The guests attended a cocktail, followed by a raffle with numerous prizes, and later there was a concert with some great musicians from Brazil, such as Affonso Nigro, Leo Maia, Paulo Miklos, Fernanda Abreu and Nazi. (at Innovation Marketing Corporativo)

Read more…>

Report Delevery process

conformation upon receiving the payment via paypal or 2checkout,report will be delivered within 24-48 hours (max).(saturday,sunday holiday)

Harvard Business Review Press

Companies spend billions of dollars to advertise products that customers don’t want
Large companies are capable of doing amazing things, but when it comes to innovation, they just scratch the surface.
Marketing teams are busy producing PowerPoint documents on products rarely to be launched.
Companies often look for opportunities by saying something along the lines of: We have things to sell. Who will buy them?

What would you offer your 3-year old child for Christmas?
Dora The Explorer toy laptop, or an iPad?

The customer may very well prefer an offer that is sense & simplicity over complex & technical (what we call overshooting)

What is innovation? Something different that has impact. Impact means measurable results.
The word “technology” does not appear there. The word “creativity” does not appear either. Creativity, of course, can help in the innovation process. But innovation is a process that combines discovering an opportunity, blueprinting an idea to seize that opportunity, and implementing that idea to achieve results. No impact, no innovation.

Take Leonardo Da Vinci and Thomas Alva Edison. Both men were geniuses. Da Vinci was a creative genius. His ideas didn’t have impact at the time. Innovation is not an academic exercice where we think, think, think, but never do. The stock ticker-tape symbol, phonograph, incandescent light bulb, motion-picture industry… all have their roots in Edison’s labs in New Jersey. They all were different. They all had impact.

The new normal is perpetual change
In today’s world, innovation is not an option. And it may require walking away from the things you view as your core competency. Imagine: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer base?

Ted Levitt, “Marketing Myopia“:
Customers have problems. The company has potential solutions.
People don’t want quarter-inch drills. People want quarter-inch holes.

Peter Drucker, “Innovation and Entrepreneurship“:
Companies need to take a customer-first perspective to succeed with innovation.
Nobody pays for a product. What is paid for is satisfaction.
The customer has a problem to solve or a job to get done.
Now, if you go to your customers and ask them what job they are trying to get done, you are likely to be met with a blank stare. You just need to keep asking Why…? Hence…? And Therefore…?

Why do you want to buy a drill?  – I need to drill a hole.
Why do you need to drill a hole?  – I need to hang a picture.
Why do you need to hang a picture?  – I want to make my living room look nicer.
Why do you want to make your living room look nicer?  – My mother-in-law made an offhand comment about the room last time she visited, and I don’t want this to happen again…

The goal is to move from a solution to the source of the problem. Deep understanding of the problem can reveal the customer dream solution. Train yourself to spot signs of frustrations at your customers’.

A.G. Lafley, “The Game-Changer“:
Innovation is a process that can be managed and measured. The key to successful innovation is a customer-is-boss mindset. We have one and only boss. The Customer.

You need to focus on the customers wants and needs. You need to spend time with your target customers. You need to appreciate not just what the customers were saying, but also what they were feeling or unable to articulate. You need to understand what the person says he or she wants and needs, what he or she can’t easily articulate.

There are two moments of truth. The moment a customer chooses a product. The moment the customer uses a product.
Triple the amount of time you spend with your customers. Get the marketers out of HQ to spend time with the customer. It will help you feel their hopes, dreams, frustrations, and desires. This is a critical input to spot opportunities for innovation.

Joseph Schumpeter, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy“:
The problem that is usually being visualized is how capitalism administers existing structures, whereas the relevant problem is how it creates and destroys them. Sometimes you have to destroy in order to create.
Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction“.

Vijay Govindarajan, “Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators“:
Existing companies that want to master strategic innovation have to carefully borrow some core capabilities, thoughtfully forget others, and systematically  learn some completely new skills.

Dave Goulait, P&G Innovation Productivity Team:
To do something different, you have to do something different. It is almost Einsteinian in its simplicity.
If your mission is to shake up the corporate establishment, or to create what does not exist, you simply cannot do the same thing that everyone else is doing.
Historically great companies such as Kodak, Digital Equipement Corp., IBM, Sears, General Motors, Sony, Nokia, Microsfot, RIM (…) stumbled by doing precisely what they were supposed to do.

