Steven Todd, an Associate Director of Mindsheet, recently wrote this article for the Saïd Business School, Oxford University where he is an Associate Fellow.
“What marketing opportunities have been created by the recent global financial meltdown?
Developing new products and services is hard and most fail. The cost of these failures to US companies alone is estimated to be over $100 billion per year. The recent global financial meltdown has had a profound impact on many markets. Businesses and individual consumers are reducing their budgets and becoming increasingly cautious about spending money. But more importantly, what customers want (and are prepared to pay for) may have changed significantly.
These discontinuities provide exciting opportunities for companies who are prepared to take a fresh look at what customers really want. Leading companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft, have moved beyond traditional approaches to customer-driven innovation and instead focus on outcomes – the metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done.
To exploit these opportunities, companies need to act fast and do three things. First, adopt an outcome-based approach to understand what value really means to their customers today. Second, use this insight to reposition current offerings and develop sales material and tools that focus on outcomes. Finally, review their pipeline of development projects and cancel or redirect projects that don’t deliver measurable improvements in customer outcomes.”
Thank you to Steven for allowing us to share this article with you.
To find out more about the outcome based innovation model, read our Innovation Lens report for a full insight.