Grow or die! Product fertilizer to grow your top line

Apologies on the overly dramatic, “please-read-me!” title. I figured I’d jump into the pool with the rest of the bloggers attempting to get the attention of the 1.6 billion of you bouncing around the virtual world.

Anyhow, you’re probably familiar with the phrase, “whatever stops growing eventually dies”. And, while I don’t subscribe to this black & white, morbid declaration, we all know that when it comes to your business, growth is essential.

So in the spirit of doing my little part to help get our economy back on its feet, I’ve decided to write a series of brief articles about different growth drivers (tools, frameworks) you can use to grow your products & your business, and perhaps even add a few inches to your height. So let’s get started…


Growth driver #1: develop different versions of your product to suit different usage scenarios

Take mustard. Yes, mustard.

You’re at a baseball game with some friends. Perhaps you’ve enjoyed a few beers. You head out to one of the fine stadium restrooms to reduce your inner-bladder pressure, and you decide to pick up a hotdog on your way back to your seat. Guldens, right? The perfect neon-yellow goo to spread on your ‘dog. No questions asked. Right place, right time. Guldens all the way.

Flash forward 2 months. You find yourself at a very formal cocktail party. Pinkies out, fancy degrees flying about, drinks you would otherwise never drink, people doing their best to inject British-inflexions. You make your way over to the hors d'oeuvre table and sample a selection of finely smoked meats. Grey Poupon, anyone? Again, no questions asked. Right place, right time. It’s a Grey Poupon moment.

(sorry, I just couldn't help but include the most classic Grey Poupon commercial ever produced. enjoy!)



Let's put aside the mustard and put growth driver #1 to work for you:
1. Make a list of the different situations in which your product or service is used (or needed).

2. For each scenario you’ve identified, jot down those characteristics or dimensions that make it different from the other scenarios on your list. Characteristics could include the physical environment, the people you’re with, your main objective at the time you use the product, your main reason for needing the product, the time of year, the activity you’re engaged in at the time you need the product, etc.

3. For each scenario ask yourself what changes you could make to your service in order to provide greater value to your customers given the unique characteristics of the situation.

Examples could include adding complementary services, increasing or decreasing the performance level of certain features or dimensions, adding or eliminating certain features, making changes to physical dimensions of the product, etc. Whatever you come up with, it should be dictated by the unique needs of your customer under the given scenario.

Real-world examples of growth driver #1. Different versions of the product for different usage occasions.

• Candles: For romantic dinners, for keeping the bugs away when camping, for festive holidays, for scenting the air, for birthdays.
• Travel insurance: For safaris, for ski trips, for family vacations, for cruises, for long-stay trips, for international trips.
• Suits: For hot climates, for formal events, for casual events, for outdoor events, for weddings, for funerals.

What other examples can you think of? Please share them with us in your comments.

Happy growing!

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Additional posts that discuss growth strategies:

• Innoviation via other worlds: a tool for generating powerful ideas for your business
• Enhance your innovation by tapping your product's value-creation web

Great books that discuss scenario-based product innovation:

• Marketing Imagination, New, Expanded Edition 

• The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty

• What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services
  

How to unleash the power of context and turbo-charge your marketing

There are few more powerful insights you can generate than learning the main contexts in which demand for your product/product category arises. Having such knowledge will allow you to elevate your marketing and develop deeper, more profitable relationships with your customers.

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Step 1: identify the most frequent demand contexts
The first step in unleashing the power of context is to identify the different contexts in which demand for your product is triggered. Think of yourself as a detective attempting to answer the questions:

• Under what situations do people become interested in my product?
  
• What triggers their interest in my product? (Events, changing circumstances, etc.)
  

In sleuthing your way to an answer, you may find that there is a series of events that take place before demand is sparked. You will also likely learn that there are several distinct demand contexts for your product, some of which will occur with far greater frequency than others.

Your key objective in step 1 is to assemble a list of those demand contexts that account for at least 75%-80% of total demand for your product/product category.


Step 2: ask the 6 power-questions to elevate your marketing strategy
For each of the most frequently occurring demand contexts for your product, ask the below six questions:

1) How can I tweak or reconfigure my product to better meet the consumer need in the given context?

2) Are there complementary products or services I should consider offering, whether though my company or a partner?

3) How might I adjust my pricing to better reflect the value provided by my product within the given context?