.

7 Technologies Marketers Can’t Live Without : Marketing :: American Express OPEN Forum

http://www.openforum.com

January 17, 2012

OPEN Forum Message
4 Ways to Spy Your Way In (or Out)
Alexandra Levit's column explores workplace culture and building a better business. [...]

Read more »

Credits: Ryan Warren, Senior Director, ExactTarget The Four Pillars of Digital Marketing 6 by Tatiana12

Si la formation vise l’acquisition ou le développement de compétences, le coaching vise la réussite d’un projet. Les dirigeants qui font appel à un coach d’affaires souhaitent généralement atteindre rapidement un objectif, tout en développant leur potentiel – c’est aussi la motivation du sportif de haut niveau. Etre bon ne suffit pas, il faut savoir se remettre en cause, remettre à jour sa pratique pour pouvoir continuer à progresser.

Le coach pratique l’écoute active (travail sur les objectifs du dirigeant, sa vision, son projet, le contexte et les enjeux). Il propose des entraînements, des simulations en situation. Il développe la compétence en facilitant l’assimilation de nouvelles connaissances. Le coach travaille sur la motivation en focalisant l’attention sur une “vision” clarifiée, des objectifs précis. Il permet également d’apporter un regard extérieur.

Formation + Action: les connaissances sont dispensées et assimilées dans l’action (savoir-être et savoir-faire), dans le cadre de l’entreprise. Un formateur transmet son savoir, un coach offre à son client de se révéler lui-même pour obtenir un résultat dans l’action.

L’objectif est de développer le potentiel d’entreprise, de gestion de projet du dirigeant; de l’accompagner dans une phase spécifique de la croissance de l’entreprise, de renforcer sa confiance dans son rôle de dirigeant, de le faire sortir de sa zone de confort ou de libérer son potentiel pour remplir son contrat. Les dirigeants coachés vont également progresser largement dans leur communication orale et comportementale.

Le coach a une obligation de résultat. Contrairement aux missions de conseil, l’objectif est de rendre le dirigeant autonome pour qu’il soit capable ensuite d’agir seul.

Un programme de coaching commence à partir de deux heures par semaine, et quatre séances minimum.

Cette échéance, contraint les laboratoires à diversifier leur offre, à faire évoluer leurs métiers, à changer leurs modèles économiques.

La dimension “revenu” est peu abordée en stratégie.
C’est ce qui distingue le business model de la stratégie.

“comment l’entreprise gagne-t-elle de l’argent?”
“comment sont répartis ses revenus entre segments de clients”

Le Business Model pose l’étude des combinaisons de ressources
et de compétences, et d’organisation des transactions.

Check out how Quirky solves all three of these problems by crowdsourcing opinons about new products and helping inventors to get started.  Some of the products developed on the website even sell on HSN!

1. How to Change the World - I’ve been a fan of Guy Kawasaki’s books and writing for many years.  His recent post on how to enchant customers is an example of why I’m a committed reader of the blog.
2. Chris Brogan’s Blog – Tips and insights on marketing & all things related.
3. Duct Tape Marketing Blog – Focused on small business, this blog offers many tips for marketing on a start-up budget.
4. Copyblogger - More than just about copywriting, this blog covers tips for creating meaningful content (a great way to go viral!).
5. Heath Brothers - The authors of Made to Stick and Switch have interesting insights into psychology and sociology, with many marketing applications (and examples).
6. HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog - The blog offers a mix of strategies and tactics for online marketing.
7. The Viral Garden - How to’s and tips for social media strategies and creating viral content.
8. Influential Marketing - Plenty of tips and reviews of successful and floppy marketing campaigns.
9. Viralogy – Focused on social commerce.  Although this site includes news about products from viralogy, it also has interesting coverage of the social commerce space and successful campaigns.
10. Seth Godin’s Blog - Short & sweet food for thought.

What marketing blogs do you read?

