List of Posts

Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

Target those who need you most - NETT blog Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

Our politicians have shown they could learn a thing or two from small business when it comes to marketing their wares.

You can be the best at something, but if people don’t know about it, that fact won’t get you anywhere.

The federal election brought home for me the importance of positioning and promotion when you’re marketing your business. The shambolic campaign and aftermath showed that you can be running the only western economy to emerge unscathed from the global financial crisis, which should be enough to get you elected a saint, but if you can’t sell your accomplishments – and you let your competitors dictate the agenda – you will be severely spanked.

Policy waffling, backstabbing and leaks didn’t help, but history tells us that Australians give a neophyte government a second chance, even if it’s made mistakes. For the government to have so many runs on the board, the election should have been a walkover. To my mind, Labor’s biggest problems were a lack of firm positioning and an inability to sell itself to its customer base – uh, I mean the electorate.

These principles also apply to running a small business. It’s not enough to be the best-in-class for service, delivery, reliability, range or innovation; if your customers and potential customers don’t know it, you won’t survive.

The first step in this process is positioning. You need to work out what you’re best at; what your salient attribute or point of difference is, and why it’s meaningful to your customers. It’s only worth focusing on a defining attribute if:

Read the rest here:  http://nett.com.au/blogs/target-those-who-need-you-most/162.html


It’s time to get innovative Friday, November 14th, 2008

While most companies are running for the hills as a result of the current economic crisis, the really smart ones will use the tough times to try out new ideas to enhance their chances of surviving unscathed.

A posting on the Knowledge @ Wharton website (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2086) puts the case for engaging in “disruptive innovation” in the current climate. “Paul J.H. Schoemaker, research director for the Mack Center for Technological Innovation, suggests that, for some companies, the economic crisis can actually provide an innovation platform. ‘The crisis has multiple impacts,’ Schoemaker says. ‘Loss of revenue and profit will at first instill a cost cutting mentality, which is not good for innovation. But if the patient is bleeding you need to stop that first. Then, however, a phase starts where leaders ask which parts of their business model are weak (and perhaps unsustainable) and that, in turn, can lead to restructuring and reinvention.’

“He also cautions against too much caution - over-reliance on incremental innovation versus transformative, or ‘disruptive,’ innovation. In innovation circles, the two have come to be differentiated as ‘little i’ and ‘Big I’ innovation. ‘The largest gains in business come from more daring innovations that challenge the paradigm and the organization,’ Schoemaker says.”

Companies who dismiss social media marketing as “too hard” or too “out of the box”, and who use tightening budgets as a reason to put off trying to get started, are missing a big opprtunity. It could lead the the type of “disruptive innovation” that leads companies into new areas and new levels of success.