4) How can I more effectively communicate & position the value provided by my product within the given context? Is there specific imagery, tonality & language I should use in my marketing communication?

5) Are there any changes I should make from a channel perspective, whether it be my channels for building awareness, for selling, or for servicing customers?

6) How can I detect when demand has been triggered for this given context? Can I actually identify these people with some degree of certainty? (Dig deep to answer this crucial question. There is almost always a way)
(Note that some of the questions may not be pertinent for certain product categories and demand contexts)


Let's make this pop! with a brief real-world example

Product du jour: Cars

Step 1: identify the most frequent demand contexts for cars
-The lease is expiring on the existing car
-The price of gasoline jumps and the person owns a gas-guzzler**
-The car is old & worn out (tail pipe tickling the pavement, etc.)
-The car died & resuscitating it would cost a whole lot of money
-The person is moving from the City to the ‘Burbs

Step 2: ask the 6 power-questions for each frequently-occurring demand context for cars
**Below I've answered the questions for the demand context in which the price of gasoline jumps and the person owns a gas-guzzler

1) How might we tweak our cars to better meet the needs of the owners of gas-guzzlers?
We could develop a fuel-efficient car or one that could run on cheaper types of fuel (given the long R&D cycle for new models, auto companies are always best suited to have such a model either always available for sale or one that can easily be ramped up for production)

2) Are there complementary products or services we should consider offering, whether though our company or a partner?
We could develop services or partnerships that would cheapen the price of gas - e.g., partner with credit card companies to develop attractive cash-back rewards on gasoline purchases

3) How might we adjust our pricing to better reflect the value that our cars provide to owners of gas-guzzlers?
Consumers who are feeling increasing pain at the gas pump are likely willing to pay more for a car that will significantly reduce their “gas pains”... Then again attempting consumer-level pricing can be tricky and a risky move from a brand perspective (not to mention the current distribution structure for cars does not readily lend itself to such a pricing strategy).

4) How can we more effectively communicate & position the value provided by our cars to owners of gas-guzzlers? Is there specific imagery, tonality & language we should use in our marketing communication?
We could position our cars as “fuel-smart” alternatives that could save them thousands of dollars, which could be put towards more enjoyable things than gasoline, such as a much-needed vacation in the Caribbean(!)

5) Are there any considerations we should make from a channel perspective, whether it be our channels for building awareness, selling, or servicing?
(Response not included to maintain brevity)

6) How can we detect when this demand trigger has been fired? Can we identify the owners of gas-guzzlers during a spike in gas prices?
Knowledge of rising gas prices is a layup - CNN & our local gas stations would make any major rise in gas prices abundantly clear. And, there are a number of ways to identify owners of “gas-guzzlers” with fairly good precision, starting with identifying the geographic distribution of SUV sales & SUV dealerships.


Your assignment
1) Select one of your products or services – especially one that you believe has the most “improvement potential” & could provide the most upside for your business.

2) With a pad & pen in hand, walk the product through Step #1. Also, ask colleagues and friends & family to complete Step #1. And, hold a brainstorming session if timing & calendars permit. (I’ve always found the collective IQ of a good group to be far greater than any one individual flying solo)

3) Take each of your top demand contexts and run through Step #2. For this step it is particularly valuable to hold a brainstorming session or two, as the collective brainpower of your colleagues in this step can be the difference between a $1mm idea and a $10mm idea.

4) Share your experience with us here on the blog, including any interesting things you learned from the process and, of course, any successes you have to-date.


A note on business strategy & demand context
In a future post I’ll be writing about the role that the demand contexts of your product should play in (re)designing your business strategy. Depending upon a number of factors including the economics of your business and the positioning of your brand, there are likely certain demand contexts that you would want to focus your efforts upon. More to come on this, so stay tuned...

And, as always, please feel free to leave a comment, question or shout-out.

Sources: car demand contexts based upon 2005 study by the American International Automobile Dealers (AIADA).

Injecting some Maslow into your marketing

What would you say if I told you that just a few miles off the coast of Australia was a tiny island where a man's success was indicated by the colorfulness of his shirt? Think male peacocks or Seinfeld-as-pirate, whichever is easier to visualize.

For fear of defaming the semester I studied anthropology in London, I will leave the "anthro-isms" to the anthropologists. That said, we in the US are as knee-deep in symbols as the aboriginal cultures of Papua New Guinea. Of course, most of our symbols have been manufactured by companies competing for our attention & disposable income - and some of them have done remarkable jobs imbuing seemingly ordinary "objects" with profound meaning.