Even in the case of an innovation patented in fully commercial form – as is the case with many relatively trivial patents – the firm must make significant investments to simply distribute and market the invention.  But expenditures necessary to identify the market for the product and to persuade potential customers of its utility can easily be captured by competitive imitations.  Absent a patent on the product, the incentives to provide information to purchasers about their need for a product as opposed to information about the particular characteristics of the seller’s product are limited.  The trademark law protects only the names and symbols identifying the seller’s product; it confers no protection against imitators of the product itself.  Thus competitors can ride on the demand for the product created by the first seller without incurring the expenses necessary to inform buyers of the advantages of the product.  Only in the case of a patented product in a firm able to make the expenditures necessary to bring the advantages of the product to the attention of the customer without fear of competitive appropriation if the product proves successful.  This aspect of the cost of introducing innovations is stressed here both because managements find that marketing is a major cost in innovation and to illustrate that even in the case where nothing remains but to make and sell the patented invention, there are significant costs whose return could be appropriated by competitors.  Absent a patent, firms have less than the optimal incentive to invest in providing information about and techniques for using the new technology.[2]

Inventors need to take these additional costs into account when undertaking a new venture.  There are several strategies that can be used to reduce these costs.  For instance, teaming with an existing company that has a strong market presence (marketing channel partner) in your marketplace.  Another solution is to invent only line extensions to a company’s existing products.  This second solution is common for large companies and is why large companies are not known for inventing revolutionary or disruptive technologies.

Critics of the patent system have to answer why they believe inventors will develop new technologies when it puts them at a cost disadvantage compared to copiers.

[2] Ibid. p. 277

“Siamo molto felici e soddisfatti di questo rapporto con Radio 105, che oramai si è trasformato in amicizia” dichiara Luciano Pareschi, Titolare di Aqualandia “in quanto Radio 105 rispecchia gli stessi valori di divertimento spensierato di Aqualandia.”

Maggiori informazioni su www.aqualandia.it

MILANO – Un nuovo cliente per Innovation Marketing, che annuncia l’acquisizione di parte del budget per la comunicazione web di Aqualandia.

Aqualandia è un vero gigante nel panorama dei parchi tematici europei. Situato a Jesolo (Venezia), il parco si estende per oltre 80mila mq, che comprendono 26 attrazioni acquatiche e non, come lo scivolo più alto del mondo (42 metri) e la torre per il bungee jumping più alta d’Europa (60 metri).

Per imporre la propria leadership, Aqualandia ha lanciato un cospicuo piano di investimenti, che porteranno la struttura a competere con i più famosi parchi tematici del mondo. Oltre ad innovare nell’offerta di attrazioni e ricezione turistica, Aqualandia mira a ridisegnare anche la propria strategia di comunicazione, puntando sul web e scegliendo Innovation Marketing come partner per le attività di social media marketing.

“L’acquisizione di un cliente come Aqualandia è un segnale molto positivo – commenta Stefano Cocconcelli, Direttore Commerciale di Innovation Marketing – che dimostra come la crisi degli investimenti si possa vincere anche grazie alle nuove forme di comunicazione. È importante che un’azienda di questo calibro abbia sposato la metodologia di lavoro di Innovation Marketing – spiega Cocconcelli – confidiamo che presto altre realtà vincano la diffidenza verso il nuovo”.

Ufficio Stampa Innovation Marketing
Tel. 02 39841408
Mobile. 333.6354269
Email. ufficiostampa@innovationmarketing.it
Web. www.innovationmarketing.it

- Monter des opération multi marques
comme des jeux concours pour recruter des adresses emails ou des chéques cadeaux multi enseignes (avec Leadshare par exemple).
On n’est pas loin du bon vieux Bus-mailing organisé par la société Charter.

- Créer un jeu publicitaire ou advergames
* soit en Flash avec l’agence Virtuadz qui se charge ausi de sa promotion
* soit en 3D avec ad-invaders.com
( voir le jeu développé sur Virtools pour Toyota :http://www.toyota-auris.fr/v2/play.asp?direct=0Creer

- Garder le contact avec ses clients en leur proposant d’installer un widget sur leurs blog/site/bureau. En France les sociétés Nosibay ; Kreactive ou Widgetavenue proposent ce genre de services.

