See Me, Feel Me, Criticize Me

It's a challenge to objectively examine your own website as if a prospect or customer seeking information would. There's an approach you can follow to get ideas flowing though: Look at a direct competitor's online presence, trying to shoot holes in it based on how a customer might view it.

You should really be able to get into it by answering a few questions:

• What misleading or out-of-date information is presented?


• What's not compelling about the website?


• What's confusing about the navigation?


• How much unnecessary detail do I have to supply to get a copy of the "free" download?


• What questions do I have that the website doesn't answer?


• Do I know where to get my other questions answered?


• In what ways did I get smarter by browsing this website?


• In what ways were my information needs left wanting?

After doing this, go back and see how your own online presence compares. Looking at yourself from a customer perspective should now be much easier! - Mike Brown

Getting Ready for 2010: Planning in a Recession - Guest Post by Barrett Sydnor

Today's guest post addressing preparing for 2010 comes from Barrett Sydnor, one of the first guest authors ever on Brainzooming back in early 2008. I've worked with Barrett on various strategic planning projects over the past 15 years, including quite a bit of quantitative industry analysis and supply/demand forecasting.

Today, he's addressing the right marketing stance to have during and coming out of a recession:

Fortune Favors the Bold.

The Roman playwright Terence wrote that in the 2nd century BC, though Virgil often gets credit because a similar line later appears in the Aeneid. Terence was probably talking about the military strategy of some emperor, but it turns out that the sentiment applies to businesses—small and large—as they face figuring out how to plan for 2010.

A natural tendency when looking at bad or uncertain times is to hunker down, keep spending to a minimum, and stay with what you have done in the past. Natural, but maybe not smart.

A Hurwitz & Associates report found that 65% of small businesses that expected increased revenues during 2009 had raised or planned to increase marketing spending. Increased revenues were expected by only 30% of those who were keeping marketing spend flat, and almost half (41%) of those who were cutting marketing spend were expecting a decrease in revenue.

This correlates with a study done at Penn State after the 2000 recession. The authors say that using what they call “proactive marketing” can allow firms to improve both capital market and business performance during a recession. They cite increased marketing spending by P&G, Kellogg, Intel, and Wal-Mart during recessions—and depressions—as a way to grab or consolidate dominant market shares.

For sports fans, one way to restate “Fortune Favors the Bold,” is “The Best Defense is a Good Offense.” You might ask, "How did that work out for Bill Belichick and the Patriots against the Colts?" While the execution lacked, he had the science—and the odds on his side (discussion here, here, and here).

In planning, as in coaching football, getting the odds on your side is really is what you are trying to do. Being more aggressive with your 2010 plan may be the way to tilt those odds in your favor. - Barrett Sydnor

Getting Ready for 2010: 3 Real Life Planning Successes

I'm a proponent of spreading strategic thinking broadly in a company and not readily handing off strategy development to outside parties exclusively. Yet I've been a part of many examples where an outside perspective helped move strategy development ahead much more quickly.

Here are several examples you may be facing where it's good to get outside expertise:

Turning Talk Into a Plan

A small subsidiary's three-person management team was told to get a plan in place to show corporate management the company's direction. They had no planning process and only ten business days to deliver a comprehensive strategic plan. We brought in the Brainzooming process to develop an innovative strategic plan in one day. The output couldn't be simply a bunch of ideas nor could it be only a rote plan with little strategic insight.

Structuring a day-long session using question-based exercises allowed the team to answer questions about the business, participate in exercises to stretch strategic perspectives on competition and opportunities, and come back the next morning to make people and timing decisions on a tight plan to share with the operating president.

As non-planners, they wouldn't have been able to put together a coherent business plan in ten days, but they did understand their business and the general direction they needed to head. We combined their deep knowledge with exercises and facilitation allowing us to challenge and create a strategic flow from their answers. We delivered the best of both worlds - a structured plan reflecting their intent for the business with sound strategic logic and more innovation than they'd have ever brought to it alone. This experience demonstrated the clear benefit of the emerging Brainzooming process.

Stimulating a Management Team that Knows It All

We rolled into town to help a really experienced senior management team tackle annual planning. Because of their tenure and smarts, they knew the company inside- out. This knowledge rendered them ill-suited to solving a long-term growth challenge: as every idea was uttered, they "knew" why it wouldn't work for the brand.