American Express & Maslow
Case in point - American Express, a company that successfully turned a tiny piece of plastic, into a symbol that represents the fulfillment of one of Maslow's core human needs: the need to feel significant. Companies, such as Amex, that successfully transform their products & brands into symbols that represent the fulfillment of a Maslow need are often some of the most successful.

This has no doubt been one of the biggest success factors for American Express since it introduced its charge card fifty years ago. The card quickly became a powerful symbol of one's success (and hence significance); pulling it out from one's wallet generated a profound "buzz", filling one with feelings of pride, accomplishment, and a rush of endorphins. Pretty wild to think that a little piece of plastic (or back then, a piece of paper!) could mimic the feeling one might get from a quadruple espresso or pulling up to one's high school reunion in a shiny red Porsche.


How to inject Maslow into your marketing
While your company or product might not have the tailwind of 150 years of brand-building at its back as Amex does, thinking about how to inject aspects of Maslow's hierarchy of needs into your marketing is an absolute must.

The key to achieving this is to first identify which of Maslow's needs is addressed by your product or service - and yes, it may address more than one. Then, ask yourself the following questions to stimulate your thinking and get the ball rolling:

1) How can my marketing better communicate how the benefits of my service satisfy this Maslow need?

• Example: the old “reach out & touch someone”AT&T ads are a perfect illustration of taking the core Maslow need filled by phones - social connectedness - and bringing it to life in compelling, emotive ways.


Note: if you don't see the video of the old AT&T ad on your browser, the link to the ad can be found here on YouTube.

2) How can I link my product touch points & brand elements to reinforce the fulfillment of this Maslow need? Are there tweaks or enhancements I can make to my service that would enable it to provide even greater fulfillment of the Maslow need?

• Example: Imagine you do marketing for a group of upscale lounges in your town. One of the core Maslow needs you would likely be trying to satisfy is the need to feel important. In thinking about how to add touch points or brand elements to support the fulfillment of this need, you may consider adding to your lounges amenities such as bathroom attendants, coat checkers, well-garbed doormen, and servers who address patrons as Mr/Ms .

3) Are there aspects of my product that undermine the success with which it satisfies this Maslow need? How can I remove or reduce them?

4) Are there other Maslow needs I should try to satisfy in order to provide even greater value to my customers, and perhaps attract new customer segments?

• Example: a simple, yet highly successful move made by many manufacturers of home appliances has been to tap into the Maslow need for beauty by imbuing every-day appliances with style, color and form. In fact, in his excellent book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink devotes an entire chapter to this trend, and retailers such as Design Within Reach have successfully exploited it.
  

As always, feel free to send me an email or leave your comments & questions. Best of luck in your endeavors and in building some Maslow into your business! It's well worth your time & energy!






Other posts on Maslow:

• Innovating around Maslow's needs

Manage your core business assumptions and secure your company's long-term success

What have you come to accept about your customers, products and competitors? What assumptions has your company consecrated as gospel? How confident are you in the assumptions you are making about core dimensions of your business, such as:

• The price sensitivity of your customers
• Your partners’ biggest priorities & challenges
• The macro forces - e.g., technology - that are having the greatest influence on your industry

Which of your existing assumptions are most ripe for "busting"?

Let's warm up with a little target practice. In the cross-hairs today: Laundromats
Let's make "assumption busting" a little more concrete by looking at one of my favorite examples of an industry with assumptions ripe for busting, the glamorous world of Laundromats. I currently live across the street from one of the thousands of fluorescent-bathed Laundromats that dot the streets of New York City. I've had the pleasure of living in New York most of my life, and have sampled a myriad of the City's laundry establishments. While they all tend to look a little different - the age of the machines, the color of the walls, the out-of-order sign hanging above the change machine - they all share one thing in common. They are some of the most unpleasant spaces to spend time in, only slightly edging out the Post Office and the DMV.

So what exactly is going on here? Is the aesthetic appeal of Laundromats simply a reflection of the economics of the business model - i.e., fluorescent lighting & lime-colored paint are all that Laundromats can afford given their thin profit margins? Tell Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks that and I'm sure it would make him chuckle. Starbucks showed the world, or at least the US, that masses of people were not only willing to spend more than $1 on a cup of coffee, they were willing to spend 5x that amount given the right atmosphere and the proper balance of sugar & caffeine. Starbucks busted the lid (no pun intended) off long-held assumptions regarding the range of possible coffee behaviors of US consumers, and completely redefined the market.