- Pour sortir des comparateurs habituels, tentez les solutions de Looneo en push ( qui “rémunère” les éditeurs de conseils / commentaires postés sur le site de Looneo à propos de certains produits) et Xinek en pull ( j’envoie ce produit à cet ami car je sais que cela correpond à ses besoins et je suis rémunéré pour les conseils que je prodigue).

- Proposer a vos clients d’acheter en commun avec la société Kadocom qui édite le site Amikado.

- Inviter sur votre site des avatars pour guider visuellement et oralement vos visiteurs. Le but final etant de convertir et de fideliser. Voir le site de Manutan.
http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/virtual-agents/

- Jouer sur les interactions mobile / web comme l’a fait Yves Roches :
* envoi de code propo par sms, web push ou wap en fonction des infos sur le type d’appareil du client fournies par les operateurs
* viralisation web to sms

- Proposer une newsletter video comme TVtrip qui a été la première societe a faire cela en France (mais allez dire cela aux “vlogers”…)

http://media.tvtrip.com/news/20080418/versionfr-video.html

- Creer votre propre reseau social
Voir la liste de solutions pro proposées dans un post de Techcrunch ou Mixxt http://blog.accessoweb.info/Mixxt-creer-votre-propre-reseau-social
ou votre propore univers virtuel ( ça j’y travaille .

Et si vous avez d’autres idées, les commentaires sont les bienvenus!…

Small size is no longer a disadvantage-Brick and mortar businesses need considerable amount of money to build offline business presence in new territories. They have to purchase / rent expensive real estate and work-equipment / materials. Online businesses reach out to their global customers with a simple ‘mouse – click’ with effective website content and design customization for localized web IP web-pages. Instant international reach with minimal investments is a characteristic i-marketing advantage.

‘Flatter’ e-world-Thanks to global interconnectivity of web based consumers, the web flattens the business landscape with a vengeance. As all businesses, irrespective of size, lineage and budgets have equal opportunities to capture e-consumers attention; the web offers a refreshingly simple level playing field to all businesses. This is a great i-Marketing advantage where customer focus and not size wins.

Innovation triumphs always-In the offline world large businesses spend millions of dollars on slick advertising to build their brand differentiation. On the other hand, online businesses rely on product and service innovations to build their brand differentiators. And instead of expensive advertisements they promote their business offerings through smart web content and other technological innovations. This creates a better value for customers at a significantly less cost (but more passionate efforts) for businesses. Innovation over large marketing spends is another i-Marketing advantage

If the answer to this question is “yes”, the next step it so identify a very small group of willing customers to work side-by-side with you in further exploring and developing the idea into an actual product or service. 

The goal at this stage is to quickly get a simple working prototype up and running – a proof-of-concept.  It need not be perfect and flawless.  What you want is something functional that expresses the core purpose and heart of this particular innovation effort. 

Once you have something “real”, you can begin to test it.  Testing your new beta idea with real customers will enable you to quickly draw out the weaknesses and flaws, helping you to quickly transform your rough sketch into a finished masterpiece.

Once the product or service is ready for prime time, your marketing department can leverage the partner-based relationship that was created by the development team and your customer for a rich source of marketing and promotional material – there is no better sales rep that one of your own satisfied customers.

Copyright 2006 Christopher A. Gayle & Capital Genesis LLC ©. All Rights Reserved.

No strategy planning or decision should take place until you have the right people in the right places, and the wrong people are gone.

 Employees are no longer “cogs in the wheel.”  They are means by which your organization can create success or failure.  They should be made to be “co-owners” of the business and not just “employees” who show up for work and then clock out at five.  Your employees must become active and integral part of all ongoing innovation initiatives.

Your HR strategy must be linked to your over all corporate strategy. 

• Do your people have the skills needed to profit from the challenges of tomorrow? 
• Are you doing everything you can to create a pipeline of qualified leaders from within your company? 
• Are you making it easy or difficult for your employees to grow as individuals?

When recruiting and hiring new employees, focus most of your attention on their intelligence and personal character, and less on a paper trail of education, degrees and certificates.  It’s more important to know “who they are inherently” as opposed to what they’ve done.  Level of education, schooling and degrees are a dime-a-dozen – it’s not hard to find people with impressive academic records or extensive work experience. 