During the course of a day-long planning session, I created a new exercise on the fly based on a brand in a very different industry sharing the same fundamental characteristics of our client. I asked the group to suggest how this other company could address the same challenge they were facing. All of a sudden ideas started flowing non-stop. We were able to take the concepts and strategically apply them to their business.

Left on its own to think strategically, the management team would never have reached an alternative look at its business. An outside perspective, unburdened by excessive detail was critical to identifying an analogous situation, providing an entree for innovative strategic thinking and implementation.

Doing the Thinking for a Distracted Management Team

We had a pre-scheduled planning follow-up with a management team who, since our initial session, had been charged with exploring a major brand contraction. Unable to convince them their new assignment should be the focus for our session, we instead spent time addressing the status quo scenario. Unfortunately, the status quo wasn't likely or compelling enough to command much of their attention and strategic creativity.

Frustrated by the lack of intensity while addressing the status quo, we wrapped the effort early. We told them we'd work on the status quo scenario, delivering 200 prioritized, fleshed out ideas and concepts within 3 days. Using several creativity techniques during the flight home, we generated really strong creative concepts for the status quo or, with some modification, for the alternative scenario also.

This was a great example of the importance of a balanced group in doing the best strategic thinking. The client's management team had business experience and functional knowledge, but was sapped of any creative energy it ever had. Bringing in outside talent for a creative spark was needed to turn lackluster thinking into vibrant, implementable ideas. - Mike Brown

Getting Ready for 2010: Tools to Improve Your Success

With 2010 looming and the importance of approaching the year with creative business and competitive options, here are links to a variety of tools to help if you're under the gun to get a successful plan completed.

A Foundation on Strategic Thinking

• An Overview on What Strategic Means, Who to Involve in Strategy Development, and a Few Strategic Tools

Creating a Strategic Focus

• Steps to Re-evaluate and Focus on Important Elements in Your Business


• Better Understanding What's Strategic in Your Business

Contingency Planning

• Thoughts on Dealing with Uncertainty


• Steps to Deal with Planning Amid Uncertainty


• Quickly Developing Options When Your Current Plan Isn't Working


• Having to "Wing" Your Strategy Because of Uncertainty

Updating Your Current Plan

• Re-checking Your Marketing Plan for Completeness


• Reviewing and Modifying Your Strategic Direction


• Updating a Marketing Plan Under Tight Resources

Implementing Specific Strategic Thrusts

• Generating New Ideas When You Need Them


• When A More Aggressive Competitive Strategy Is Needed


• You're Fighting an Uphill Battle and Need a Contrarian Strategy


• Developing a Low-Investment Marketing Strategy


• You Have a Turnaround to Fix

Wrapping Up with a Smile on Your Face

• The Ultimate in Flexible Strategy

Additionally, Trendwatching.com has released its briefing on "10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010" covering impacts arising from (among other things):

• Urbanization
• Fragmentation in what constitutes luxury
• Increasingly complex online presences
• A push for mass IRL interactions emanating from online networks

There are certainly other Brainzooming articles touching on these planning topics, but ideally this short list will get you jump started for current planning efforts you have to complete. - Mike Brown

Go Ahead. Prove Me Wrong.

Don't underestimate the tremendous motivational force of challenging someone to produce facts to try and prove you wrong. Most people like to be right and will expend at least some effort to support their point.

If you can get someone to do this, you'll benefit in multiple ways:

• You'll better understand counter arguments against your point of view.


• There's the opportunity to learn more about your topic from a different perspective.


• You might discover you are actually wrong and be able to correct your own misunderstanding of the issue in a lower risk situation.

So go ahead and issue the challenge to try and prove you wrong. In so doing, you'll set your challenger up to make your day. - Mike Brown

Can You Handle the Truth?

During a presentation, I was highlighting the blog post on finding a strategic PITA (pain in the ass), describing how it was originally inspired by a senior person at our ad agency who never fails to dissect our ideas in painful, yet tremendously valuable ways.

