The Cloud and other forces – Climate change, or just the weather?
I’ve been having trouble getting a handle on the relationships between the nexus of forces / third platform themes of social media, mobility, big data, analytics, and the cloud…
I’ve been having trouble getting a handle on the relationships between the nexus of forces / third platform themes of social media, mobility, big data, analytics, and the cloud…
Have you had the experience of walking into a new store or restaurant on opening day? All bright and shiny, entirely overstaffed with smiling faces tripping over each other to help you. Or the grand opening of a grocery store, with the aisles all clean, the lighting bright, all the lanes open. Then you come back in a year or two or five – the linoleum is stained and yellowed, the ceiling tiles streaked with smoke and grease, doors are broken, light bulbs burnt out, signs are crooked, there are only two lanes open, staffed by clerks who are too busy to acknowledge you, and the portions are smaller.
What happened?
It’s not just that the cost accountants moved in - something fundamental and special has been lost, and no one seems to have taken notice.
While you might not think that businesses outside the trendy, youth-focused fashion and music markets would have much to learn from the practice of “coolhunting”, there are some key product life cycle principles common to both. Coolhunting is market research aimed at discovering, in their infancy, new trends in youth markets, catching them in the process of becoming ‘cool’, and then capitalizing on that knowledge by being first on the scene to take advantage of it. Coolhunting typically involves on-the-street interviews or focus groups, and there are numerous firms that specialize in providing this service, as well as other retailers and manufacturers that have taken this capability in house. The seamier side of coolhunting involves planting / infiltrating your people and products directly into the market, or paying certain key influencers in order to have them use and tout your product as if it was their own idea.
Once I was chairing a conference where the speaker was explaining the business model for the licensing of the Peanuts cartoon characters - Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang - and how all that works when it comes to the balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (in case you are wondering, they cost about half a million $ each). The speaker was running well over his allotted time with the end nowhere in sight when he turned to me and asked, “How am I doing on time?” Looking out at how he had the audience spellbound in rapt attention, I simply said, “You’re doing fine – keep going”. There was no way I was going to prematurely interrupt this master class in media business models.
Whether you choose to call yourself customer centric, smoother operators, or innovators, any one of these can provide a sufficiently powerful vision around which to rally the organization, but to succeed requires that the entire organization align behind the chosen strategy – it’s why they call it value “DISCIPLINE”.
The question, by the way, was: “Where do you most commonly sort your mail”. And the reason is that the […]