The tension that sits between selling a future strategic position and selling value now is not easily fixed.
Everybody understands why the pull of the future is less strong than the current target and the £1 revenue in your pocket is worth more than the £10 you may get next week/ month/ year.
We know that policy, regulation, crisis, competition and discovery affect us. We know it explicitly but, in business, it’s often easier to overlook intuition because of need to get through the to-do list.
This is where the concept of hyperbolic discounting* thrives: the big picture may be interesting but measured against what needs doing next, it’s just abstract.
Despite that, we’d suggest that being informed about how future markets may develop has huge value.
Having a view of emerging consumer trends, developing technology, competitive activity and changes in regulatory landscapes can significantly improve today’s decision making: how to promote, how to communicate with the target audience, who the target audience is and how to manoeuvre to your next market position – what the next market position needs to be.
Strategy based on data specifically analysed to meet your need is a newly accurate science and it doesn’t rely entirely on history.
And so, having a strategy for the future isn’t futurism.
Doing what is necessary and doing what is right aren’t always mutually exclusive. It’s just a matter of timing.
We’ve put together an example of how we see a market segment in a downloadable infographic. This one looks at the consumer health market but we have others.
[button link=”https://share.hsforms.com/1TNCLUcsyQtqcFpLPxty7rg2xevn” type=”big” newwindow=”yes”] Download our free infographic[/button]
*Hyperbolic discounting – the tendency for people to choose a smaller reward sooner over a larger reward later.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
While the media (and all of us) continue to hazard guesses about what March 29th will bring, this week has brought more news of businesses leaving the UK to base production abroad. We’ve had Monocle Monday and Honda Tuesday. What next?
Monocle Magazine #Monoclemagazine the newsy/ lifestyle/ trend reporting magazine that has been, until now, printed in the UK announces that it is moving printing to Germany “to ensure there are no hiccups in delivery and quality”.
#Honda announces it’s closing a factory in Swindon – devastating, not only for its employees, but also the thousands working in the Honda supply chain around the UK.
The Labour Party #LabourParty goes into a flat spin with Monday Mutineers, and responds by pleading for by-elections to paper over the cracks.
These are effects brought on by mounting uncertainty. When a problem shifts from ‘chronic’ to ‘acute’, our defence mechanisms mobilise and decisions are made that may prove not to be best-judged.
Although we have had nearly three years to plan for the Brexit scenarios, it’s only now, when the impact of the move is still so unclear, that many businesses are acting.
As Courier Media #CourierWeekly said today: “We are living in uncertain times. In the UK, trying to understand what Brexit will look like is impossible (even politicians don’t know). So what’s the current reality for small businesses operating in the unknown?”
This is the question room44 is here to help with. Thursday is a great day to start seeing it differently.
With five weeks to go before the clocks go forward (in the UK) and Brexit happens, you do still have time to see your prospects differently.
Innovation (even invention) can happen regardless of Brexit. Treat the macro impact on the trading environment right, and we can show you how to turn it into a positive feature of your development plans.
Another word from #courierweekly. This time from top UK chef Shamil Thakrar: “We’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about this [Brexit]. This time would be better spent improving the proposition for customers – [instead] our mental focus is on damage limitation.’
Make this Thursday DESIGN THINKING THURSDAY.
Click here to download our guide to Seeing it Differently – How to sell innovation into your own business.
Once you see the potential room44 holds, get in touch. There is no time to waste.
Why do companies seem great while the founder is in place and then gradually wither to nothing?
My dad started his jewellery retail business in the late 1960s. He grew it to three shops and planned for his family to succeed him. Then the 1970s came along. Petrol was in short supply. The three-day week hit. Power cuts were a regular feature on high streets and the UK hit a recession. Trade was not so buoyant, but the business kept its head above water.
By the mid-eighties, though, my dad’s shops were in trouble. The market for luxury goods was waning and he didn’t have a successor yet. The systems he’d built into his business relied upon him being there – to anyone else, they were impenetrable.