In today’s world of political and corporate corruption and failure, the qualities of creativity, intelligence, initiative, honesty, independent thinking, imagination, leadership and ethical decision making are very rare personal characteristics and are the qualities your hiring process should be looking to identify and attract.  You can always send someone with great personal character to college to get a degree.  You can’t send anyone anywhere to “get” initiative, passion, kindness and honesty – they either have it or its absent.

What you want are the best minds and personalities, NOT primarily people with the best degrees.  You want passionate people who can think, communicate, create and solve problems.  If they happen to have a degree too, then super!

As I’ve always said, people, not money, make the world go round.  In this case, your people either make your company outstanding or they’re slowly grinding your company to a halt, so choose wisely.

Copyright 2006 Christopher A. Gayle & Capital Genesis LLC ©. All Rights Reserved.

“How do you expect to be an adaptive, innovative organization that can quickly profit from inevitable change, when every new idea has to reinvent the support infrastructure ‘wheel’ needed to develop those ideas and bring them to market?” remarks Christopher Gayle, CEO of Capital Genesis LLC.

On the most basic level, your business must have in place some formal mechanism that allows all departments to have rapid and accurate access to all information within the company.  An Intranet would be great for this task.  Every idea, project, deadline, financial forecast – all internal information and data should be accessible to everyone in the company – uncensored and unfiltered.  This system you create need not be big and complex, but if this system does not exist in your organization, make it happen. 

Once you have a working system of information sharing, the next step is to put in place a simple mechanism for all departments and key customers to provide input in evaluating, supporting and developing new ideas into a marketable product.  First, the inter-departmental team must evaluate the potential of the new idea and determine if this is something your company should pursue.  If the decision is made to move forward with the new idea, the next step this team should take is to formally schedule time and resources to help transform the idea into a marketable product. 

With a system of free information flow functioning and with a mechanism for channeling all the talents each individual department brings to the effort, blind spots can be avoided, preventing delays and costly mistakes.  Inevitably with such a system in place, the turn around time from idea to marketable product will be greatly reduced, allowing you to realize your ROI much sooner than was previously possible.

Copyright 2006 Christopher A. Gayle & Capital Genesis LLC ©. All Rights Reserved.

Simply put, Six Sigma is defined as only allowing a maximum of three errors for every one million repetitions of a service, output of a process or manufacture of a product that you provide to your internal and external customers.  The philosophy and methodology lends itself to simple and easy adoption by the service industry.

For your company, this means dramatically reduced occurrences of customer complaints, improved communications, increased efficiency, less paper work, fewer errors, increased employee moral and improved levels of customer service.

Besides improving the way you run your business, the other attractive element of Six Sigma is that it is focused on improving your bottom line right from the start.  Reducing waste, simplifying complex operations and eliminating the causes of errors, all save time and money while simultaneously improving the customer experience, which very quickly translates into free word-of-mouth marketing, customer loyalty and increased revenues for your organization.  Six Sigma’s profit centric methodology also makes the distinction that while a particular improvement may be an excellent idea, it may be cost prohibitive to implement.  In such cases, an alternative solution would be selected.

Ultimately, Six Sigma is a way of thinking about how your business adds value to your customers.  It forces you to ask “Is this the best service that I could possibly provide to my customers?”  More often that not, there are many areas within your organization that could use improvements.

The steps to performing a Six Sigma quality improvement initiative progress through the following steps: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control – DMAIC.

“Define” asks you to state who the customer is, what their requirements for your services are, and what your patient expectations from you are.  Define your process boundaries ­ when does your service start and stop?  Define the process to be improved by mapping the process flow.  Define by what percent you wish to improve or how much money you desire to save.  Finally, ask “What is the problem I’m trying to fix or process I’m trying to improve?”

Before you can improve any aspect of your business, you have to know how it performs in its current state.  To do this you have to “Measure” it.  Collect data from many sources and from both your employees and customers.  Data collection does not have to be complicated, but it does have to be accurate and unbiased.

Once an acceptable period of data collection has taken place, the next step is to “Analyze” the data.  Identify the gaps between your current performance and the performance goal you desire to meet.  Identify the sources of this performance gap.
Prioritize what areas you should improve first.

