Invent Sales Growth Opportunites Your Competition Can't Imagine
SAMPLING OF AVAILABLE POINTS FOR CUSTOMIZING YOUR PROGRAM:
A. The Common Death Spirals of Consumer Products Manufacturers.
1.Improper measures of success produce short-term wins, yet risk long term business failure.
2.The measures of success that will typify market leaders in 2010.
B. Beyond Product and Service Innovation to Business Concept Innovation
1. Lessons from Starbucks & Krispy Creme: How to transform a commodity product into a brand that delivers emotional connection.
2. Dissecting the interactive elements of a business model that produce sustainable sales growth.
C. Addressing Latent Needs: Knowing What Customers Want Before They Even Know Themselves
1. Seven "clear and present dangers" from asking customers what they want and giving it to them.
2. Synthesizing future trends information and existing changes to anticipate intensifying latent needs.
3. Recognizing "imbedded compromises" that are being jammed down the throats of customers but
represent potential goldmines for new sales.
4. Determining customer's ideal visions of service.
5. The Turock 29: Provocative questions that distinguish market leaders From me-too followers.
D. "But I've Got a Business to Run and I'm not a Futurist!": Making Strategy an Ongoing Process While Producing Today's Results
1. There is little proprietary information about the future.What is proprietary is the original thinking given to future trends information.
2. Cases examples of using trends to conceive new business opportunities.
3. Routines for proactively preparing for the future even when there appears to be no time.
E. How Your Strategy Process is Unintentionally Killing Innovation
1. Eight ways that traditional strategic planning practices doom innovation.
2. Sharing the strategic load: Soliciting creative ideas company-wide.
3. Few "eureka-scale" innovations originate at the senior management retreat: Innovation is a year long cumulative process.
4. The nobility of mistakes: innovation is not a zero defect process.
"The product you sell is only one component
Of your business" - Jack Welch
An explosion of new products is taking place in the consumer products business. While the number of new items has doubled since 1990, Marketing Intelligence Services estimates only about 7% of these 31,000 new products are innovative. Failing to innovate decreases margins and puts manufacturer at risk for being sub planted by a retailer's private label brand.
A second issue is that many manufacturers focus entirely on product innovation, while ignoring other retailer needs for sales growth. Sustainable sales growth comes from breakthrough features or benefits in six areas: formulation, packaging, technology, positioning, merchandising, and creating a new market.
Manufacturers who adopt a broader view of innovation organize their sales efforts around a single strategic premise:
Asking customers (consumers, retailers) what they want and giving it to them is ordinary. Anticipating what customers might value but wouldn't even think to ask you for is extraordinary.
Unless you are blessed with visionary customers, their suggestions will be minor tweaks on what the industry is already providing. Market leaders detect customers' unspoken dreams, implied wishes in complaints, and unrecognized compromises with current services, and then develop hard to copy solutions.
OBJECTIVES:
Participants will learn:
·Recognize the potential "death spirals" that await manufacturers who are not proactively pursuing innovative sales growth opportunities.
Create new value and emotional connection for "commodity products" (e.g., Starbucks with coffee, Krispy Crème with donuts)
Detect and solve "latent needs"what customers might value but have never experienced or would never think to ask for.
Understand a "sources of differentiation" model that suggests areas for conceiving innovations (along with actual manufacturer examples).
Develop measures of success that will typify category leaders in 2010 and attract lucrative partnerships with the most desirable retailers.
Synthesizing market research and tracking future trends to conceive products, service, and business concept innovations.
