of New Product Development

Note: The term ‘Discovery’ in NPD terminology, was coined by Robert G. Cooper as the preliminary phase in his trademarked Stage-Gate process. A more universal term for this phase would be “Idea Generation”.

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Just came back from my first trip to Qingdao, China. Qingdao is at the southern tip of the Shandong Peninsula. It is a famous coastal tourism city near Shanghai - also known for its Tsingtao Beer around the world

When I went, I had little idea of what to expect. I found a country that is undergoing change at a rate that is surely unparalleled. The Qingdao skyline resembles that of an American city; I caught glimpses of old China but that is all they were.

The high level of foreign investment was striking. The sheer number of people was something that has left a large impression. When this is coupled with the nation’s determination to develop, it is apparent why China will become the world’s largest economy. The highlight of the trip was spending time with the people who were not just kind, but fun loving with a rich sense of humor.

The visit was a huge success and carried a very steep learning curve for me personally. It involved a mixture of meeting suppliers and forming professional relationships on which to build, spending time with the company’s purchasing and outsourcing departments (both on and off-premise), seeing and learning about the production processes, learning about Chinese business customs, and lastly traveling about Qingdao and the surrounding area in order to develop an understanding of China and gain an insight into what doing business here might involve. Qingdao, which is on the Pacific coast, will act as host for the sailing events in the 2008 Olympic Games.

During my stay I made it a habit of picking up the local English newspaper, which pragmatism gladly surprised me. I could not help but notice how seriously the Chinese government and the media were paying attention to what is said here in the US about “Made in China” products in general and the latest succession of well-publicized problems with its food products including contaminated toothpaste and imported fish that was found to have traces of illegal antibiotics.

These are serious matters, no doubt about it. But there is nothing happening in China today that is fundamentally different from what has happened or is still happening in other countries - including the US. Remember the peanut butter contaminated with salmonella and E. coli contaminated spinach few months ago?

In many of its sectors, China’s booming economy is one of the most cutthroat in the world: Factories pare margins to the bone in order to beat out their neighbors for orders and market share, and they eliminate as many costs as possible. Bad ingredients are substituted for good ones if they are cheaper and non-apparent.

Even some of China’s best and most responsible companies, those with genuine ambitions to produce high-quality goods, are sometimes forced to choose between losing money, the Wal-Mart order or both.

Does this sound familiar? Of course it does. Go back and reread Upton Sinclair. Recall the sweatshops in New York’s garment district or what sparked the creation of the Food and Drug Administration and, not so long ago in ‘72, the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

This country is now furiously engaged in a remarkable frenzy of self-examination and criticism. As China looks at itself in the mirror and prepares to face the world’s markets, consumer expectations and demands are only slowly beginning to have an impact on product quality and safety. Truly blatant crimes of corruption and official misconduct may lead to highly visible executions, such as the ones we’ve witnessed in the last couple of weeks, but these punishments will have only a limited deterrent effect.

Real and widespread change in the Chinese regulatory environment will come from two much more important developments. First, the better Chinese companies with Western customers and international ambitions for their own products and brands, will band together and plead for better and more effective regulations. They will be joined by the Western companies with operations in China whose managers wonder about the quality of the ingredients that they use. These managers after all, are already under scrutiny by their regulators and customers outside China. Both the Chinese and the Western companies want and need a level playing field where the worst of the price-bound competitors no longer can play with an unfair advantage.

Second, the Chinese government will step in with rules and regulations that will be enforceable…and that in fact will be enforced.

Chinese and Western companies with huge Chinese operations face two challenges today. They need to manage and communicate their way through a series of crises - related to product safety, public health, environmental quality, labor practices and a host of other public issues - that are just now beginning and that likely will continue to challenge them. At the same time, they need to learn quickly how to help shape the new regulatory directions that the government is bound to take, how to help educate government officials about which rules will work and which will not and how to make the kinds of strategic bets about regulatory policies and their own investments that either will allow them to adapt quickly and prosper - or that will condemn them to a quick demise.

The U.S. Congress in 2002 passed the Bioterrorism Preparedness Act, designed in part to improve food safety. It includes new rules on how all domestic and foreign food facilities must register with the FDA – and give notice for any shipments of human or animal food.

Yet the FDA is able to inspect only 0.7 percent of all imported food products, down from 1.1 percent the previous year. In 2006, that means the FDA inspected just 20,662 shipments out of more than 8.9 million that arrived in US ports – employing about 1,750 food inspectors for ports and domestic food-production plants.

This only shows that the tasks at hand are much more complicated than our respected congressmen believe. The U.S. government and congress should be much more mindful of what they say and communicate to their constituency, since lashing out against the Chinese will only further alienate the US-Sino relationship. This is an issue facing governments globally and projected to increase with the growth of global commerce. A more careful and beneficial approach would be an international standardization of Food safety regulations and ongoing bilateral collaboration for faster and more flexible solutions.

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In the spirit of community giving, I’d like to send 3 copies of the book to CMOs on our behalf. But who should I pick? I can’t deny any requests since this is from us…so make it good.

I’ll be the first…so I pick:

Colgate-Palmolive

I think this company can definitely use some help in making some better products that reflect consumer needs. But as from my page in the book, conversation can bring new ideas for improvement across a wide variety of company activities. Ultimately, I’d like to see this company step up to P&G’s level of product innovation. It will probably take a while, but that’s fine…they just need a little encouragement. (*Gentle shove* into the playground).

Who else would you like to see get a book?

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The Era of Enlightenment is back in full glory. After 250 years since these classicists helped fuel a revolution of ideas across Europe and in the New World, a Grand New Coalition has formed to spread the merits of thinking open-mindedly and the power of conversation as a tool to further the humanistic, commercial, and spiritual progress of mankind. The following individuals have come together for a wondrous cause.

These individuals have each contributed a page to a book called “The Age of Conversation”. In it, each author discusses their perspective on how conversation is best seen and applied in this new millennium. I’m happy to be one of the authors included, and I recommend you keep it in mind for your bookshelf.

Sales proceeds will be going toward the children’s charity Variety.

Official website:

Age of Conversation

To purchase:

stores.lulu.com/ageofconversation

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