Shoppers in the jewellery market looked around for cheap alternatives. While Dad held on to his Rolex and Bulova concessions, Timex did new things with LED digital watches and shoppers drifted to lower cost products. After all, a watch didn’t get more accurate the more you spent, especially since electronics were now more reliable than mechanicals.
Empires sprouted out of ‘low cost’. What eventually killed off many traditional high street jewellers – including my dad – wasn’t a recession or a digital watch, but the insurgent response.
Even after Gerald Ratner reduced his multi-million-pound jewellery business to rubble with a single remark about how his products were so cheap – ‘because it’s total crap’ – the market still needed watches and wedding rings. What Dad didn’t do was see the trend and respond to consumer signals. He stuck to his established ways, failed to prepare for a time when they were out of date, and eventually went under.
How does this relate to today?
Let’s have a quick look at another industry that is important to the UK today: automotive.
It’s changing.
The UK Government says within twenty years we’ll have seen the last signs of the current petro-chemical-based car industry. The recognisable car-making supply chain in the UK is founded on mining, smelting, rolling, beating and pressing. Now we’re seeing electric vehicles start to dominate. New cars are getting lighter, using less metal, and new construction methods. Process like laminating, injecting, bonding and moulding. If legislation isn’t sending a wake-up call to the component end of this market, the language of the new market should.
The SME’s lament: the language of change.
Too often, the generation that built a business doesn’t acknowledge when it needs to change radically. More and more SMEs (and others too) are seeing their markets change so quickly that there isn’t time to enjoy a ‘career’. Established SMEs are used to believing that what mum or dad started, the kids can take over. Not necessarily so.
Today, the average lifecycle of a business is around eighteen years, while careers last over thirty. Because demand and technology change markets so quickly, and old habits die hard, what worked even five years ago, can’t be relied upon to work now.
There’s an adage that says:
- The first generation builds it.
- The second generation keeps it.
- The third generation loses it.
This is really unfair on the third generation. The probability is that the first and second generations just don’t set the third up for success by changing soon enough.
If you see any of this in yourself, get in touch. The best time to have made an essential decision may have been twenty years ago. But the next best time is today.
Download our guide to selling innovation into your own business, ‘Seeing it differently’, here.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
History tells us that the likelihood of most companies surviving much beyond the founder’s involvement is slim. Many businesses get bought, absorbed into other companies or simply fail. In fact, according to John Elkann at Fiat, only 49 companies per million last beyond 100 years.
If you were able to audit your own probability of remaining innovative would you?
Unicorns, like Amazon, are big news today, but even they could fail to thrive once the founder is no longer involved. While Jeff Bezos runs Amazon. Larry Page and Sergei Brin guide Google, Howard Shultz is at Starbucks, Mark Zuckerberg sits at the top of Facebook and Yvon Chouinard runs Patagonia the new ‘normal’ looks OK. If they move on, then what?
Put into context, what’s your gut feeling about Uber and AirBnB lasting longer than their unicorn status? Recent market reports about saturation and financial results already suggest that Tim Cook needs to change something in The Valley if Apple is to maintain its unique consumer appeal.
As growth starts to get harder established companies need to consider their consumers more actively: i.e. to put innovation at their core. Often, they do the opposite. The tendency, after the visionary entrepreneur leaves and the money-men take control, is to respond to anticipated competitive threat.
Seeing competition developing and moving to defend a market position with a similar proposition is the sales target-driven, fast-follower route to product development.
Here’s a blog about that ‘Product trends trending. Competitor confirmation bias.‘
Established companies can’t bring themselves to put decision-making responsibility into the hands of one person and so creativity suffers. Whereas owner-operators won’t shy away from the big decision. If something needs doing to protect and grow a business, an owner will step up.
This particular skill is really hard to replace. If the culture that sits around Jeff, Larry and Mark has got the company to where it is, who’s going to do that when they’re gone?
An answer is for the founder to help the team to treat innovation as the driver of strategic decisions: make strategy about consumer experience more than ROI. Get this right and ROI is the net result. Make ROI the driver and consumers will fall away.
