Domino's, Conan, and 3 Fundamentals for Communicating Big Brand Change

There are lots of discussions on whether Domino's is brilliantly innovative or colossally mistaken in the redesign of its pizza with new crust, sauce, and cheese. It's obviously a multi-dimensional brand question involving both major product and communications decisions.

Not having eaten Domino's for years, I don't know whether it's better or not. Instead, the question here is how to creatively present a major strategy change to customers? Do you do a mea culpa, as Domino's has done, saying we've heard you, and it's necessary to change? Or do you take an even more aggressive stance and sell against what you were doing previously?

While some commentators have said Domino's is doing the latter, it depends on what communications you're watching.

Its 4-plus minute "documentary" version of the story presents a Domino's message of, "We've heard your concerns and have been working hard to address them." Editing to sound bites for a TV spot, however, pushes the message closer to, "We sold you crappy food, and said it was good." By the time comedians and the public get a shot, it's, "We suck, and frankly, we didn't care...until now."

Here are three communications take-aways from Domino's to consider when implementing a major change:

• Go out of your way to NEVER sell against what you used to do. Violating this simply makes you look stupid ("If you knew you sucked, why were you doing it in the first place?"). Your loyal customers will also FEEL stupid ("They say they suck; what does that make us for liking what they did?").


• There's a fine creative balance since your focused change message will change based on who's shaping it. Even if you followed the first lesson, somebody outside or inside your own organization will wind up messing up the message (intentionally or unintentionally), ensuring you will be selling against your history.


• This issue isn't limited to brand changes and turnarounds. It applies to internal programs, reorganizations, career changes, etc. When you're making a dramatic change, really think through your strategy and what you really want to offer as the rationale.

The Conan-Leno Tonight Show debacle at NBC is a relevant example of these three fundamentals. I've never been a big Conan fan, but watched during his last week to see how he handled the messaging relative to the three lessons above:

• Conan didn't message against the past, as much as against what the future held. He skewered NBC, but focused more on the ridiculousness of the current moment and future changes in forcing his decision to leave.


• His well-known ironic, wink-of-the-eye comedy style gave him lots of room to play with the situation. And as his late-night comedy competitors weighed in on the story, he took an underdog role, laying claim to being the most respectful defender of The Tonight Show brand legacy!


• Amid this significant brand and career change, Conan used the last moments before his highly-compensated, highly-enforced silence, not to savage NBC, but to talk instead about the pride in his 20 year association with NBC. Watch the excerpt below from his final episode to see a tremendously classy way of messaging a nasty change and doing it with dignity.

Periods of major change are great proving grounds for brand marketers. Go to school on these two very prominent examples for approaches and learnings to use in future turnarounds you face. - Mike Brown

Not Even One of These Things Is Not Like Another

I was in my first meeting the other day of a group expected to help shape strategy for an organization with domestic and international reach to a mainly young audience. Of the eleven people present, ten were Caucasian males (mostly baby boomers), and the other was a Caucasian female baby boomer.

Ok, big problem looming!

Next time you're on an input-giving or decision making group, look around at the participants. If you're lacking diversity on any important dimension relevant to your target audience, voice a concern.

In this case, after challenging ourselves on the group's composition, one member offered to have his wife take his place. Nice sentiment, but hardly a fix for the underlying problem.

Leaders need to aggressively look out for diversity and ensure it's taken into consideration, even when it means reaching far outside their traditional networks to include different people. Beyond being an issue of propriety, it's critical for innovation and sound strategic decision making. - Mike Brown

How to Succeed Where Strategy Is a Bad Thing

In many circles, "strategy" has become a bad word, right up there with "creativity," "innovation," and even "thinking." There clearly are business people who see strategy as mucking up getting things done. For them, strategy is perceived as simply adding time, cost, and complexity. It’s viewed as an impediment to running a business successfully. And by “successfully,” I mean “by the seat of their pants.”

To try getting a toehold for introducing a strategic perspective in these environments, we talk about strategy at Brainzooming as "addressing what matters with insight and innovation.”