It's not about the bottom line
The bottom line on Laundromats is simple - it's not about the bottom line. Laundromats are unpleasant places not because they cannot afford to look nicer, but because their owners have come to assume, whether explicitly or implicitly, that customers are satisfied with the existing price/value paradigm. And, given the dearth of available alternatives, it’s reasonable to conclude that customers are in fact (relatively) satisfied.

Were Laundromat operators to BUST existing assumptions regarding the role that a Laundromatcould play in people’s lives, and, for example, make Laundromats more hospitable places to spend time, operators could open doors to whole new revenue streams. These new revenue streams could more than cover the cost of Laundromat “beautification”. Much as Starbucks transformed the drinking of coffee into an experience which enticed people to linger around and purchase additional goods (e.g., desserts, CDs, coffee-related "gear"), Laundromats are perfect places to follow such a strategy given that their patrons are captive to their dirty socks for an hour or longer at a time.


How do I locate busting opportunities within my industry?

Let’s set our opportunities within the Laundromat business aside and discuss how you can locate the assumption-busting opportunities within your industry. Busting is a 2-step process, and like many approaches that can uncover large opportunities, it requires your time, your focus and some of your best thinking.

Step 1

In step 1 you want to codify - i.e. put down on paper - all of the critical assumptions under which your company currently operates. By critical, I mean those assumptions that are core drivers of your company’s growth & sustenance .

An easy way to determine whether an assumption is critical to your business is to ask, "If this assumption proved to be wrong, how much would my business suffer?" If you assess the potential impact to be excessive - e.g., you could lose your most important customers, miss out on explosive growth opportunities, be made extremely vulnerable to competitors, or be put out of business altogether - then the assumption is a critical one.

Categories under which critical assumptions typically fall include assumptions regarding products, prospects & customers, competitors, the industry, organizational structure & competencies, partners & suppliers, technology, and the macro environment. (Below I have provided examples of some common types of critical assumptions)

Completing step 1 often serves as a major eye-opener. Businesspeople frequently find it challenging to identify even a few of their most critical assumptions. Often this is because over time a company’s critical assumptions have become so ingrained within the company’s DNA that they have become all but invisible to most employees¹. Organizations that find themselves in such circumstances place themselves at great risk to external "surprises" – or what I like to refer to as things organizations would have seen coming had they actively monitored their critical assumptions!

Step 2

After you have identified your critical assumptions, you’re ready to move onto step 2. The goal of step 2 is to identify assumption-busting opportunities. This is accomplished by analyzing & pressure testing each of your assumptions from step 1; asking simple, yet provocative, questions such as:

• Is this assumption still valid, or is it ripe for busting? How would I find out? Does my business have processes that allow for efficient, low-risk validation of this assumption? (I.e., can we easily test whether this assumption has busting-potential?) If we learn that the assumption is ripe for busting, what does it imply for our business strategy, our products, our marketing, our organizational structure, etc.? What activities or projects should we start/stop/increase/reduce?
• How can I effectively monitor this assumption on an ongoing basis? Does my business have the flexibility to respond quickly & effectively to changes to this assumption?
• If we learn that this assumption is still valid are there any activities or projects that we should start/stop/increase/reduce?
  

Enough reading. It’s BUSTING time!

Busting is best started by practicing the process within your "personal lab". Your first objective is to become comfortable with the two steps of busting and adept at surfacing your critical assumptions. Begin by doing exercises in which you focus upon a single category (e.g., Products) and try to identify a few critical assumptions within it. Take each assumption you've identified through the battery of questions listed in step 2 above. Now imagine a scenario in which you determine that the assumption is invalid, i.e., ripe for busting. What could it imply for your business? What actions might you consider taking? Write down all of your thoughts.

When you’re done, move onto another category (e.g., Technology) and run through the exercise again. Run through this exercise for each category over the course of a week or two, and see what you come up with. As you become more comfortable with this exercise you can start to bring busting-based thinking into your organization, leading the effort to push for the deep, strategic thinking that is in dangerously short supply in our modern corporations.

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1 - This seems to be more common within large organizations and organizations where people change roles on a frequent basis. I believe this is because in such organizations, the designers of the original business strategies have either left or moved into different parts of the company, taking with them the assumptions that underpinned the strategies they developed. What is left behind is a set of activities, processes, and reporting procedures to be carried out by new employees, often with little explanation regarding their rationale.

