Billion Pound Learnings

I was recently at an event from a founder of a multi-billion pound business, who gave a very entertaining and thoughtful presentation on his learnings. I would normally quote him, but given it was off the record...

• Be Hungry Like The Wolf - the mighty wolf is a strong & crapricous carnivore, but it is not too proud to eat the lichen off the rocks in winter when it can't find enough food so it can survive another day.  So be proud, but not too proud to change the plan when an opportunity presents itself so you can survive for another day.
• Too much money means too little focus. A number of start-ups need loads of financing and this can sometimes be their own downfall, as the less money you have the less options you have to focus on.  This means that you prioritise behind the things that will really make a difference.
• Rip Up The Business Plan - If you need a detailed business plan to get funding, then once you have the cash, rip up the plan and learn.  Look for capital funders who are happy to have a company learn rather than stick to the plan.
• Beware of doing it properly - basically understand why things have to be done "properly" or why things are done the way they have always been done and if nobody can truly explain the reason why things are done "properly" or the way they've always been done.
• Take a gun to a knife fight - ensure that if you are competing, that you have a clear, differentiated & unfair advantage.  And don't get into a gun fight if you only have a knife!
• Don't get drawn into it rusty - a reference to a Gary Larsen Far Side cartoon and basically means not to get drawn into a fight on somebody else terms.  Always fight on your own terms.
• Focus - get the 5 things done that need to be done, then go home!
• There are no rules for innovation.  Innovation is about breaking the rules. So therefore you can't learn the rules of innovation.
• Take a risk, especially with people. Look for people who are different and develop a true meritocry.
• Create urgency - speaks for itself!
• Allow the space for things to grow. But also once you've given it the time, if it's not growing, stamp on it. Basically use a Disney Creative Technique.

Occasions

On a recent innovation project, we hit the often ignored element of occasion - basically, when were the target consumers going to use our new product and how could we reflect this occasion in our Brand Essence Wheel / Key Brand Benefit.

This is the biggest opportunity area for a marketeer - understanding when the consumer is in need of the product and look to expand that opportunity with an extended occasion.

The client initially viewed the occasion opportunity as lunch and weekends, with some consumption in the morning. This was pretty straightforward and based purely upon the current consumption patterns of the generic category.

That is to say, that unprompted by advertising, consumers enjoy this category at two distinct times-  lunchtime and over the weekend. All well and good.  Now the choice becomes do we want to fight a share war just over these two occasions with generic offerings that can compete better on price because of their lower quality or can we bake a bigger cake and take the largest slice of that cake

Well by looking at the occasion of consumption we can start to see opportunities where with a little prompting, consumers can start to see how a brand can be relevant in these other specific occasions, and what's more, the brand will own that occasion, as opposed to sharing it with every other brand in the more generic occasions.

A good example would be Diet Coke.  Back in the day, Diet Coke's consumption occasion was pretty much limited to lunchtime, especially by female office dwellers.  So how could Diet Coke look to expand its occasion (and therefore its marketshare)?  It could look at other meal times, since consumers had already associated Diet Coke with food for lunch, but it was highly unlikely that Diet Coke would offer an appetising choice at the breakfast table.  It could offer an opportunity for the evening meal, but given the choice of drinks in the home (from tea, coffee, water, cordials, fresh fruit juices, never mind the array of wines & beers available) or when out for dinner (more likely than not to be an alcohol occasion) it probably seemed quite a limiting opportunity area. 

They hit upon the idea of owning "the break".  The time in the day when people need a physical refreshment but also a emotional refreshment.  And the great piece of news was that we all need a break EVERY day and Diet Coke can credible offer refreshment during a break. Thus was born the Diet Coke break moment.

So using Diet Coke as an example with my client, I have been able to lift their sights above just the existing generic consumption occasions and find not only a time that fits with the physical requirements (e.g. thirst) but also emotionally (e.g. refresh).  This means that it reinforces the brand's identity and creates a powerful connection moment for the brand in the eyes of the consumer.

Twenty Minutes A Day

Last night I attended a networking event for "ideas" people hosted by the author of Screw Work Let's Play.

It felt like I had found my community, but I had discovered it in a different way to the people that had arrived there as they had mostly arrived there after reading the book, I had arrived there by my own experience.

I left the event in two minds.  One mind slightly hacked off, for reasons I won't go into here.  But I was also struck by the energy that just doing gives to an idea.

I will now attempt to spend 20 minutes a day on getting a couple more of my ideas up and running over the next month or so and see what difference that makes...

In A "What" vs "How" Fight, What Needs To Win in NPD

Back in school we were always told to show our workings when doing "sums", just in case we got the number wrong by simply overlooking an element of the calculation.  We were rewarded in part by the "How" as much as the "What".

But recently while working with a client on a new product, I realised how easy it is to fall for the "how" over the "what".

I know from my years of working on new products that the functional benefit (the what) is vastly more important than the emotional benefit (the how), as users have to establish the use & credibility of the new product's usage claims before they will buy into it. But the client & I spent too much time getting excited about the how and didn't answer the what sufficiently.

But what do I mean by the what (functional benefit) & how (emotional benefit)?  When developing a brand, the classic tool used is the brand essence wheel, which details the functional benefit on the top half of the wheel, asking questions like what does it do and what does it look like.  The BEW then asks what backs up the functional benefit, what makes the what credible by looking at the facts and symbols.

A classic example is the launch of the Gillette fusion in 2006. The functional benefit is not the five blades as they are the product features (the what it looks like) but that is gives men the most comfortable shave, because of its five blades which don't tug & pull.

The emotional benefit of the BEW (the lower half of the BEW) asks about how it makes you look and how it makes you feel, backed up by the personality of the brand.  The feel of the brand is very important to the longevity & profitability of the brand.  As an example, look what happened to Tango when they moved their "feel" away from edgy urban kids playing street hockey underneath the A40 (How many people actually remember that ad?!?!?) to the "You Know When You'Ve Been Tangoed" with the orange "portly gentleman" slapping the drinker on the chops with a football TV pundit style commentary - sales rocketed!

But the problem is not getting sucked into the trap of trying to create a sexy, glamorous TV commercial with the feel before the what is stuck into people's minds. After spending a fun afternoon developing a song platform for the launch of the brand, I realised that I had too fallen into the trap by focusing too much on the sparkly shinny bit of marketing and not the important "Ronseal" test element of marketing...

So with that, I'm going back to the client and challenge them to describe exactly how their product meets the functional needs of the consumers and how we describe that on the packaging...