It's tough for executives to argue against the "what matters" part, especially when making a case for something tactical as REALLY important. It forces them to put up or shut up if an idea is more of a pet project than a fundamental business issue.

Granted, "insight" is a little easier to sell-in than innovation; people don't want to be "dumb" about the work they're doing even when they're willing to accept a "status quo" mindset.

The clear implication the past few years is the simpler and more straightforward the definitions, process, and deliverables of strategy creation and implementation are, the more likely something successful will happen. – Mike Brown

3 Must-Haves for Driving Social Media

The title topic came up recently on Twitter, as it had at a B2B social media roundtable late last year: Who should be doing social media strategy and implementation for a brand - organizationally and individually?

My take is a strategic perspective is the foundation for a social media effort to build a sustaining impact. When it comes to questions of social media strategy "ownership," it's clear sole responsibility for it doesn't fit nicely into a box on today's org charts.

Stepping back from the discussions, I forced myself into three criteria which seem necessary for taking on social media responsibilities in corporations:

• Ability to always be on message for the brand, which implies effectively linking brand strategy to messaging


• Appropriate sensibilities for social media channels


• Diverse communication skills that work across various social media channels

Sometimes those people are in marketing communications, but you may find them in other parts of a company as well. They may also exist outside a company's employee base; that's fine too.

Most importantly, given the rapid pace of social media, you want the best strategic writers crafting the communication. Where are these people located in and around your company? Find them wherever they may be! - Mike Brown

When People Don’t Understand There Are Lots of Ways to Be Right

What’s your first reaction to a new possibility? And importantly, what are typical reactions to new possibilities from the people who surround you? Lately, I’m encountering more people whose first reaction is why something won’t work, how they know better than I do about it, or who simply react with a hostile tone.

For someone who espouses openness to ideas, I’m seeing detrimental impacts on my attitude. When you hear enough negatives, it can lead you to also start reacting negatively to new possibilities out of frustration, spite, or self-protection.

What to do in this type of situation? Overtly model positive behavior and hope they get it? Challenge them directly on how they dampen creativity? Leave the relationship for the sake of creative self-preservation?

No single answer works - each choice has its own advantages and peculiar stumbling blocks. Sounds like some type of combo is in order. We’ll see how that possibility works. – Mike Brown

Stop Right There, Before We Go Any Further

Okay, it’s the time for 2009 reviews and 2010 look aheads.

So, what did you stop doing in 2009?

Stopping something counts as “doing something.” And in a period when time demands are coming at us from more ways than ever, it’s okay to quit things that aren’t contributing or adding as much value to your life as other things.

So, what did you quit in 2009?

Answering the question myself, I had a big quit (my long time job) in 2009 and a variety of slow downs (i.e., less activity than previously expended while still keeping something going). I probably didn’t quit enough things in 2009 though and certainly didn’t quit as many things as I started.

How about you?

For me, 2010 feels like it’s going to be a year of more quits. That’s because there will need to be a bunch of starts and trials this coming year. It will be one of dramatic changes and will require repeatedly identifying what isn’t valuable anymore and needs to go "bye-bye." One of the things I'm considering for the quit list is daily posting on Brainzooming in favor of a several times a week schedule. Would definitely appreciate your reactions to the idea before it's a final decision!

If your stop doing list from 2009 also seemed too short, start deciding what you’ll be quitting in the next 12 months. – Mike Brown

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

Getting Ready for 2010: A Strategy Foundation - Guest Post by Keith Prather

Keith Prather is Managing Director of Armada Corporate Intelligence, a corporate business intelligence firm that functions as outsourced members of corporate strategy groups and consults with companies of all sizes on strategy and implementation. Armada is sponsoring this week of posts on getting ready for 2010 planning.

I've known Keith for nearly a decade and have worked with him closely on a variety of strategic and market planning efforts. Today, I'm excited he's sharing his professional perspectives on getting a better understanding of your external environment during this period of dramatic global change in business and consumer markets:


A critical component of a successful strategic plan is a well-established strategy foundation – a compilation of information and intelligence covering your industry, global markets, customers, and the environment. Particularly relevant this year is the need to produce an accurate economic forecast with meaning and relevance for the business. And given the uncertainty surrounding the global economy, this can be a daunting task.