Innoviation via other worlds: a tool for generating powerful ideas for your business

I'm not quite referring to Mars or Pluto when I say "other worlds". Although, there is no doubt that even a few seconds of stargazing can inspire & fuel your innovation efforts.

By "other worlds" I'm talking a little closer to home than Mars or Pluto. What I am referring to is a great framework for innovation in which we explore other worlds (i.e., people, places or things) that provide the samehigher-order benefits as those provided by our product or service.

The Analogous Worlds Framework consists of three steps:

1. Identifying the higher-order benefit(s) provided by your product/service (e.g., save money, save time, guidance, peace of mind, confidence, social connectedness, pleasure, etc.)
   
2. Making a list of those people, places or things that provide the same higher-order benefit (s)
3. Asking how these "other worlds" that you identified in step 2 go about providing the higher-order benefit. Is there anything about what they do or how they do it which you could incorporate into your product, or use in aspects of your marketing strategy*?

*By marketing strategy, I am referring here specifically to product, price, promotion, distribution, segmentation, positioning, and targeting.

Analogous Worlds Framework - PPT template
click here to download slide (use it, share it!)

The Analogous Worlds Framework: a brief example - BMW
Let's take "the ultimate driving machine" for a test drive through the framework and see what we can come up with...

Step 1: Identify the high-order benefits provided by a BMW:

• Saves time. Transportation inventions such as the automobile have cut down the time it takes to get from point A to point B in dramatic fashion (assuming you don't line in LA).
• Provides feeling of importance; status. This should come as no surprise from the Bimmer.
  
• Provides access; empowerment. BMWs, and cars in general are incredibly empowering tools, enabling people to explore places that otherwise would have been unreachable by foot, horse, bike or train.

Step 2: Make a list of those people, places or things that provide the same higher-order benefit(s):

Analogous Worlds Framework for BMW

Step 3: Ask how these "other worlds" that you identified in step 2 go about providing the higher-order benefit(s). Is there anything about what they do or how they do it which you could incorporate into your product, or use in aspects of your marketing strategy?

Here are a few of many thoughts that come to mind (note that I have bolded those items in the BMW framework above which led to the ideas below):

• The BMW butler. Leverage the butler concept and design an on board, voice-activated, computerized "butler" that can do various tasks for you while you drive - e.g., manage the radio settings, climate control, seat positioning, etc.
  

• The Car Doorman. Leverage the concept of a doorman, and develop a feature that allows drivers to push a button and have the car door open for them, saving them the time & effort of having to open the doors for themselves - an activity which is especially difficult when their hands are full (e.g., when carrying bags of groceries, carrying children).

• In-car Google. Leverage Google's approach to providing access (via pertinent information now!), and develop a voice-activated capability that allows drivers to access information about local traffic, road conditions, local commerce, the "health" of the car, etc.
  

• Your driving anthem. Similar to the Nike+ / iPod "Power Song" feature that allows runners to push a button and listen to their favorite high-adrenaline song, develop a button under the steering wheel which plays your favorite "cruising song" when pushed. This concept leverages the method via which Tony Robbins provides "empowerment".
  

Hopefully the BMW example will give you a taste of the potential power of The Analogous Worlds Framework. It's a framework that effectively "shakes things up" and gets you to think in terms of the higher-order benefit(s) provided by your product, getting you out of the feature-focused, product-centric paralysis that consumes all of us from time to time.

Please feel free to download the framework, pass it along to your friends & colleagues - and more important than anything, use it. Like many tools, the more you use it, the more it will work for you, and help you generate high-impact, game-changing opportunities.

As always, feel free to contact me with any of your thoughts, comments, or questions.

Great books on innovation & creativity

• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition)

• Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas

• The Innovator's Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth

Marketing & the 5 W's: a framework for marketing innovation

In my prior post I introduced the wonders of the 5 W's, and how you could benefit from utilizing this foundation of journalism in your efforts to innovate & develop potent marketing strategies. In this post I provide a peak into one of several dozen 5W's frameworks you can use to turbo-charge your marketing efforts.

5 W's Consumer Journey Framework
This framework provides you with a powerful tool for generating a rich inventory of ideas & insights with respect to the customer journey for your product or service.