A number of the attendees were in advertising and were surprised someone from an agency could get away with taking strong stands with a client. The experience for most of them has been that the agency has to conform to what the client wants to do, with little challenging involved. They wondered how my strategic PITA gets away with what he does.

My reply was he is able to do it because we want him to do it. It's a waste to engage smart people with diverse perspectives and then expect them to hold their tongues and simply agree with what we want to say or do.

Whether someone has the experience and intellectual horsepower to be strategic is only part of the issue. The important part, particularly in client-vendor relationships, is whether you've given another person permission to take on the "pain in the ass" role you need. So, have you given your potential strategic PITA the go ahead yet to be truthful? If not, do it today!

24 Hours of Innovation - First Half Innovation Pep Talk: Let’s Go Out There and Not Say What We’re Doing!

Here’s a potentially unusual theme for a 2009 half-time innovation pep talk: Let’s go out, boldly innovate, and not talk so much about it!

Let me explain the strategy. Many business innovators I've talked with in the past year have recounted their frustration with the negative economic situation, resulting short term management perspectives, and dwindling resources across the board.

So what is an innovator to do in the second half of the year?

You can close up shop and wait for better times. Alternatively, you can redouble your business case building efforts and take a run at getting some semblance of the funding you used to secure for formal innovation efforts. Or, you could go underground and create a more modest innovation approach.

Why go underground?

Going low-key can provide several advantages:

• It potentially lowers expectations and increases maneuverability. You’re asking for less, so there’s potentially less scrutiny. That can mean more freedom to experiment, make mistakes, learn, and still drive results.


• The parties who decide to participate are likely to be more committed and motivated. There’s a certain amount of risk in joining forces with an underground effort. People won't typically get in half-way.


• It forces more ingenuity – you’re going to be cut-off from some potentially fundamental resources. But at least you can understand limitations upfront and spell out a plan for what you won’t have. It may force you to innovate in new areas you wouldn’t have considered before.


• You may be able to focus more on creating deliverables than having to justify each step in the innovation process. For a challenged management team centered on near-term results, being able to provide a view of an innovation nearer to its potential implementation can be beneficial.


• You can get an advantage relative to competitors who may be taking a more traditional route to innovation or completely eliminating innovation programs.

An underground innovation strategy won't work in every business or for every type of innovation program. But if what you've been doing is stalled, it's a valid approach to try to keep innovation efforts moving forward in the second half of 2009.

Thanks to The Board of Innovation for the opportunity to participate in the 24 Hours of Innovation!

Strategic Thinking Snippets - Direction and Change

Here's another installment in Strategic Thinking Snippets - ideas first shared on Twitter and now collected and arranged for Brainzooming. This Strategic Thinking Snippet installment focused on identifying strategic direction and managing through change.

• A lot of effort gets spent solving wrong problems. Important Safety Tip: Invest the time to figure out the right thing to fix.
• If you don't start with questions, it's really easy to solve the wrong problem. Go ahead...ask questions.
• Without a strategic foundation, even bad ideas can masquerade as great ones. Don't skip the strategy step.
• Being able to recall past patterns is key to strategic thinking, no matter how you're able to recall them.
• As important as recall is for strategic thinking, looking at things anew is vital also. Together, they're transforming.
• Be careful of "never" & "always" statements. The real frequency is "almost always" between these 2 extremes.
• Sometimes you need a mini-crisis to drive change. Know how to create one, if necessary.
• Force yourself to put things you think are really good in new settings. You'll find many new ways to improve them!
• Get comfortable with the intriguing twists life takes that you could never anticipate. Simply enjoy them!

World Creativity and Innovation Week - Innovating in Your "Happy Zone"

As a kid, I was a huge baseball fan, reading anything I could on how the game could be played better. One of my favorite books was “The Science of Hitting” by Ted Williams. As one of baseball’s greatest hitters (and the last person to hit .400 for a season), Williams had plenty of advice and insights to pass along.

The lesson that’s stayed with me to this day was depicted on the book's original cover. It was a photograph of Williams in the batter’s box with the strike zone depicted as 11 baseballs high and 7 baseballs across. And each color-coded baseball had a batting average listed on it corresponded to Williams’ expected batting average for pitches throughout his strike zone.