Following the most basic tenets, forecasters need to identify the supply and demand drivers for an industry, and capture meaningful data describing the condition and outlook for them. Sometimes though the most impactful elements on a business are not what we think. Going to the expense side of the income statement and understanding the biggest cost items in your business will help determine the real key elements of supply – those you rely on.

For instance, one client believed steel (which was one of the company's top expenses) was the primary input for its business, with countless hours spent monitoring, forecasting, and negotiating steel prices. Energy costs, on the other hand, were not considered to have a material impact, and were lumped into utility and overhead costs. In 2008, however, consumption of oil-based resources drove prices up significantly. As a result, oil costs had to be factored much more directly into forecasting models to improve their accuracy. By not anticipating this significant change to the company's business mix, however, it was caught flat footed.

On the demand side, the challenge is more complex. While providing future economic insights for clients, several fundamental items seem to be driving things developments. First, everything ultimately circles back to consumers. You and I, spending money, drives more than 70% of the nation’s $13 trillion in GDP. Watching consumer spending, consumer confidence, housing, and several other metrics tracking consumer activity are useful in helping gauge future activity. One great aggregator site for basic economic information is the US Census Bureau’s Economic Indicator page.

There are some other great free aggregator sites providing solid current economic news and explanations of some of the items driving current activity. One of my favorites is the RTTNews Daily Market Analysis. We also pay a lot of attention to the Financial Times, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, and Global Insight for forecasting information.

For manufacturing, the Institute for Supply Management publishes one of the most accurate gauges of manufacturing activity, the Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI), on a monthly basis. You can read about the PMI in simple, easy to follow prose at the ISM website.

Calculating risk is also an important component to a well-done strategy foundation. With a wave of new legislation floating around in Congress, it is important for companies to use scenario planning in considering impacts of various regulatory actions on the company. From health care to energy legislation, companies will be hit with direct and indirect risks as a result. Using a system such as the Lockwood Analytical Method for Prediction (LAMP) can help in gauging which scenarios provide the greatest risk – and the greatest likelihood of occurring.

It can’t be said enough, a solid strategy foundation is the underpinning to a successful strategic plan. Woodrow Wilson once said: "We should not only use all the brains we have, but all the brains we can borrow." If you can’t build the strategy foundation in-house, it’s worth getting help to make sure that the business landscape is being accurately portrayed. Otherwise, you might be building a ship when what you really need is a bicycle. - Keith Prather

The Frost & Sullivan Marketing World 2009 Event - Joe Batista

I participated in the Frost & Sullivan Marketing World 2009 event November 2 in Chicago, leading a round table on getting around innovation roadblocks. The next several days will highlight some of the many intriguing ideas shared during the day from great marketing practitioners.

Yesterday's Creative Quickie mentioned the title "Chief Creatologist" which belongs to Joe Batista at HP, who spoke on "Creating New Market Revenues in a Down Economy." I met Joe at a 2007 Frost & Sullivan event, and his case study-driven presentations at both events were tremendously thought provoking considering HP targets $3 billion in new growth quarterly from the approaches Joe shared.

He looks for business growth through discovering and exploring new areas to respond to clients' needs. His efforts center on going beyond a closed innovation model and exploring the company's research in new ways and looking beyond its boundaries for new opportunities:

• Joe highlighted techniques to help identify new growth sources, including thinking broadly about the available assets a company has, generalizing what the assets (especially technology) can do, and connecting organizationally-dispersed assets inside a company. Comment - These all tie to fundamental lateral thinking principles, stressing the real-life importance of being able to apply abstract thinking skills in identifying opportunities that would otherwise be missed.
  
• Look for pockets of knowledge and expertise inside your business and explore how they can be converted into new revenue streams. Comment - A great way to do this is to identify what BENEFITS your knowledge can provide and then think through what other parties are seeking these or related benefits.
  
• One more potential growth source? Growth arises from examining currencies you have available inside your company (i.e., what flows through your value system) and by making the boundaries of your company porous so ideas from outside can flow through it. Comment - Joe's remarks continually underscored the importance of being able to step away from detail and "get" the bigger, potentially underlying picture, whether it's inside or outside your company.