(click to download as PDF)

Using the tool couldn't be more straightforward:

1. Create a matrix like the one above, comprised of two dimensions - the 5W's dimension and the consumer journey dimension.

2. Take each customer journey dimension (e.g., demand, search, purchase, etc.) through each of the 5W's, one at a time. Note that some of the Ws will be less relevant to some of the journey dimensions. Despite this, always push yourself to generate insights - 9 times out 10 they exist but just require a little extra brain juice. Within each journey/W box, write as many ideas & thoughts that come to mind.

3. Redo the exercise a few days later and see what additional thoughts you are able to generate. Allowing a little incubation time for your thoughts rarely fails to deliver some powerful new ideas.

4. Now, with your fully blown-out matrix in-front of you, ask yourself some of the following questions:

• What new channels might I want to explore for increasing product awareness, improving the product search, selling, & servicing ?
• What new consumer needs are likely generated at various points along the consumer journey and how might I benefit from them?
  
• What complementary products or services might I want to offer or bundle with my product at various stages along the customer journey or to specific customer segments?
• What new partnerships might we want to explore to provide greater total value to our customers at various points along the customer journey?
• What marcom approaches might we want to test or use with certain customer segments, within certain contexts, or at different stages along the consumer journey?
• What new products or features might I want to offer to meet the needs of certain customer segments within certain contexts and during specific stages of the customer journey?
• What ways can I improve & influence the search & decision-making process for customers / specific customer segments?
• What ways can I can improve the {purchase & payment, delivery & installation, usage & maintenance, disposal, repurchase & renewal} experience for customers / specific customer segments?

Use the tool & share your experience
So I'd like to ask each of you to try the tool out on a product or service that you currently sell or manage. After you have run through the tool and the battery of follow-up questions for improving your business, let me know what insights or ideas you were able to generate - I would love to hear about them, and have you share them with the rest of our marketing community.

And of course, please let me know if you have any questions along the way - I am more than happy to answer them.

Have fun, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the innovative ideas & insights you come up with!

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Related posts

• Innovation using analogous people, places & things (powerful tool)

• Using the 5W's for your marketing strategy

• Using the 5W's to reduce customer churn

Marketing & the 5 W's: why every marketer should take a journalism class

Journalism 101. Who, what, when, where, why, how?... these key dimensions that are the foundation of journalism can also be used to design great marketing & segmentation strategies, and to turbo-charge your innovation efforts.

The 5 W's as they have been dubbed, can serve as a powerful tool for gaining deep insight into the contextual nature surrounding the need for and use of your product. I like to think of the 5W's as the marketing equivalent of an industrial-grade power shovel, allowing you to "dig deep" so you can get to those precious consumer gems that lay beneath your feet.

Context is king
Powering the 5W's is the essential notion that everything that we do is embedded in a context, and the better you, the marketer, understand the different contexts in which the need for/use of your product occurs, the better equipped you will be to develop marketing strategies or innovations that truly pop!

How do I use the 5 W's?
The simplest way to begin using the 5W's is to start with the most basic question and loop it through each W:

• {When/Where/Why/How/For whom} might the need for my product arise?

Spend at least 5-10 minutes on each W, making a list along the way. Allow your thoughts to percolate; don't be afraid to make assumptions - you can always validate them in the future. Do the exercise again a day or two later - often the most insightful thoughts will come after a period of incubation.

As you begin to use the 5W's, one thing that will become clear to you is that one or two of the Ws will often be more relevant to your product than others. You'll also notice that the Ws will frequently interact with each other in meaningful ways, and that you'll often want to drill down on a given insight using "follow-up" Ws. Note these interactions and drill-downs and allow them to generate further insight into the contextual nature of demand for your product. Often the deepest insights lay in these pockets.

Gatorade: a brief example of the 5 W's in action
Let's take Gatorade, that cold, refreshing beverage that most of us have purchased at some point in our lives. Reaching into our magic hat of W's, we come up with "Where?", leading us to ask, "Where might the need for Gatorade arise?"

Given that Gatorade is 'the ultimate thirst quencher', I begin to think of places where the need for thirst-quenching is likely to arise. A few examples that come to mind include basketball courts, hot climates (e.g., Phoenix, The Mojave Desert), marathons, and the Dead Sea.

Let's reach into the hat again... this time I pull out "When?", leading us to ask, "When might the need for Gatorade (thirst-quenching) arise?" Some initial thoughts that come to mind include summertime, playing sports, during a long hike, the morning following a night of drinking, a few hours after eating extremely salty food, and last but certainly not least, during a prolonged bout of diarrhea.