Belt high and over the plate, and he was a .400 hitter; low and away, and even the great Ted Williams knew he’d only hit .230. Williams’ point was he knew in what situations he’d be great (his "happy zone") and in which he’d be less than average. As a result, he only swung at pitches where he had a high probability of success.

That’s a great lesson well beyond baseball. Do you actively evaluate your strengths, your areas with the highest probabilities of innovation success, and concentrate efforts on those areas? If not, maybe now's the time (early in the season) to make sure you're only swinging at good "innovation" pitches day in and day out.

A Few Life Lessons - Just because . . .

• Just because you can doesn't mean you have to.
  
• Just because you don't have to doesn't mean you shouldn't.
  
• Just because someone else wouldn't doesn't mean it isn't worth trying.
  
• Just because it hasn't worked before doesn't mean it will or won't now.
  
• Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it's not possible.

Sports Strategy Lessons Week - Yes, I’m Bluffing . . .Don’t You Think?

Although I’ve been accused by co-workers of having a poker face, I’m not a poker player. As a result, this follow-up to yesterday’s post on bluffing is based on secondary research, not real-life poker experience. These rules, adapted from poker bluffing maxims, are helpful in deciding when and how to use a bluffing strategy in business situations:

• Be attuned to details in others’ behaviors. Study good bluffers and identify why they’re effective.


• Don’t make it a general practice to bluff. Use the strategy only when necessary and avoid pure bluffs (i.e., you have limited means to deal with the downside of losing) at nearly all costs.


• It’s dangerous to bluff against careless or inexperienced parties. They’ll tend to miss or incorrectly perceive situations and react unpredictably.


• Fully understand your position in any situation where you’re considering a bluffing strategy.


• Make sure the risks aren’t too high when you elect to bluff.


• When bluffing, do so in a way that’s consistent with what the other person suspects is accurate and true about the situation (i.e., they think you have all the necessary information in a situation, so you act as if you do).


• Don't bluff someone you suspect has a stronger position (i.e., more information, flexibility, risk tolerance, etc.).

When to bluff? Here are a few situations where it may be appropriate:

• A situation is familiar and you need to appear strong and in command even when you don’t have all the information you’d like or a full grasp of this particular situation.


• You have some negative near-term information that can be corrected more readily if you don’t have to disclose it to the other party.


• You’re bargaining with someone in a low-importance situation and are indifferent to winning or losing.

Consider incorporating bluffing into your strategy repertoire if you haven’t before.

And given how good interviewees are about Googling interviewers, these last two posts might be enough of a nudge to pave the way for reintroducing my bluffing question with the possibility of getting some decent answers.

Thanks for playing along during Sports Strategy Lesson week. Did you enjoy these strategy lessons? Let me know!

Sports Strategy Lessons Week - Are You Bluffing?

I’ve finally quit asking an interview question about situations in which prospective job candidates would make a conscious strategic decision to bluff. While based on a real-life situation where I had to bluff during a senior executive presentation, hardly anyone would identify when they’d do the same.

That’s too bad, because bluffing can be an effective strategy - just refer back to yesterday's post about Joe DiMaggio. The key is to not overdo it and to be able to sustain the implications of having your bluff called.

I’ve bluffed several times recently with outside parties looking for assistance where there was little downside if they said no – which the first one did. In every other case though, the strategy resulted in a positive gain for both of us, interestingly enough.

So how about you?

What’s a situation where you’ve had to bluff either in business or personally? Have you seen someone else bluff and get called on it? Or someone bluffing and winning big as a result?

Share your stories in the comments section, and tomorrow we’ll cover successful bluffing tips from the world of poker (hey, ESPN thinks it's a sport).

Sports Strategy Lessons Week - Use What You Don't Have Wisely

The start of baseball spring training reminds me of a favorite baseball story. It’s been so long since I heard it, who knows if it’s true, but it’s so rich with strategy lessons, it almost doesn’t matter!

The Story

During a Yankee World Series appearance, Joe DiMaggio’s arm was reportedly injured. Scouting reports said opponents could run on anything hit to center since supposedly DiMaggio couldn’t throw.

How did DiMaggio deal with this blatant weakness?