There's a lot behind these summarized comments. I look forward to trying to connect with Joe further and better understand the innovative approach he's bringing to business growth! - Mike Brown

BTW -This is the second anniversary of the blog's first post. No big deal in the posts this week, but it seemed like at least worth a mention. Look for the Brainzooming redesign and move to a Wordpress format in the very near future!

Starting Over, Part 2

I'm a huge fan of NOT starting from scratch. If there's a remnant of a leftover idea, approach, or possibility sitting around, I always want to begin there and get that much of a head start toward a final goal by incorporating what I've done before.

Earlier this year, long-time friend Vince Koehler stopped by while in town. Vince shared his approach on collateral updates: he requires his staff to throw out all the copy on a brochure that's being redone and start over.

The reason? Doing so forces strategic thinking and a fresh creative view of the program that's being marketed. There's the potential for tremendous innovation value since this is another way of forcing a different look at a familiar topic.

If you've got a project that looks and feels like a re-do, why not give this approach a try? Toss out everything that's gone before, and it will feel just like starting over. - Mike Brown

Creative Quickie - Take Some Time

Keith Prather and I attended the October 21, 2009 Central Exchange CEO Series luncheon featuring Beryl Raff, Chairman and CEO of Helzberg Diamonds.

It was an interesting talk, especially when she went off script, discussing challenges in her career, how she developed a specialty in turnarounds, and the first meeting with her new "boss," Warren Buffett.

The first audience question was about what type of atmosphere she feels fosters innovation. Her answer was one where the status quo is challenged all the time and people "talk about ideas."

There's your creative quickie: see how often you're challenging the status quo today (vs. settling for what's okay or routine) and notice amid the time pressures of business, if you're avoiding "talking" about ideas.

Don't rush to "just do something." Invest time in strategic thinking and challenge your world as it exists today. - Mike Brown

A Whole Brain Network of Great People

I've extolled the benefits of surrounding yourself with both left brain and right brain people to complement what you lack in expertise and perspective. It's incredible to tap innovative people across the entire spectrum of points of view on strategic situations you're facing.

Last Friday at my going away party, another upside of a network of great diverse thinkers surfaced: it makes for a better party!

Shortly after the announced start time, someone remarked about the "surprising" number of attendees from finance and accounting backgrounds. Looking around, nearly the entire crowd would be considered naturally left brained thinkers (i.e., quantitative, precise, punctual).

A little while later, more of the right brain people (i.e., intuitive, holistic, random) began to arrive. By the time the event was well underway, it became a whole brain party, spawning interesting combinations of diverse people interacting with one another throughout the evening.

And since my creative instigation partner Jan Harness drove the party planning, there were 3 innovation exercises along with post-its and Sharpies for guests to ideate on what Brainzooming could become!

Because of the whole brain network of great people in attendance, we had a crowd early on, lively interactions and ideas throughout, enough people staying late to extend the party, and a final small group of both left and right brainers having a passionate (and by "passionate," I mean "interesting but slightly uncomfortable") conversation about my future prospects.

Truly, the type of whole brain night I love! - Mike Brown

What Are We Trying to Say?

Many (okay, let's be real, nearly all) corporate visions, missions, values, BHAGs (you name it), sound alike. They either extol bland concepts (i.e., "our associates will be the best") or meaningless ideas (i.e., "our human intellectual capital will leverage world-class synergies").

If you have boring or confusing strategic statements in your business, here's an approach to correct it: ask the questions below to help simplify and enrich the language in your strategic statements:

• How would customers describe what we're talking about in ways very meaningful to them?
• If we were telling somebody who knows nothing about our business about why this idea is important to the company's success, what would we say?
• How would we communicate this in a way that really inspires our employees to greatness? How about potential employees?
• What are more emotional words to describe this statement?
• How will we talk about it when we've accomplished this goal?
• How would one of our mothers proudly tell a relative about what we're trying to do?
• If we had to explain this to children, what would we say so they could understand it and be able to act?

