It is about the hole in the wall

Again and again I am surprized by how companies still focus on physical goods/products. This is marketing basics! Let me include the statements from Kotler - page 9 of his marketing management bible:

"People satisfy their needs and wants with goods & services. A product is anything that can be offered to satisfy a need or a want. The importance of physical products lies not so much in owning them as in obtaining the services they render."
"Manufacturers often make the mistake of paying more attention to their physical products than to the services produced by these products."

Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole"

Being safe is now too risky

It is not possible to write a blog about inspirational stuff around innovation & marketing and not talk about Seth Godin (similarly, you cannot call yourself a marketeer and never have heard of Seth Godin either). Most probably you have all heard about or read his book "The Purple Cow", what Seth is calling the 6th P in the marketing mix. It is about why mass marketing is dead and that you have to be remarkable nowadays to survive. Doing something that stands out. Don't be boring. Safe is risky. Being very good is bad, you have to be excellent.
Another great quote I saw in a presentation flips it around: “Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal” by Yves Behar.
Seth is also very passionate about spreading your remarkable idea, by telling it to the sneezers; the innovators and early adopters, who want to be remarkable, look for remarkable things and who will be telling their friends about it.
There is a nice clip on TEDtalks where Seth very inspiringly talks about The Purple Cow, nice to refresh all of our memories once in a while: Seth Godin on sliced bread
While searching for inspiring video's I came accross this talk from Seth Godin on the topic "this is broken" - about organizations/people offering customer experiences that do not work. Here also a link to the blog with more great examples Blog: This is broken 



Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

The role of product management

During the past years I have been leading marketing and product management teams with a continuous drive to improve performance and develop the department to highly performing teams. One consistent factor in these roles have been the search together with the teams what our mission and role is in the organization.
That is how I found an inspiring document with a great view of the added value of Product Management or "How a market-driven focus leads companies to build products people want to buy".
I have always believed that a product manager is the "CEO of the product" and that the role of PM is a management role not an operational sales support or marketing communication role.
In my efforts to define the most optimal marketing organization in the medical device industry, on element always stood out and that is the fact that it is impossible to integrate all aspects of product management - strategic, application, technical, commercial and marketing communication - into one person. There should either be sufficient expert support roles or it might be an idea to split the PM job as suggested in the article:
Strategic Role of Product Management

Predictable innovation part 2

In a previous blog I mentioned that predicable innovation is not rocketscience. Here is a link to a presentation that has some inspiring content on that topic:

• An idea-first approach leads to failure in 70 - 90 percent of the time
• The truth is when it comes to innovation: voice of the customer practice does not work
• Companies do not know how to listen to customers
• Markets consist of people who are trying to get a job done…the goal of innovation is help customers get a job done better
• Products come and go - the job is the stable, long-term focal point around which value creation should be centered

Yes, the presentation is a bit commercial but anyway providing some insights.
The Secrets to Predictable Innovation

Personas: A pragmatic and useful way to step into the shoes of your customer

Occasionally I have been in workshops creating Personas and every time I realize how easy and powerfull this tool actually is. A persona is a description of the identity of your (target) customer, the user of your product, a stakeholder or even your own company etc., in the form of an actual person.
I have used Personas to create brand identity and positioning, as input for marketing communication, I have used it for insight generation and concept development (in the fuzzy frontend), during product development and for usability design. I have seen it being used to characterize how a brand is perceived today versus the desired perception in the future.
In a workshop it is a very good tool to step into the shoes of your customer, and have a discussion with your team and share knowledge. And a persona is a nice communication tool for internal communication purposes.
I like the description on Wikipedia: Persona - wikipedia
Here an example that you could use as a template to create your own:

Learn and get inspired from other people's successes

Last year I received the book "Inside Steve's Brain" for my birthday. In this book Leander Kahney reveals the secrets of Steve Job's success and takes a dive into the reasons behind Steve's success based on his personality traits. An inspirational book and very practical as Kahney ends each chapter with a list of key learnings, although when reading, you do wonder whether Steve himself would actually confirm these key learnings.
An important factor for being innovative is shifting your paradigm, look at things from different perspectives and think out of the box. For me, these books facilitate this where sometimes even the way some obvious things are described gives a slightly different perspective then you had before. Let me share with you some key learnings fromt the book that I like:

• Saying no saved Apple. Be selective and learn to say no. Focus on the few things that you are good at.
• Be perfectionistic and go for highest quality, do not accept compromize: in your product, your people, your processes etc.
• Design is function, not shape.
• Create prototypes and test.
• Combine & steel: often great ideas come from combining different things, look at integration of technologies. Sticking to vertical integration, Jobs created unique innovation opportunities with a relatively fast time to market.
• And, my favourite: do not ask your customers, they do not know what they want.
 

We are not in it for the money - so what is your (company's) purpose?

A friend of mine just send me a link of a great speach from Simon Sinek about "start with why", according to Simon, the recipe for success. As he explains, it is not what you do or how you do it, the most important question to answer is "why you do what you do".
Interestingly, as he indicates, companies often claim that their purpose is to make profit but in fact this is not the case - profit should simply be an enabler and companies should have higher a purpose, a reason for exisiting. That is the recipe for success.
In his speach, Simon has some great statements: "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it". He explains that people's decision making comes from our beliefs and purpose and that the things we do merely serve as the proof of what we believe. This is especially so for the innovators and early adopters. "The goal is not to just sell to people who need what you have, the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe". The "why" question could just be the magic trick many companies need to be successful. Here the link to Simons website: www.startwithwhy.com
My lesson for today - we are not in it for the money. What is your belief, your purpose, your passion?