Even though hurt, he could make one throw a day. Most people would save that one throw for an important play late in the game. Not DiMaggio. Before the game, with the opposing team on-field, he’d uncork a bullet from center to home plate. Seeing this for themselves, the other team wouldn’t dare try to take advantage of DiMaggio’s arm by attempting to grab an extra base when things really counted.

Lesson One

Lesson one focuses on the fundamental strategic question, “What matters?” In this case, preventing runners from advancing on balls hit to center was paramount. And since DiMaggio’s physical prowess was failing him, he used an alternative - his mental skill – to accomplish this important objective. His adeptness demonstrates a true strategic perspective. Applying this lesson is relatively clear: understand your desired objective and be open to unconventional ways to accomplish it.

Lesson Two

The second strategic lesson is you don’t have to display all your capabilities all the time for them to be effective. DiMaggio relied on his "brand" reputation, with only slight real evidence, to create a larger-than-reality perception.

Using this lesson is more subtle. Suppose you have a brand capability that’s temporarily weakened or under attack. While it’s fine to not rely on the capability, you may still need to let others know it’s in your repertoire. If that's the case, determine in what ways you can compensate, perhaps by taking advantage of an opportunity to mass resources temporarily and deliver better than typical performance or ward off a competitor.

Both lessons can help prevent others from taking advantage of you or your brand when it really counts!

Sports Strategy Lessons Week - Strategy Gone Wild

One of this football season's most intriguing strategy stories was the Miami Dolphins’ use of the Wildcat Offense – a variation of a 1907 Pop Warner (the coach, not the youth league) offensive formation designed around multi-dimensional, Hall of Fame great Jim Thorpe. It had last been used in the NFL during the 1951 season.

This very different offensive setup features the running back taking the snap from center and an unbalanced offensive line that causes confusion in defensive assignments. The first six times Miami used the Wildcat, it scored four times. In the first 76 Wildcat plays, they scored eight touchdowns and gained 453 yards (or nearly 6 yards per play).

And no surprise, other teams, seeing Miami’s early success, introduced their own version of the single wing offense with varying degrees of success. Even the lowly Kansas City Chiefs incorporated some razzle dazzle in their offense, with their quarterback catching a 37-yard touchdown pass in one game.

Three strategy applications of the Dolphins’ story come quickly to mind:

1. Those who know history are able to repeat it!

This example turns the maxim, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it” inside out. Knowing history allowed Dolphins coach Tony Sparano to repeat and introduce a play that had long ago fallen out of favor. Even though considered ancient history, the Wildcat offense was ideally suited to take advantage of his team’s skill set.

Question – Do you know relevant history in your business so you can broaden your strategic options in ways that less-studious competitors can’t?

2. Competitively, surprise can work better than rehashing today’s best practices when looking for dramatically improved results.

Surprise can have a far bigger positive impact in competitive situations than mining today's best practices. If Sparano had simply looked for the best examples of current offenses, he might have gained some incremental improvements. It’s unlikely though that the Dolphins would have scored four times in the first six plays using a current offensive best practice. The dramatic success was fueled by something not only unexpected but unseen previously by its competitors.

Question – How are you actively cultivating opportunities to use surprise to beat competitors by intriguing prospects and capturing them as customers?

3. Surprise wears off and smart competitors respond.

If you choose surprise as a strategy, it’s only good for so long. The Dolphins' early success rate moderated with the Wildcat offense’s more frequent use. Competitors catch up and change approaches. You have to be prepared to stay another few steps ahead and move to other surprise tactics.

Question – Before you implement a surprise-oriented strategy, ask yourself, “What are our next three or four variations or additional surprises to sustain our advantage?”

The Dolphins’ surprise-based strategy was a strong factor in their significant change of fortunes, going from a 1-15 record in 2007 to 11-5 in 2008 with their first playoff appearance in 7 seasons.

How can you use the lessons from the Dolphins’ turnaround to dramatically improve your business results in 2009?

Business Week Exchange Reminder

Remember to check out the Business Exchange website Tuesday, February 17, where I'm scheduled to be the featured user of the day. Business Exchange is the new social media site from Business Week that provides networking and opportunities to upload and review content on a variety topics.