Give these questions a try with your management team or on your own. Take the words and phrases you imagine and start turning strategic corporate speak into language that moves the hearts, minds, and actions of everyone in your company! - Mike Brown

You Never Know

Cleaning offices isn't a distinctive talent for me; it's a chore from beginning to end. Yet, as you learned this week, it's necessary right now.

Among my files was a notebook from a Statistical Process Control training class my first weeks on the job. Inside the notebook was a section on conducting brainstorming along with handwritten notes from the class.

I don't remember learning brainstorming in grad school, and we didn't have training at my first job, so this had to be my first formal exposure to brainstorming. There in the notes are the familiar admonitions I use all the time: listen intently to all participants, capture what they're saying in the words they use, encourage and reinforce all comments, don't judge prematurely. Everything's there for getting innovation started.

While the class (and some of the great people I met there) is as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday, this specific topic isn't even a vague memory. Back then, it was something my boss was making me go to. In retrospect, it was life altering day.

The moral - you never know.

You never know which days will change your life. So never write off any day as a throw-away. Go into each one with a sense of wonder. Look for who you may meet or what you might learn that will fundamentally shape the rest of what you'll ever do. - Mike Brown

When DIY Doesn't Work

Steve Epley visited last week, and we talked about challenges in trying to do for yourself what you do professionally for others. This resonated because of recent work on the Brainzooming™ brand. It's much easier to figure out another's great brand value and how to communicate it than doing the same for myself. It's tough to step back and address your own situation as objectively as you can for someone else.

Are you facing similar challenges? Here are three alternatives:

1. Use what you know works.

Struggling to clarify the Brainzooming brand as a business entity and personally, it struck me that we use a variety of tools with others to help define brand promises and positions. Turning to tools I've seen work in so many situations helped push my own thinking and expand the concepts being considered. If you've got tools and approaches developed for those you serve, don't overlook applying them to your own business situation.

2. Ask for help.

I stared at my resume for years, unable to update it. In 2007, I finally sought professional preparation, with great results. Updating it now with all the new experiences and results of the past two years is again challenging. Based on a tip from Jan Harness, whip-smart wordsmith and media maven Emma Alvarez-Gibson is helping convey what Brainzooming represents in words. Never consider it a weakness to get help doing what you know how to do. Instead, it shows the respect for your profession you want others to also have.

3. Be Patient and Wait.

As much I love believing strategic thinking approaches completely get you around time and mental capacity crunches, they won't in every case. Many issues need to unfold in real time to allow strategic thinking and action. Each passing day, next steps for Brainzooming become clearer and more developed. As much as I'd have loved to figure out some things last year, it simply wasn't reasonable to do so. Maybe if you can't work too far ahead on a project, you can at least work on patience instead.

Hope those help in getting around any roadblocks you face employing a DIY approach in your own field. - Mike Brown

Innovation Strategy? Yes, No, and Everything In Between - Guest Post by Mike Brown

How can I be a guest blogger on my own blog you may ask? Well, this post was originally written for Braden Kelley's Blogging Innovation website. So it was a original guest post there in response to the question, "Does an organization have to have an innovation strategy?" Here's my take:


Does an organization need an innovation strategy? Let me say, unequivocally, "It depends."

Depending on its business situation, there are multiple strategic innovation approaches. Here are three different business situations and a potential innovation path for each:

Situation 1 - It's All About Innovation

If innovation is fundamental to an organization's success and competitiveness, then innovation "matters" for that business. And when innovation passes the "does it matter" test, beyond an innovation strategy, it becomes more important that innovation be woven into overall business strategy.

Situation 2 - Innovation Is Appreciated

For many (most?) companies, innovation is viewed as beneficial, but it doesn't matter in the same strategic sense as in the first group. If that's the case, having visible top-level support for innovation can take the place of an explicit innovation strategy.

Beyond that, it's vital to manage the environment's receptivity to innovation. This starts with assessing the degree to which critical success factors (CSFs) for innovation exist. If CSFs are largely in place, the primary task becomes integrating innovation into the company's strategic direction. If some or all aren't present, step one is making moves to put them in place to create a higher probability of innovation success. Among innovation CSFs are:

• Having an innovation-friendly environment - Even absent an innovation strategy, are processes in place that are conducive to exploration and development of new ideas? Organizational forces should motive and support work across disciplines and recognize individual and group contributions to innovation.
  