Tools are available for this process to be successful. Sometime external moderation helps. We offer to start by running an innovation audit.
Auditing the way your company regards innovation and how it pushes initiatives into the market can be a key indicator of business sustainability.
“Creativity is having new ideas. Innovation is doing new things.” – Theodore Levitt.
Book some time here and I’ll personally talk you though it.
Seeing it differently. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
Product trend-spotting is a bit like birdwatching, or chasing hurricanes. You know they’re out there, but you don’t know when or where they’re going to show up. Patterns from the past may tell us roughly what to expect, but the actual event is harder to predict. So, because the product trend is an unpredictable beast, the conflict between delivering short-term results and innovating is a real one.
Here’s a typical scenario
Company A (CA) works in a consumer segment that has been reliably solid for years. Competitors have come along over time. Some have dropped away; some were bought and consolidated into the CA structure; some stayed on the market and incentivised CA to change up its product range from time to time. This is a reasonably common condition that can be managed through traditional marketing and sales tactics.
Another standard feature of this scenario is the year-on-year growth target. The R&D team works with Marketing to identify new product prospects, and runs research programmes to identify shifts in consumer thinking, usage and attitude, ethnography and so on. Range development is planned out to about 18 months. The budget runs to the end of this year. Beyond that, things are a bit vague.
During the year, the team goes off to trade shows to see what’s going on and what they might design into the product offering. Shows like Packaging Innovations may throw up a new material; consumer health and electronics shows could reveal some new functionality; and consumer experience shows point a way to customer service systems.
R&D get interested in some themes. They start looking to new ideas and working up some PoC projects.
Problem 1
Around mid Q3 the sales budget begins to look tight, so a gradual refocus on the year end begins, and by the time Q4 comes around, the whole company is working on promotional priorities to bring in the results declared to the market / stakeholders / staff bonus scheme. And the longer-term thinking, designed around new ideas picked up from market scanning, falls by the wayside, and the next year starts from point zero – again.
Problem 2
The new ideas picked up from trade shows were already old ideas. The new service and product designers exhibiting at the show, or working in an incubator to generate VC funding, were responding to a market need they saw way before you did. By the time you became aware of the solution, your competitors had seen their own version of your market dynamic.
No matter who picks up the idea, the fact is that it’s going to be a lot older before you research it, position it, brand it, package it, sell it in, deliver it – get it to market. That may still be in time to meet the anticipated consumer need, and you may launch at the same time as the rest of your sector. To make it to market alongside your competition validates the idea in the eyes of management. But the reality is that you’ve only kept up with the market – you haven’t outpaced it.
This is the trendy trend. The one everyone believes because everyone responds at the same time. Safety in numbers.
New ideas
As Theodore Levitt said, “Invention is having new ideas, innovation is doing new things” – not the same things as your competitors. To do this, you must see the future market as a real opportunity, and be confident in your assessment without the need for industry confirmation.
It’s hard for anyone in a corporate structure to be different. You may have seen this quote attributed to Steve Jobs (he didn’t write it), and “Think different” is the essence of the Apple brand to this day:
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
My point is this:
- Please let your creatives create without barriers.
- The end of year result should have been underwritten long before Q3.
- The innovation forecast has more veracity if it features products and services that meet consumer needs that don’t feature in your competition’s line-up.
If your team wants to go to the big trade shows and shop new ideas – ask them whose ideas will be more compelling: yours or everybody else’s? Trends are available for everybody to see. The most valuable ones are not obvious – but they are available.
Seeing it differently is a skill. Seeing it differently enough to be compelling is the skill further refined.
A skill takes time to develop and practice to get right. In the same way that captains captain boats and pilots pilot planes, trend-spotters spot product trends. Don’t underestimate this. It’s not a function you buy from an analyst or a forecaster.
This hard to define, sometimes intuitive, always practised skill comes from experience. It’s not easily written into job specs or recruited for. If you get lucky and find someone who can do it, hang on to them – give them the space to rebel.