Let's now drill down on one of the "When's" - during a prolonged bout of diarrhea - and ask, "Where might such bouts occur?" One thought that comes to mind is certain poor villages around the globe where outbreaks occur regularly. Gatorade could be used in such places to quickly rehydrate people, especially children, who can die from the dehydration caused by the outbreak. Needless to say the potential benefits to Gatorade, the Gatorade brand, and the people of such villages would be numerous.

5 W's Recap
How to use the 5W's for developing marketing strategies & for business innovation likely merits an entire book; perhaps we'll put one together in the near future. Hopefully in this post I've given you a little taste of how one of the bedrocks of journalism can also serve as a potent tool for marketers & innovators alike. Much more to come.




More posts on the 5 W's:

• 5 Ws innovation framework
• Using the 5Ws to reduce customer churn
  

How watching Seinfeld can help you become more innovative

"Did you ever wonder why...?"

The above phrase captures the thematic brilliance of Seinfeld, both the show as well as the comedian. In addition to providing a foundation for Seinfeld's comedy, it also serves as a framework for exploring the world with more innovative eyes.

One of the core premises of this famous "Seinfeldian" phrase is the idea that not everything that is necessarily makes sense or should be. Most people, being extremely busy and having grown up in an environment in which "it has always been this way", are less likely to notice "the absurd" in everyday life.

Taking the time out to put on the "Seinfeld glasses" allows you to take a step back and make the types of observations that can lead to major innovations for products, services & processes. As I have written about in prior posts, becoming a more mindful marketer is the name of the game, and Seinfeld's mindfulness is one such variation on the theme.

So the next time your thinking about a product, a service, a process, or what have you, take a 60-second timeout out and ask yourself, "What about this do I find annoying? What irritates me or seems unnecessary, silly, or overly cumbersome?"

After you have discovered these irritants or apparent absurdities, challenge yourself to come up with solutions, knowing that they are waiting to be discovered.

How to spur innovation using Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Abraham Maslow, the psychologist from Brooklyn who is famous for his 'hierarchy of human needs' has contributed more to the discipline of marketing than he ever would have probably imagined. Mind you, Maslow probably spent little if any time contemplating marketing so he likely would have been ambivalent towards his contribution.

Regardless of Maslow's intentions when he devised his famed hierarchy of needs, his pyramid provides us with some extremely powerful innovation exercises for business, particularly with respect to products & marketing.

One such exercise that I run through frequently is to explore how I might inject one or more of Maslow's needs into an existing product or service to help differentiate it. For example, meditating on the esteem need begs the question of how I might make my customers feel extra special, important, and worthwhile.

With respect to the need for self-actualization, which is strongly associated with giving to others, I am led to think about giving a share of profits to charities selected by my customers. As a purely hypothetical example, let's say for every $100 car insurance premium paid by a customer, $2 will be given to a charity of the customer's choice, which she gets to select while paying her premium online.

In using Maslow's hierarchy as a potential playing field for innovation, it is critical to first identify the core benefits provided by the product you're looking to innovate around - whether it be security, guidance, hope, pleasure, saving time or money, etc. Only once you have a clear grasp of the core benefit of your product will certain needs within the hierarchy begin to resonate, and will opportunities for innovation in your marketing or the product itself begin to "pop".

More to come on innovating around Maslow's hierarchy in future posts - I have some neat frameworks & tools for you to use which will beef-up your Maslow-muscle. As always, feel free to contact me with any of your questions, comments or thoughts.

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Other posts on Maslow:

• Injecting some Maslow into your marketing
  

Enhance your innovation by tapping your product's value-creation web

In the continuous search for innovation and creating more value for your customers and shareholders (and hopefully for society too), it's important that you have a good understanding of your product's value-creation web (aka "value web").

A product's value web is simply an assessment of all of those people, services, products, companies and institutions that have the potential to derive value from the sale of your products or services. This assessment should importantly capture additional customer needs that are generated when a customer purchases your product (e.g., the need for plant food that is generated from the purchasing of a plant).