• A longer term sensibility - Some innovation starts yielding near-term returns. Often, it takes longer. There has to be some rope to play with (both in terms of time and resource investment) for a sustained innovation effort.
  
• Fact-based strategic perspectives are encouraged - Is innovative, strategic thinking considered to be the purview of senior leadership or is it cultivated broadly? Multiple, perspectives are vital to triggering, thoroughly vetting, and successfully implementing new ideas. The closer to customers those strategic perspectives originate, the better, and that's usually not exclusively from senior managers.
  
• A basic comfort level with disturbing the status quo - Moving into new areas is usually messy organizationally and in the marketplace. These disruptions need to be understood as innovation precursors. Is your organization ready to fail fast & learn quickly if it's a step to successful innovation?
  
• A willingness to bring diverse parties into innovation - There's now more recognition and acceptance of the incredible potential in ideas coming from outside an organization. Does yours have an externally-oriented view that introduces broad inputs into innovation?
  
• Metrics are used to motivate and refine innovation, not quash it - Innovation has to produce value for customers and the business to be worthwhile. Monitoring value requires solid metrics. Are they (or can they be put) in place to help steer innovation efforts and monitor their impacts without being used to prematurely shut-down exploration?

Situation 3 - Innovation Gets in the Way

When an organization's sentiment runs counter to innovation, underground innovation is an alternative. This implies working around the system to create and implement innovation efforts beneficial for the business. Going low-key can provide several advantages:

• It potentially lowers expectations and increases maneuverability. With few resources, there’s potentially less scrutiny, leading to some freedom to experiment, make mistakes, learn, and still drive results.
  
• Parties who participate are likely to be more committed. With a certain amount of risk in joining forces with an underground effort, people won't typically get in half-way.
  
• It forces more ingenuity. Cut-off from some fundamental resources, you have to understand limitations upfront, spell out a plan for what you won’t have, and innovate in areas you wouldn’t have considered previously.
  
• You can focus on creating deliverables instead of justifying each innovation step. With a near-term results oriented management team, being able to introduce them to an innovation that's nearer completion can be beneficial.
  
• You can get an advantage relative to competitors. They may be taking a more traditional route to innovation or completely eliminating innovation programs while you're still trying to move ahead.

What Do You Do?

You know your business situation. Consider the range of possibilities and select the level of strategic innovation focus that makes sense for your business and the desired results. - Mike Brown

Borrowing Brilliance - A Guest Post of Sorts

I attended the KC Small Business "Think Bigger" luncheon recently when guest speaker David Kord Murray discussed his new book, "Borrowing Brilliance." The tome covers 6 steps (defining, borrowing, combining, incubating, judging, and enhancing) to build from others' ideas.

While several people afterward expressed frustration with Murray's presentation and demeanor (some of the frustrations were very justified), he shared a number of valuable points. Here's my take on the highlights he covered (thus the designation of this piece as a guest post of sorts):

• To get to a core issue, Murray suggests asking, "What's the problem above the problem we're considering?" This is a different and helpful way of expressing the question, "What are we trying to achieve?" He cited an old, but relevant, example. In the 1920's, Ford defined the issue as building the cheapest car. GM identified a more fundamental issue: making cars affordable. Its problem definition led to auto financing's introduction.
  
• Murray expressed a clear disdain for unfettered brainstorming, claiming stronger ideas emerge when more judging is involved. He has a point, in that once you've moved from divergent to convergent thinking steps, solid evaluation approaches do push you closer to more readily implementable ideas.
  
• In using different perspectives to look for analogous ideas, Murray shared a borrowing continuum to look for ideas in Same, Similar, and then Distant domains (i.e., your industry, a related industry, a radically different industry). This concept has been discussed frequently in Brainzooming (and the "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" ebook is structured similarly), yet this was a new, actionable way of expressing the approach.