Without a round peg and a square hole, the best you can do is follow the trendy product trend. A round peg will seek out the innovative opportunity. If you can’t wait for that person to show up, get in touch.
“Great companies make change for a living.” Michael Schrage.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we we do. Click here to see how we start.
When you call your next assembly, staff meeting or write a directors’ newsletter, stick something with ‘innovation’ in the title and it’s expected to grab the attention and get everyone buzzing.
If it’s nothing else, innovation is definitely a buzz word.
Reactions to new ideas vary. There’s ‘we’ve seen it all before’; there’s ‘it’ll never happen’; and there’s the more quizzical ‘why does anything need to change?’ And if there’s one question we hear more often than any other, it’s ‘why?’
The answer is two-sided.
1 WHY? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
It can be hard to imagine that anything needs to change when the company’s doing well, your product is in demand, and money is rolling in.
Our stance is simple. Great – enjoy it while you can. It can’t last forever.
For CSuite guys trying to reassure stakeholders that their investment is in good hands, this can be an uncomfortable perspective. Even thinking about change tends to give the short-term mind of a VC the wobbles. So, be honest, know more than the VC, value the business and future-proof it.
2 Innovation is a flexible term and doesn’t mean the product needs to change completely.
The option is to keep your core values and innovate around the edges.
Example: toothbrushes have looked like toothbrushes since they were first invented. Yet, bristle technology and timers have been developed and toothpastes now sit in the same aisle alongside mouthwashes, tongue brushes, floss, tape, picks and other dental accessories.
Look at Porsche: that car hasn’t changed in outline since the 1960s, but everything under the skin has – and I mean everything. Tyre technology, traction control, fly-by-wire, injections systems, suspension management, lane change alerts, assisted cruise…
How most products start out is not how they end up. While the core function may remain exactly what it was at the outset, the way that it‘s achieved has changed. There are always ways to enhance or supplement your core business, and room44 helps get the process started. We audit your product range and present some ideas about where the market might be going.
This gives you an opportunity to see customer need from a new perspective and to consider what your team can deliver now, next and later. So, when you next sit down with the team and think about what you may have to do to stay relevant, remember: not everything has to change.
The room44 audit is a cost-efficient way to start innovating without scaring the pants off everybody you discuss innovation with, including your stakeholders and the CSuite.
Start by booking half an hour for a chat. Click here to book time in my diary. It’s free and won’t change anything, except your perception about innovation.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
UK businesses have a little under two months to watch Brexit unfold and try to decide how to move forward. Conventional advice is to watch the pennies and mitigate the risk of getting caught out if and when rules change.
This is brilliant news for innovators.
Your colleagues have been working on Brexit planning for months, and they probably have a pretty good idea of the scenarios that could play out. So, let’s give them something new to do for the next few weeks.
You’ve still got time to dedicate to new and innovative projects:
- Time to build a plan that your company can focus on.
- Time to set a strategic direction that will carry the business into a new phase of growth.
- Time for interesting, creative, transformative work, while the supply chain servicing your current business worries about what new costs Brexit may send your way.
room44 has a unique perspective on business – your business.
We don’t believe the traditional way is the only way.
We don’t believe the only thing you can do is to wait for bad news.
Let us show your team the way to a new plan.
It’s a programme for change-makers. The ROI is clear and precise:
- Drive new products to market faster than ever before
- Increase sales from new products, current and new markets
- Have more ‘hits’ as a % of ideas started
- Balance criticism with market insight
- Develop an enquiring mindset
- Bring future profit forward to today
Traditional thinking vs Future Thinking
The table below compares what a well-known accountancy firm suggests you should do with Brexit looming, and what we say about that. You’ll have done most of what’s suggested in column 1* and now you can invest a few short weeks more profitably?
