Archive for October, 2011

The power of why

October 14th, 2011

The power of whyFor those of you who don’t already know, I am a staunch believer in market problems being the key to product and business success. Products should always, without exception, respond to a market problem (whether it is an actual or a future problem). A customer’s problem is never the lack of the solution, it is something else and you need to find out exactly what that is before you create your product / business.

So for me Why is the most important word when identifying market problems and by extention creating market driven products. On the other hand What is the question that sales / customer driven businesses use. This means that the sales force ask their biggest customers “what do you want?” and never why do you want it, this is customer driven as it is usually driven by a small handful of big customers and it is also solution focused, not problem focused as you may not even know why the customer wants the feature / product in question.

Henry Ford understood the power of why

Asking the what question does not necessarily mean you are solving the problem correctly, it only means you are giving the customer (not the market) what he / she wants. Doesn’t sound too bad really when you say it out loud, however, as Henry Ford once said; if he had listened to his customers (asked What not Why) he would have breed faster horses.

Why; the distance between the known and the unknown

I recently sent an email to some customers to identify market needs, I was in the discovery phase after which I validated it against a mass audience. I  asked what problems they were facing in regards to IT, I got one answer that said: Additional capacity would be useful, to which my answer was…… “Why”, “Why do you need that additional capacity”, I could have supposed, I could have imagined or thought she has the same problem as the other customers I have seen so far, but why do that when you can ask?

The customer did tell me why and it was something I would never have thought of, so why do we not ask why enough? I think when we ask why it means we are effectively admitting that we do not know the answer and we don’t like being in that situation, the unknown. However, what exists between the known and the unknown is called GROWTH and supposedly that is what we are looking for, isn’t?

Is Why an important word in your vocabulary? Why? Why not?

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Posted in Analysis, communication, Innovation, Market Driven

The two questions you need to ask of your strategy

October 8th, 2011

 

Strategy and value propositions, putting the 2 together

These last few days I have had strategy on my mind for one reason or another; there is logic behind it all no doubt. So I’ve been very sensitive towards the topic, it’s like when you are going to buy a new car and all of a sudden there seems to be more car ads on the TV, in social media, you check out cars on the street more than ever etc.

In addition I’ve been reading “Mastering the Rockefeller’s habits by Verne Harnish” which is where I got the idea for this post.

So my topic of interest is strategy. Now strategy is understood differently depending on whom you talk to, some people compare and use the term where others would talk about action plans, an action plan for me is the next few steps further down the chain after strategy and objectives have been defined.

Create value, be different

However, regardless of how you understand strategy and where it should fit into the way of your business there are two questions that it must be able to stand up to and these are what will make the true difference in its success:

  1. Does it, or will it make a real difference for your market (present customer base + future markets), simply translated; will it create value for them.
  2. Does it and will it differentiate you from the rest of the pack.

But isn’t that your value proposition?

You could argue that the above is really a simple break down of a value proposition or competitive advantage and I would agree. So I think the conclusion drawn is that a company’s value proposition is born from the strategy and that all future product and or service value props must align with the strategy.

Put it to the test

Sounds straight forward and logical but look at any company’s strategy and see if you can answer the two questions above, then take one of their products value propositions and see if you can discover where they align or if they align.

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Posted in Differentiators, Marketing, strategy