• He talked about "aha moments" occurring in the shower so frequently because we've typically minimized conscious thought, allowing the sub-conscious to sift through raw materials it's been fed. I haven't tried scheduling a group creative team meeting in the shower yet, but it again emphasizes the value of changes of scenery and activity in ideation.


• Murray passed along an interesting factoid: Walt Disney conceived Disneyland not as an amusement park, but as a movie starring the park's guests. Instead of "rides," mini-movies were then developed in which guests star for a few minutes. I'd never really thought about it, but it makes perfect sense. It's also a great example of selecting a rich core concept and using it throughout the innovation process to create strategically consistent implementation.

All these are helpful insights. Now here's one for new authors (i.e., David Kord Murray): when a well-known local bookstore (i.e., Rainy Day Books) helps co-sponsor your appearance, maybe your closing book slide should feature its logo along with (or even instead of) the major online bookseller brands you chose to feature. Just saying. - Mike Brown

Research Review Week - Keep Going!

Too many research reports are train wrecks of charts, arrows, and statements that simply play back the graphics, or even worse, regurgitate the detailed methodology with no forward looking implications.

For senior executives, it means a confusing (and at best, boring) jumble of information – pointing in all kinds of directions without really saying anything.

If you have research responsibility, apply this maxim for great strategic thinking from Gary Singer, a wonderful strategist and former Chief Strategy Officer at Interbrand. His comment to me was:

• Good researchers go to the edge of the data and step back – to be cautious & statistically sound.
• Good consultants go to the edge of the data and stop – to be sure they’re on solid footing & that the client will buy off.
• Great strategic thinkers go to the edge of the data, formulate a sound next set of assumptions that the audience can comment on & agree to, and then keep going to expand understanding & get to revealing insights.

It’s a simple statement and hard to do, but done successfully, it promises incredible business results. Use it as your new strategic hurdle to clear! - Mike Brown

Remember to check out the American Marketing Association Marketing Research Conference website for updated tweets, videos, and articles from the conference. You can also track the conference at #amamrc on Twitter.

Research Review Week - Forging Strong Relationships

I'm tweeting and blogging the American Marketing Association Marketing Research Conference early this week. You can visit the conference website to see live tweeting, video interviews, and blog posts as the conference progresses. Back here at Brainzooming, we'll be running some earlier posts on market research to complement the new material coming from the conference:

It's vital to have strong, successful relationships with key market research partners. This “Ten Things” list is a helpful starting off point for forging a solid relationship. Feel free to use or adapt it with your marketing partners:

Ten Things - The Foundation to a Strategic Research Relationship

1. Be a “thought partner” with us. This is a two-way street – we’ve got to treat you like one before you can do what it takes to become one.
2. Your energy and passion for what you do (and your intellectual curiosity) need to be evident.
3. There’s a difference between researchers who think they’re researchers and researchers who see themselves as business people. It’s tough to explain the differences, but they’re readily apparent. We need researchers who think like business people if we are to be successful.
4. Understand our business more deeply than from just the numbers that you see. If not, we’ll never get to where we must go.
5. Bring creativity to questioning, analysis, and reporting (and any place else in the process). That means generating new ideas to produce breakthroughs on mutual efficiencies, high impact insights, easy to grasp reporting, and actionable recommendations.
6. We must put information into context. We can’t afford to just report numbers or even changes in numbers. We need to get to insights. What does it mean? What do we do about it?
7. We have to get beyond reports that show charts and have bullets that merely say what is on the chart. We have to offer our audiences relevant insights. That takes pulling information from various sources (including people) and analyzing, talking, and identifying relationships among everything we’re looking at.
8. Look outside our industry or outside research circles for ways to report information. Review Edward Tufte, Richard Saul Wurman, and others. Are there movie scenes that help us get our points across? Magazine ads? Always ask the question: “What’s that like?”
9. Communicate proactively - let’s make sure we talk and we’re all clear on things before moving ahead. That may mean a phone call instead of an email.
10. Exhibit strong attention to detail – that way we can get beyond fact & spell checking and spend our time on delivering insights.

If you can get to this point with your research partners, you’ll truly be doing COOL WORK that matters and that can change your company and your industry. WOW!!!