‘What they say’. | What we say |
Regulation and compliance
Maintaining compliance with changing regulatory frameworks will be crucial to enabling a business to continue to operate and trade across the EU and non-EU countries as they do now. For example, businesses will also need to consider how Brexit might impact their ability to access some tax reliefs and whether insurance provisions will still be appropriate. |
Good, pragmatic, conventional advice, but…
you’ve probably been planning this for ages, and you still can’t be sure you’ve guessed right. Let’s not keep doing the same thing. Now is a perfect time to see things differently. |
Financial planning and management
Forecasting the impact of decisions and price shock uncertainty will be crucial to maintaining business continuity. Equally important will be the ability to access finance to fund suitable working capital requirements. |
No matter how well you are planning and managing your finance…
…your buffer won’t last. You need to grow. Innovation is the answer and it’s within reach, this quarter. |
Trade
Can your supply chain withstand Brexit? Businesses need to consider the potential impact of increased customs duties, greater regulation causing delays to the movement of goods and services, and the effects on cash-flow. Have you made sure your suppliers have also considered this? |
Yes, it can.
Will you be affected by increased charges? Possibly. But if price rises are inevitable, you won’t stop them. See it differently. Now is the time to start. |
People and talent management
Changes to UK immigration policy will have a profound effect and businesses should be thinking about how they will continue to recruit and retain the right people to maintain business continuity and make the most of Brexit opportunities. |
The skills shortage in the UK goes beyond access to EU labour resource.
Let’s focus on what we can influence… …like how we see markets evolving and how you meet developing consumer need. |
Business management
Avoiding disruption to core operations and maintaining business continuity will require careful planning and may involve restructuring the business or acquiring additional entities in different jurisdictions. This may also mean outsourcing key areas to increase efficiency and enable a business to focus resources elsewhere. |
…or be the disruptor.
If your competition isn’t planning to nail you while you’re fussing over Brexit, they’ve missed a trick. Let’s assume they have. This is your big moment. room44 is your weapon of choice. |
- The programme is written.
- It’s adaptable precisely for you.
- We’ve even set some time aside to take on a small number of projects in February.
- The workshop just needs a room and a date.
Your next e-mail is where it starts. Click here over to you and the e-mail is set up for you/
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
In 2016 I represented Team GB as a triathlete. Two and a half years ago.
The spring after, I had a bike crash while training in the Spanish countryside. After leaving skin on the road and taking three months to get back on a bike, I figured I was on the road back to qualification.
The next ride saw me in hospital with a cracked sternum and broken teeth. In any training regime, this takes a while to come back from.
I had a choice: dig in and train again, or find a new way.
It’s not as if Team GB isn’t within reach. Like innovation, anyone can achieve the level of fitness with the commitment to learn what’s required and an investment of time.
But, what’s the best option? Falling off bikes isn’t much fun. It’s not mandatory, of course, but to run a business it helps to have teeth.
So, I decided to sell a race bike, get an e-bike to commute on and spend more time running and swimming.
And now I have options. Hopefully, I’m not going to fall off anything. I can train long and I can give more time over to swimming. The plan is to run a 100km race this summer, to do a 24 hour relay and to enter some 6km and 10km swims.
It’s not giving up.
It’s pivoting away from past glories and focusing on what needs to come next.
Whether I’ll go back to triathlon is something to think about when the time is right but just now, maybe not.
Planning a race strategy and planning an innovation strategy both take a degree of pragmatism and realism.
They both require tenacity, persistence, energy and self-awareness – of ability and of what the business needs. It isn’t that there are bad ideas, just that some ideas need to meet their moment.
room44 has a method of testing ideas, and it’s called the CRiTT test. It considers Commercial, Regulatory, Technical and Time factors. Through this process, we can place ideas on a timeline of probability, and specify the insight needed to keep an eye on market developments – so you know when the time will be right for the ideas that can’t work now.
To find out how we see innovation differently, you can download our free guide by clicking here. It’s no coincidence that our book is called “Seeing it differently – how to sell innovation into your own company.”
Or click here to start a conversation about our CRiTT test.
Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.
You’ve got a great website. You’ve got a switched-on digital team. You’ve got funky ads, and your consumer segment is buzzing every time the brand says something.
But sales aren’t so great, not really. You’re doing OK, but the cost per click is rising, so the budget is stretched and there’s a new competitor on the block…
…which reminds me of a scene from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, where the Messiah says: “Look, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals.”
And the crowd replies, “Yes, we’re all individuals.”
And Brian says, “You’re all different.”
And the crowd replies, “Yes, we are all different.”
And that brings me to PPC
Your team loves the idea of content-based marketing but, frankly, they don’t have the skill or the inclination to write effective content. Your market personas are set in stone because the marketing team says so. So, content creation got farmed out to writers. The contract got you 500 words a week from a Sixth Former who can optimise for search, but doesn’t know one end of your customer from the other.
It hasn’t worked, so your budget’s been diverted into pay-per-click (PPC). Suddenly, you’re first in search for a term you aren’t quite sure you’ve ever heard before, and site traffic is up.
OK, the dwell time is down and the bounce rate is up but they’re coming, right?
Brian: “You’re all individuals.”
Crowd: “Yes, we’re all individuals.”
Brian: “You’re all different.”
Crowd: “Yes, we are all different.”
Single person in the crowd: “I’m not.”
Crowd: “Sshh!”
PPC can keep you at the top of search results. It may pull people in and show visitors what you do – today. What it can’t do is meet your need for differentiation; it won’t future-proof you.
In our blog ‘The business return on intellectual investment in innovation.’ we make the case for stepping back from the routine of daily business. Instead of increasing your online budget, why not consider the root cause? Why not divert a bit of the budget away from PPC and on to creating an innovative view of your business?
room44 is rooted in the belief that innovation, creativity and consumer-centricity set brands apart from their competitors. It takes some compartmentalising at the top of the management pile to trust Marketing to carry on as usual, and take some team members to build out your future vision.
That’s why we’re here:
To introduce a process; to moderate it; to create a roadmap; and to drive the process so you see a plan emerge. A plan that provides you with visibility of a new revenue stream and the strong possibility of generating a return on the investment by:
- Increasing sales through a quicker time to market.
- Increasing sales from having more ‘hits’ as a % of ideas started.
Your choice is to be one of the crowd and do what they do – or be that, while you work on the new innovation.
You can get a copy of our free guide to ‘Seeing it differently – How to sell innovation into your own company‘ by replying to this e-mail address.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
It’s easy, as a business owner, to believe that innovation isn’t your job. Invention, product development, competitiveness, even novelty – but probably not innovation.
In fact, everyone can innovate.
Step back and shake it off
To step back and shake off the pressure of everyday business can seem impossible. As a busy SME operator, you might find the suggestion ridiculous – until it’s not an option and becomes a necessity.
Like you, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we run a business, how it will grow, what we can do to make a step change and keep ahead of the market. Like you, we have issues of resource and cash flow.
We don’t know what we don’t know
We believe, unquestionably, that having a plan that extends to five years (and beyond), that envisages what we’ll look like then, that considers what will be happening in the market to influence what we do, is achievable.
Stepping out of our daily routine and working with somebody else to guide creative thinking works too. External help shines a light on what we don’t know we don’t know. Many times, there are some things we can change, and others we can’t, but why limit the thinking to the short term?
Intellectual investment pays back
Every intellectual investment you make in thinking with an innovative mindset will pay back immediately.
Innovation, per se, is a money shot. It takes time to settle on a great idea that your competition hasn’t had yet, and to get it to market first. But giving yourself regular time and space, so that innovation is even a possibility, is worth every minute.
Once you see things as they could be, not just as they are, the vista opens: the opportunity becomes clearer, the barriers lower and what was just an idea turns into a viable option. Or maybe you just have the idea in the first place.
Here’s an offer:
Let’s call or meet. I’ll ask you three questions and we’ll work out what will make the quickest return on your investment of time, so that you know if ‘innovation’ is what you’ll call whatever you decide to do next.
Before we talk I’ll send you our free guide to “Seeing it differently”.
Here’s the link.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
blog
case studies
We’re collaborators – so we can’t do it alone
Tell us what your company needs.
Call us
+44 (0)20 8123 9018
Book a call
Email us
Find us
Silverstone Park, NN12 8GX