“Improve” your processes by using common sense, simplicity and creativity.  Some of the improvements will require investments in technology and others will not.  After you modify and improve your process, conduct another round of “Measuring” to make sure the process really has been fixed to your customer’s satisfaction and to your expectations.

If you were successful in improving the delivery of your service, you must take steps to prevent anyone from sliding back to the “old way” of doing business.  The “Control” phase handles this step.  Training, documentation, positive incentives and new policies and procedures may be needed to ensure that the solution you’ve implemented stays implemented.

Throughout the entire Six Sigma improvement process, involve your customers as much as possible, since their satisfaction is the primary reason to initiate a Six Sigma improvement project.

Six Sigma sounds complicated, but in reality it’s a simple, logical, scientific and customer focused way to improve a product or service, which will create loyal clients and increased profits to your bottom line.  As a word of caution, select small and easily managed areas of your practice to apply the Six Sigma methodology to.  Once several small and medium sized initiatives have been successfully completed, you can progress to larger, longer term improvement endeavor.  In the end, you’ll help your customers get what they want and allowing you to improving the bottom line of your business.

Copyright 2006 Christopher A. Gayle & Capital Genesis LLC ©. All Rights Reserved.

Innovation is crucial to the success of any organization.  Innovation can be though of as “creative destruction”, rebirth or constant improvement.  Innovation is the end result of traveling with and adapting to the currents of change.

Despite the importance of innovation, most companies have no idea how to make innovation a pro-active and standard way of doing business, as opposed to a reactive response, completely subject to the forces of “luck”.

Innovation is not a thing you “do”.  Foremost, it is a way of thinking about your business.  The doing and creative action comes second.  The first step to creating an innovative organization is getting everyone to adopt this new way of thinking.  The central concept to understand is that “ideas come from everywhere and from everyone”. 

Encourage everyone to use their imagination and ask to “why not” and “what if” questions.  At this beginning stage, no idea is too crazy. 

What can you do to stimulate the creative process and come up with new ideas? 

First, it’s useful to reengage the child like wonder we all had as children.  Shake off the numbing effects of familiarity and start to become amazed at the ordinary aspects of everyday life.  This first suggestion is the most valuable, because it trains your mind to be open and to pay attention to everything.  If you have no idea where the next great idea will come from, can you afford to allow some information in and block the rest out?

A second source of new ideas can come from study. Scrutinize your completion; learn more about different industries.  How could certain principles or themes in your personal hobbies or interests be applied to your business?  An almost infinite source of creativity is Mother Nature; study the natural world around you.

Third, get your customers involved in this process.  Ask them about their current problems.  Ask them what they’d love to see you offer, produce or do to better serve their needs.  Ask them to share their “why not” and “what if” ideas.

Finally, every department (HR, Finance, Accounting, etc) must be expected to offer ideas.  This will cause you to look at your customers from a perspective different from sales and marketing.  In addition to traditional customer service, the focus areas for new ideas are to improve inter-departmental service and strengthening business partner relationships.

At this initial phase, no idea is too outlandish, expensive, or impractical.  Brainstorm and imagine.  It would be best to schedule re-occurring meeting time to generate ideas and capture them on paper.  At this foundational stage towards innovation, getting ideas on paper is your goal.

Copyright 2006 Christopher A. Gayle & Capital Genesis LLC ©. All Rights Reserved.

Word-of-Mouth marketing is widely known as the ultimate, most effective and least expensive form of marketing there is. 

To take advantage of word-of-mouth marketing or “WOM”, a business needs to start with three ingredients. One, you need a compelling, honest, emotional story.  Two, your business needs a meaningful purpose (to you) other than making money.  Three, listen to your customers, partner with them, co-develop with them and help them to get what they want and what their customers customer wants.

Today, especially after the financial fallout of 2000 and in addition to the growing awareness of issues like global warming, broad spectrum pollution, globalization and general cynicism directed towards big business and governments, customers do not care how much money you need to make in order to pay your bills or to keep your investors and Wall Street happy.  Customers just don’t care.

As a result, several enlightened and progressive companies have realized this and are communicating to their customers in genuine, honest and emotional ways, the reasons why their companies exist today and the value they desire to offer the world. 