The Value Web in action
To provide a brief example of a product's value web, let's consider the purchase of a pair of tickets for a jazz club in the city by a suburban couple. Several possible beneficiaries ("web nodes") come to mind. First, there are the restaurants near the theater which may benefit from the couple's desire to grab dinner before the show. Second, we have the garages near the theater because the couple will want a convenient & safe place to park their car. Third we have the babysitter who lives down the block from the couple, who will no doubt earn a few dollars looking after the couples' new born while they are in the city. Fourth we have the city government, which will garner tax revenues via the couple's car tolls (to enter the city) and the sales taxes collected from the couples spending (tickets, garage, dinner, etc.)... and the list could go on.

After you have gone through the important exercise of mapping out your service's value web, you then want to ask some key questions, including:

• Can I bundle my service with one or more of the nodes in a way that would be compelling to my customers? (e.g., bundling tickets, dinner & garage into a single offering at a discounted price)
  
• Can I share costs with any of the nodes - marketing costs, operating costs, etc.? (e.g., including a mini-ad for the garage or restaurant within your bigger ad for the concert)
  
• Can I "exchange" the value created by the sale of my product with other nodes in return for something that I value? (e.g., providing a % of ticket sales to the garage in exchange for the garage providing discounts and valet parking to folks attending the concert)
  

Now, of course, as part of doing due diligence for any of the ideas that you generate, you have to understand the economics behind the different ideas, and ensure that the value created for both you and your partner(s) is worth the effort required.

More to come on value innovation & the value web in future posts. As always, feel free to contact me via email.

Innovation via your inner consumer voice

All of us walk through the world with our own mental filters... our filters determine what we pay attention to and what we block out... when I walk down the streets of New York with a certain friend of mine from college, I notice all the dogs that trot past us... he notices the different architectural styles that imbue the many buildings ... for him the dogs are invisible... for me, the buildings.

However, there exists a quiet world which we both share. One all of us have in common, yet often pay little attention to... our inner voices. Those little whispers. So faint that they often go undetected. So what does this have to do with innovation? Everything.

Marketers must learn to hear their own whispers
For consumer-based marketers especially, it's essential to develop a refined ear. One that can tune into our own little day-to-day whispers -- particularly those whispers that relate to the products, services and consumer needs that underpin our businesses. It's through listening to these whispers that deep insights & innovation come bubbling up to the surface.

We all know that consumers do a notoriously poor job of communicating their unmet needs. Much of this is because most people have not developed the capabilities for tapping into their inner voices. And despite the many tools & sophisticated approaches, marketing research continues to have difficulty drawing out those unmet needs. This is why the onus falls on marketers to cultivate their own consumer inner voices.

Whether you're maniacally thumbing through a magazine in an unsuccessful search for the front-page article, or trying to figure out how to place an order at the funky new sandwich shop on your block, learning to "listen" to your day-to-day thoughts & feelings can provide tremendous opportunities for innovation. As I mentioned above, this is particularly relevant & powerful if you are also a consumer of the very products or services that your company sells.

Innovating around your inner consumer voice in the shower
Let's take a brief example of innovating around one's inner voice... there I am a few weeks ago taking my nightly shower before I go to bed. As I look down at the soap dish I notice that the soap is completely worn out - a thin slab of what was once a thick, meaty bar of glycerin. This situation is one that I have probably experienced hundreds of times in my life and yet not until a few weeks ago did I come to register the discomfort it creates. The soap was too small to be effective for washing yet it still has some useful life left. What I typically do is grab a new bar of soap and leave the old bar to slowly decompose in the soap dish, creating a soupy, soapy water concoction in the dish. For whatever reason, I cannot bring myself to simply throw away these tiny bars of just-about-unusable soaps.

It was only then, when I had acknowledged my discomfort, that I was able to think up ways to innovate around this discomfort which had remained dormant to myself for so long. Standing there in the shower I came up with a few decent concepts. One such concept was a contraption for tossing unusuable soaps into, which after getting filled-up with soaps, would act like a molding vice, mushing the soaps together, and producing a brand new bar of soap. Viola! While perhaps not a patent-worthy concept, that is besides the point.

The opportunity for innovation in the above example stemmed directly from becoming mindful of a mundane, everyday experience that generated displeasure for me, albeit not one of the 'life or death' variety. However, in today's modern world, with most of our basic needs already met, much of the opportunities for innovation lie within this 'valley of the subtle'; hence the need for marketers to refine their inner consumer voices. It is one of the key capabilities for marketers to develop in order to better identify opportunity areas for effective innovation.

Some of my favorite books on innovation

• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition) 

• The Innovator's Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth

• Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas