The 4 Ps of Innovation

I was reading a blog by Scott Anthony on 4 Ps...... really interesting. Scott Anthony is the Managing Director of Innosight Ventures and has written three books on innovation.

Any marketer can quickly rattle off the so-called "4 Ps" of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion). Innovators should also be able to quickly recite the 4 Ps that capture their idea's potential: population, penetration, price, and purchase frequency.
Companies looking at a specific revenue target can simply multiply the addressable population, the penetration of that population, the price per purchase, and the purchase frequency to get to annual revenues. Typically he suggests people try to be quite precise about their target population, give their best estimate based on in-market analogies of the pricing and purchase frequency, then determine what penetration they would need to hit their targets.

This deceptively simple calculation neatly captures many of the elements of an idea's business model. Does the idea target a niche or a mass population? Is it an occasional or frequent purchase? What channel would support the target price point? What kind of support would be necessary given the purchase frequency?

Once you do the 4P calculation (and of course, if you add in a fifth — profit margin — you can look at profits instead of revenue), the focus shifts to finding systematic ways to determine whether the assumptions behind the calculation have any hope of being true.

The deep thinking that goes into creating complicated spreadsheets for ideas can be very useful. But it also can be a way to mistake motion for progress. Make sure you can answer the simple questions before you worry about the complicated ones.

(Image source: Business-strategy-innovation.com)

Emotional Response Marketing

Emotions are one of the most powerful influences we have. Think back for a minute and try to think of anything that you've purchased where your emotions haven't played a major part in the decision process. We use our emotions to help visualize ourselves benefiting from the purchase of a particular product or service. When was the last time you bought something that there weren't any emotions attached to the purchase? I don't think you'll find even one instance!

Emotions are brought to the surface by taking the benefits of your product or service and relating each one of them to a particular emotion. Since every product or service fills a particular need, you'll have to find the benefits and emotions of ownership for yours.

Here's a simple, three step process to help you define the benefits and emotions for your product or service:

1. List the Benefits of Your Product or Service
You want to be able to make a list of the benefits your particular product or service has to offer your target market. This should have already been done when you were doing your market research on your product or service. But if you didn't, take ample time here to know just what benefits your product or service is going to provide your prospective customers.

2. Take Each Benefit and Match the Emotions It Creates
Now take each benefit and match up the emotions that your potential customers are going to experience when they purchase your product or service. Remember not all of the emotions are going to be positive ones. You want to focus on the positive emotions as they are much more powerful.

3. Create Exciting Words and Phrases to Relate These Emotions
You want to create phrases and wording in your advertisements and sales letters that will bring out the emotions attached to the benefits in your prospects mind as they're reading your advertisements and sales letters. Remember you're tying to get on a personal basis with your prospect so don't forget to TALK WITH THEM & NOT AT THEM. Think as if you're sitting with your prospect and talking to them when writing your advertisements and sales letters so you'll be able to relate to them on a one to one basis. Use you and your, instead of me, or I in your advertisements and sales letters.

If you forget everything else, remember this: "The Buying Decision Is ALWAYS Based On An Emotional Response!"

(Source: Internet Marketing Issues)
(Image source: Drdavidwick.com)

Nuclear Liability Bill

Monday’s verdict in the Bhopal gas tragedy case has made the present government to rethink against rushing to push the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, which aims at creating a regime for compensation and accountability-fixing in the case of a nuclear accident. I personally think that the nuclear liability Bill should not be pushed in its present form.

Nuclear power, which is the fourth largest source of electricity in India at present, accounts for just four percent of total electricity generation capacity. Within next 25 years, India aims to increase this to nine percent of the total generated power. As a society, we want certain benefits, and we want risk takers to figure out better/faster/cheaper ways to obtain them. But if we're going to walk higher wires, we need stronger nets. It is inevitable that system will grow more complex, and that human beings will continue to take risks to meet their immediate objectives. The decision makers need to address the complex issues in simple ways.

(Image source: Canarytrap.in)

Brand Community

A brand community is a community formed on the basis of attachment to a product. Recent developments in marketing and in research in consumer behavior result in stressing the connection between brand, individual identity and culture. Among the concepts developed to explain the behavior of consumers, the concept of a brand community focuses on the connections between consumers. A brand community can be defined as an enduring self-selected group of actors sharing a system of values, standards and representations (a culture) and recognizing bonds of membership with each other and with the whole.

Marketers in a variety of industries are trying to increase customer loyalty, marketing efficiency, and brand authenticity by building communities around their brands. Few companies, however, understand what brand communities require and how they work. For instance, many managers think of a brand community in terms of marketing strategy. In fact, for a community to have the greatest impact, it must be framed as a corporate strategy. Another common misconception is that a brand community exists to serve the business. An effective brand community exists to serve its members, who participate in order to fulfill many kinds of needs, such as building relationships, cultivating new interests, and contributing to society. Strong communities work to understand people's needs and to engage participants by offering a variety of roles. Finally, managers often think that a brand community must be tightly controlled. In reality, a robust community defies managerial control.

(Image source: Metaphorstudio.com)

How to Stop the Blame Game?

Playing the blame game never works. A deep set of research shows that people who blame others for their mistakes lose status, learn less, and perform worse relative to those who own up to their mistakes. Research also shows that the same applies for organizations. Groups and organizations with a rampant culture of blame have a serious disadvantage when it comes to creativity, learning, innovation, and productive risk-taking.

That's why creating a culture of psychological safety is one of the most important things a leader can do.

A set of recent studies showed that merely being exposed to someone else making a blame attribution for a mistake was enough to cause people to turn around and blame others for completely unrelated failures. This is different from the "kick-the-dog" phenomenon, where a person is more likely to blame the person below them in the hierarchy when they, themselves, have been blamed by a higher-up. Instead, it appears that all you have to do to "catch" the blame virus is to be exposed to someone else passing the buck.

How to prevent the spread of blame in one's organization??? Here are a few practical steps:

• Don't blame others for your mistakes - The temptation is huge to point the finger elsewhere when you make a mistake. Resist it. Not only will you gain respect and loyalty from your followers, you'll also help to prevent a culture of blame from emerging.

• When you do blame, do so constructively - There are times when people's mistakes really do need to be surfaced in public. In these cases, make sure to highlight that the goal is to learn from mistakes, not to publicly humiliate those who make them.

• Set an example by confidently taking ownership for failures - Our findings showed that blame was contagious, but not among those who felt psychologically secure. So try to foster a chronic sense of inner security in order to reduce the chances that you'll lash out at others.

• Always focus on learning - Creating a culture where learning — rather than avoiding mistakes — is the top priority will help to ensure that people feel free talk about and learn from their errors.

• Reward people for making mistakes - Some companies are actually starting to incentivize employees to make mistakes, so long as the mistakes can teach valuable lessons that lead to future innovation.

(Source: Harvard Business Review)

Cultural Intelligence

Cultural intelligence, cultural quotient or CQ, is a theory within management and organisational psychology, positing that understanding the impact of an individual's cultural background on their behaviour is essential for effective business, and measuring an individual's ability to engage successfully in any environment or social setting.

Cultural Intelligence is an individual capability - This means it is not an aspect of personality or personal interests. It is a set of capabilities that leads to specific outcomes - such as decision making, performance, and adjustment in culturally diverse settings.

CQ is developed through:

Cognitive means: the head (learning about your own and other cultures, and cultural diversity)
Physical means: the body (using your senses and adapting your movements and body language to blend in)
Motivational means: the emotions (gaining rewards and strength from acceptance and success)

CQ is measured on a scale, similar to that used to measure an individual's intelligence quotient. People with higher CQ's are regarded as better able to successfully blend in to any environment, using more effective business practices, than those with a lower CQ.

(Image source: Effectivegloballeadership.com)

How to Be a Changemaker...

The leadership skills that worked in the past are quickly becoming irrelevant in today's fast-paced, change-is-the-name-of-the-game world. To be effective, you need to know how to adapt to and drive change. Here are the six core skills that can turn you into a changemaker:

• Bring people together who aren't connected.
• Design new business models by combining players and resources in new ways.
• Persevere with an idea until you see success.
• Don't rely on credentials, but on the power of your ideas.
• Persuade others to see the possibility of your ideas and join you in the pursuit.
• Empower others to also make change.
(Source: Harvard Business Review)
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