The purpose of a business is not to make money.  The purpose of a business is to allow an individual or a group to use their passion and talent to contribute to society and ultimately to make the world a better place (on a large or small scale).  Money comes second, and is used as a medium of fair exchange for the value you offer.  Thus, money allows you to continue your mission of adding value and is used as a gauge or measuring stick to figure out how successful or unsuccessful you are at effectively adding value to your customers (in the form of financial statements, etc).

The Soul Purpose of your organization
How do you figure out what the ultimate purpose of your company is, other than making money?  Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great” offers these three questions as a tool to help you to figure out what your purpose is, other than making money.  Answer these three questions:

1. What are you naturally and genuinely passionate about (other than making money)?
2. What can you naturally be the best in the world at?
3. What’s the best way to get the highest, most fair exchange for the value you add?

Use short sentences with plain and simple language to respond to these questions.

When you’ve answered these three questions, answer this one:

• Will the answers to question 1 and 2 above, be valid 300 years into the future, when today’s technology will be obsolete?

If the answer is “no”, then you haven’t gotten down to the level of pure, human emotion, so try again and dig deeper.

Once you’ve identified your “mission” or “ultimate purpose”, you should use simple language and one short sentence to capture it.  This ensures that it will be easy to:

• Understand
• Repeat to others
• Remember

Your customers don’t care about you, they only care about what you can do for them, so help them to understand what that something you can do for them is and why you’re so excited or passionate about it. 

If you focus on your passion, the commonality of all Human Beings and your customers, the money will come, just as sure as the day follows the night.

Copyright 2006 Christopher A. Gayle & Capital Genesis LLC ©. All Rights Reserved.

What usually happens however is the opposite.  Inadvertently, what ends up being created is additional complexity, superficial value add and a cluttered portfolio of products that can end up confusing, not helping customers.

The Shotgun approach
The Shotgun approach to product development does not take the time to really understand your customer.  It’s what happens when a company refuses to put forth the effort to create a relationship with their customers and truly understand them.  The shotgun method is fast and cheap.  Usually it takes existing products and alters them with superficial variations.  There’s nothing wrong with offering your product in both green and blue colors, but do not mistake these options for innovation.

A company with too many products and product categories usually indicates that they are failing to understand the needs of their customers. Companies with too many products also run a greater risk of not getting the right product in front of the right consumers in the right distribution channels and retail outlets.

Companies hung up on the superficial shotgun approach to new product and service development end up offering nothing of real value to their customers, and will soon find themselves commoditized and irrelevant.

Organic Growth
By focusing on your core business – the reason your company exist, other than making money – you will naturally limit your introduction of new products to those that add real, genuine value to your customers. 

In addition, companies that focus on their core business – their core purpose and mission – they tend to naturally work side-by-side with their customers in the product/service development process to ask new questions and create new solutions that serve deep and genuine needs.  When you truly understand your customers, you can add significantly more value to them with fewer products/services.  This approach takes more time, effort and in some case capital, but the subsequent return on investment outweighs the costs several times over. 

From this approach, innovation and organic growth will blossom logically as a result.  The principle of “less-is-more” holds true for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business companies.

Here are two simple examples to illustrate the point we’re making – when you understand your customers, there’s no need to guess what it is they want, flooding them with products and services they may find no value in and regard as useless.  You can narrow your efforts to giving them exactly what they desire and value:

Financial
American Funds – 29 mutual funds
Compound annual growth rate 2000 – 2005: 19%

Fidelity – 168 mutual funds
Compound annual growth rate 2000 – 2005: 4%

Cosmetics
Neutrogena – 17 SKUs per product category
Vendor sales growth from 2003 – 2004: 15% 

Revlon – 79 SKUs per product category
Vendor sales growth from 2003 – 2004: 3% 

Christopher Gayle

Copyright 2006 Christopher A. Gayle & Capital Genesis LLC ©. All Rights Reserved.

The take away:

I’m not sure why this rule has been violated for so long, since it’s the most important rule in the book!

Where does shareholder value come from?  If you follow the money trail, you’ll find out that the customer controls your ability to increase value for your shareholders.

You provide a product or service.  If it’s a product or service your potential customers want and like, they will take the product/service in exchange for money.  Eventually that money makes its way to shareholders.  No customer = no money = no increase in shareholder value.  Simple.

