Archive for Lean Marketing
Do you understand where demand comes from?
Posted by: | CommentsMaybe the better question is can it be created? Most of us believe it is though better or more marketing or sales. Where it really comes from is understanding your customers better! That should come as little surprise to the readers of this blog.
My recent posts:
Deming was just simply wrong about variation…
Why won’t Lean commit to the Demand Chain the way it committed to the Supply chain?
It’s the Who, not the Why @simonsinek
Can Service Design increase Customer demand?
Work on demand, ‘It’s the demand side, stupid’
In the recent book, Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It by one of my favorite authors, Adrian Slywotzky, he explains how what he calls Demand Creators think. He outlines the process in a Six step process:
- Make it Magnetic: It’s not the first mover that wins; it’s the first to create and capture the emotional space in the market.
- Fix the Hassle Map: Map the hassles and fix them. This will provide a path to explosive potential demand.
- Build a Complete Backstory: Till this in place and all the dots connected in the hassle map, demand simple does not happen.
- Find the Triggers: Always experiment, always search to turn fence sitters into customers.
- Build a Steep Trajectory: Continuously innovate.
- De-Average: Constantly improve product fit for varying customers.
The author goes on to say that the Demand Creator is always in search of the next hassle map for the customer. However the most important trait is when confronted with – Where will tomorrow’s demand come from? They don’t point to anyone, they simply look in the mirror.
Author’s page: Books by Adrian Slywotzky
I highly recommend this book. It demonstrates each point through at least 2 case studies. An example is on Finding the Triggers: For Zipcar, it’s density–and just a short walk to the car. For Nespresso, it’s taste and trial in a fancy boutique. For Netflix, it’s waiting 1 day for a movie to arrive instead of 6. Smart companies recognize that each product has its own trigger–and that discovering these triggers is the key to creating demand.
Deming was just simply wrong about variation…
Posted by: | Comments..when applied to Lean Sales and Marketing. We have all heard the saying attributed to John Wanamaker, a department-store magnate in the late 19th century, famously said that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but that he didn’t know which half. That theory is substantiated in a blog post, Why Should 50% of your marketing should fail (statistical proof offered by by Don Reinertsen). So I would offer a simple explanation that we do need variation for sales and marketing to work. But it goes much deeper than that, it is the thought of the average customer.
When continuous improvement is applied to sales and marketing most think about reducing waste and segmenting customers. As Deming said, “Variation is the enemy”. Sales and marketing is a process. If we can reduce the variation and the inputs to a process, we increase the predictability of the outputs and it makes it a whole lot easier to manage those processes. As a result, we can focus on things that really do need our attention.
This is supply-side thinking. We segment out customers till we can define the “average” customer”. People that understand variation know that average is a poor measure. You could have one foot in boiling water and another in ice cold water and on average you are ok. So why do we market to the average? It makes it easier!
If we focus on Demand thinking, we must focus and embrace variation. We must ask ourselves how our customers differ and how their experiences differ. Focusing on these differences and grouping them accordingly offers us a chance to market to a broader spectrum.
An example of this is the philosophy of Mass Customization. From Wikipedia:
Mass Customization is the method of effectively postponing the task of differentiating a product for a specific customer until the latest possible point in the supply network." (Chase, Jacobs & Aquilano 2006, p. 419). The concept of mass customization is attributed to Stan Davis in Future Perfect[1] and was defined by Tseng & Jiao (2001, p. 685) as "producing goods and services to meet individual customer’s needs with near mass production efficiency". Kaplan & Haenlein (2006) concurred, calling it "a strategy that creates value by some form of company-customer interaction at the fabrication and assembly stage of the operations level to create
customized products with production cost and monetary price similar to those of mass-produced products".
In a Demand Driven world, organizations must embrace customer variation. They must encourage it and make provisions for variation to increase. This is a key strategy in a demand driven world. It is where you find new customers and is a key to you innovation. Variation is not the enemy. WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US. Embrace Variation; do not try to rid yourself of it.
Related Information:
Lean Marketing: Sales Quotas lead to Waste
Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos
Creating Flow with Don Reinertsen
Why should 50% of your marketing fail?
Is your organization a learning organization?
Posted by: | CommentsThis is an interview with David Garvin and Amy Edmondson, Professors, Harvard Business School. Learning organizations generate and act on new knowledge. The ability to do this enables companies to stay ahead of change and the competition.
This is the the link to the PDF of article that is discussed in the interview, Is Yours a Learning Organization? Or, you can view it below.
Related information:
Marketing with PDCA.
Why the Lean SALES PDCA Cycle was Created!
In love with your products more than your customers?
Janet R. McColl-Kennedy: Co-creation of Value and S-D logic
Continuous Improvement Sales and Marketing Toolset