A Good Competitive Strategy Reminder

Enemies - Some enemies are okay to have. Some enemies are bad to have. Snow plow drivers are horrible enemies.

You’ve Got Mail

Tuesday brought a variety of great inbox material on strategically addressing the current economic downturn.

Several articles included in a free McKinsey Quarterly email addressed strategy in tough times:

• Leading through uncertainty
• Strategy in a ‘structural break’
• The downturn’s new rules for marketers
• A fresh look at strategy under uncertainty: An interview
• McKinsey Global Survey Results: Economic conditions snapshot, November 2008

It’s definitely worth signing up to get access to the free McKinsey material. You’ll be able to read and download many articles in its historical library.

Another article was from Wired.com about innovation in turbulent economic times. The article was featured in the free Innovation Tools newsletter.

Many strategic pieces getting written advise against the potential initial instinct to pull back on everything in the face of uncertainty. Instead, they suggest smart, strategic businesses take advantage of major market shifts, get strategically aggressive, and come out ahead of hesitant competitors.

The challenge is that it’s easier written than done. Here’s to doing it now and being around to write about the successes later!

Saturday Special - 7 Marketing Tune-Ups for Tough Times

Amid a challenging business environment, look for opportunities to tune-up your marketing approach. Here’s a starter checklist that could be valuable for you:

Maximize What You’ve Got – Inventory creative that’s already developed and make sure it’s being used in all ways possible, i.e. Can customers get collateral as web downloads? Can you get your new TV commercial to customers in more ways? And when developing new creative, think through all potential uses before beginning. Get the extra paragraph, photograph, take, or edit that will extend its uses or effective life.

Align Messages – Pushing all-out for increased sales can create a proliferation of messages as you try to ensure every possible product and feature gets visibility. One downside can be confusion and lack of clarity among both customers and the internal sales organization. It’s a good time to revisit a solid strategic messaging platform, working hard to tie messages back to it to improve clarity.

Develop New Capabilities – Are there processes or skills that you’ve been putting off developing within your marketing team? Now might be the time to create a skunk works effort and get a new approach to an old challenge underway. To also develop your team, involve staff members not typically on your usual list of participants. That will pay dividends later as well.

Monitor Competitors’ Efforts and Share of Voice (SOV) – Most – but not all - companies cut back on marketing investments during challenging economic times. Gauge what’s happening among your competitors. Has everybody in your market pulled back, signaling an opportunity to maintain investment (or reduce it at a lower rate) and increase your share of voice? Or are certain competitors using a longer-term approach, investing for the eventual business recovery? Knowing your industry’s situation helps shape decisions on your brand’s best approach.

Spread Out or Heavy Up - Based on SOV insights, determine how to spread your marketing investment across channels. If share of voice is down overall, consider extending your investment into new areas while still maintaining enough frequency and relative presence. If you’re being outspent overall, it might be right to mass your investment in fewer places and “own” what you can, using other means to point customers and prospects to the areas where you’ve heavied up.

Consolidate Marketing Partners - When every dollar of marketing investment is precious, you need maximum efficiencies. One approach is to look at your external marketing partners and determine if there are process and cost advantages in working with fewer partners. Making this type of reduction allows you to manage fewer relationships (time efficiency), grow deeper relationships (message alignment advantages), and negotiate for lower per unit costs (investment efficiencies).

Generate a Guerrilla Tools List - Revisit and expand your list of available marketing tools, particularly low-cost and “free” ones that may be underutilized. A great starting point is the website for Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of guerrilla marketing with its list of 100 guerrilla marketing tools. Additionally, you can customize and expand the list of tools for your business. Be sure to consider blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites that allow you to inexpensively reach new parts of your audience.

Those are seven places to start fine tuning and maximizing your marketing efforts. Please comment on approaches you’re using successfully.

It's All About You

Several marcus evans Customer Segmentation Conference sessions addressed customizing experiences. Some highlights follow from two of them.

Edward Gala, VP of Corporate Marketing Services at Xerox, began his presentation covering a range of customization applications: personalized M&M’s, Heinz ketchup labels, and the recent “Obama losing by one vote” video. This emailed video effectively combines customization and viral elements to challenge the recipient to vote and avoid the result depicted: a news story reporting a one-vote Barack Obama loss traced to the video recipient’s failure to get to the polls.