The corollary to this rule says: Once you have a customer, do what ever you need to do to keep them as a customer.  Why?

1. It always costs more to get new customers compared to keeping the ones you have.
2. A happy customer is free word-of-mouth marketing, which means the cost of acquiring new customers can decrease over time.

A business degree or an MBA should not be needed to understand this simple concept, yet many companies large and small violate this canon every single chance they get.

Copyright 2006 Christopher A. Gayle & Capital Genesis LLC ©. All Rights Reserved.

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) — It is one of the great paradoxes of business: All too often, the companies that boast market-leading positions, huge number of “touch points” with their consumers and all kinds of other advantages often are the least likely to innovate. They are the ones that say, “Oh, that market is too small for me to address,” or, “That’s not how we do business.”

And then they watch as some other guy (often a start-up or an unexpected rival) leads the charge into a new area.

Diana Farrell, director of McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Co,’s economic think tank, says her firm has seen this phenomenon all too often. To help business leaders combat innovation stagnation, she’s assembled a list of ten trends that every businessperson needs to think about — and if he’s bright, he’ll figure out innovative ways to capitalize on these trends.

Farrell, an all-around smart cookie who sits on a number of policy-related committees including the Council of Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, told a group at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference that her ten trends are not intended as “top ten” list. Every executive, she says, will interpret the items a bit differently based on his or her company’s priorities and objectives.

We thought the trends were thought-provoking enough that we decided to provide you with a crib sheet of all ten ideas. Now get innovating — before some other guy does.

1) Centers of economic activity are shifting. China and India are on the rise; in a couple of decades Asia (not counting Japan) will represent about 25 percent of global GDP.

2) The public sector is overburdened. This isn’t just an issue for wealthy nations but emerging economies, too. Farrell says there will have to be a new social contact put in place, and companies will play an even greater role in the delivery of retirement and healthcare benefits.

3) New consumers are coming. McKinsey estimates that there will be 975 million new middle-class households added over the next 20 years. The consuming power of those consumers will go from $4 trillion to $9 trillion.

“This new middle class will look and feel different,” she notes — they will have some disposable income but not scads and scads of money, for example, “and it will take a degree of innovation to serve these consumers.” A good example of such innovation: A $3,000 car in development for India.

4) People lead social lives in a technologically connected world. The Internet has made everything transparent. If your company screws up, consumers will tell their friends — and the rest of the world — with a nasty posting online. Conversely, more and more social activity and commerce is taking place online, creating huge opportunities for companies.

5) Watch for turbulent tides of talent. Just as economic centers are shifting, so are labor markets: McKinsey estimates that there are about 33 million young professionals (college-educated folks with about seven years’ working experience) in the developing world — about twice the size of the young professional pool in the developed world.

6) The free market has a social cost. Increasingly, people in the developed world want their employers and vendors to have a social conscience. Companies may need to find ways to step up and show that they care about their communities and the planet in order to attract and retain the best talent and keep good customers. If companies don’t step up, Farrell posits, those folks will vote with their feet and pocketbooks and find institutions that share their values.

7) Limited resources, unlimited demand. With 975 million families entering the middle class, the world is going to need to figure out ways to provide them with goods without bankrupting the planet. “Every bit of energy conservation we’re able to achieve in the rich world is more than offset by growth in the developing world,” Farrell says. This area, she notes, has dramatic potential for innovation.

8) New global industry structures are taking hold. The scale of companies is getting massive: The average size of the biggest 150 global companies is a whopping 123,000 employees. Moreover, the definition of a company is changing. Take eBay (Charts), which has a core group of employees on the payroll, but consists of a much larger ecosystem of sellers and middlemen.

9) A new science of management will emerge. Companies will depend more on data, algorithms and other hard measurements to make decisions — and once one company in a field starts to adopt these techniques, the rest of the industry likely will follow.

10) A new economics of knowledge will evolve. Companies are spending more and more money on acquiring knowledge — investing in R&D, funding university research. At the same time some knowledge is even easier and cheaper to access (think Wikipedia and other user-generated content, which can be had for free). Companies will need to figure out how to make this new knowledge economy work for them.