Within the video, there are several appearances of the recipient’s name in newspapers, TV headlines, and even in a goat herder’s frightened reaction to a McCain win. It makes effective use of an experience memorability model that seeks to maximize personal interest (it’s forwarded by a friend, personal challenge to vote), experience intensity (surprising personalization, humor, anticipation), and a brand’s connection as the experience enabler (frequent references to Barack Obama).

This novel customization approach can trigger all kinds of ideas for applying it in other ways.

On the opening day, John Carroll, VP - Bottler Planning & Operations at Coca-Cola shared work they’re doing customizing and adapting retail store experiences:

• Coca-Cola segments to the store level, identifying each store’s “unique DNA.” To coordinate strategies with retailers, Coca-Cola maps its store segments to a retailer’s store segments.


• It’s also using shopping cart RFID to locate hot spots within a store based on movement patterns to isolate specific merchandising opportunities.


• Similar to a case study from Simon Property Group at the CMO Summit earlier this year, retailers are increasingly being considered as media outlets based on their audience delivery opportunities.

John also offered three great overall take aways relative to segmentation:

1. Don’t lose sight of your core business, even if you have to segment differently.
2. Use as many insights as possible in developing and refining your segmentation.
3. Make sure segmentation is simple, direct, and understandable.

This was a very content-rich event and tomorrow, we’ll wrap with some memorable quotes.

Rope-a-Dope

Muhammad Ali was famous for the “rope-a-dope,” a technique he used to beat defeat George Foreman and regain the heavyweight boxing title. What Ali did was stand on the ropes and let Foreman pound away for more than seven rounds. Foreman eventually wore down, and Ali went on the attack, knocking Foreman out in the eighth round. The strategy was effective because of his patience and ability to absorb as many punches as it required for Foreman to tire.

A business-version of this strategy can also be very effective.

Everyone works with people who like to talk first, talk second, and then talk some more. Maybe then they’re willing to let somebody else talk. While it’s tempting to dive in early on to interrupt and get your points across, doing so often makes them even more resolute about talking.

If you have the patience and the mental fortitude, consider letting them talk themselves out. The strategy provides an opportunity to more fully understand what’s on their mind, look for gaps and contradictions, even ask questions, and then go for the last word. It’s not applicable all the time, but it often can work to your advantage.

So go ahead and comment; it’s your turn. I promise I’m listening!

More Highlights from The Market Research Event (TMRE)

It’s wrap-up day for The Market Research Event (TMRE). Here are a few highlights from a various sessions this week:

• Interesting quote on changing business dynamics from Doug Cottings, Executive Director Marketing Research & Analysis at UBS – “Financial markets are changing over the weekend, which never happened before.”
  
• We’ve talked about businesses going after your market share not always looking like your company. Karen Gryson, Director of Global Knowledge & Insight at The Coca-Cola Company provided a great confirmation of this when covering its extensive work on needs-based segmentation. She highlighted that Coca-Cola competes with candy, snack chips, and even cigarettes on a sensory needs basis.
  
• In our Monday session, a participant from a major CPG marketer asked what’s next in ideation and strategic thinking. I mentioned the IBM Jams approach that lets widely distributed groups exchange ideas. Technology is in place that enables theme analysis and prioritization within these broad discussions. On Tuesday, James Newswanger from IBM talked about IBM Jamming in a session on Corporate Reputation measurement. He identified two epiphanies from these experiences: the Internet can transform relationships between employees and the company, and the size of these online events breaks down intra-company silos.
  
• Kelley Styring, head of Insight Farm and author of “In Your Car: Road Trip through the American Automobile” did a great overview of the work for this upcoming book. Her approach is a very cool merging of qualitative research (and ethnography specifically), quantitative analysis, and ideation to identify enhancements that would make cars much more functional for how people use them. How else to generate ideas ranging from a food warmer (for cooking items in a sun-drenched car during the day) to a separate temperature protection module (to keep all the HBA and medical solutions we keep in cars cool and protected from spoilage).

These are just a few of the insights and idea starters. We’ll cover more in the future, along with an update to the ongoing series on what poor presenters should stop doing.