Multi-site innovation - a challenge

One of the biggest challenges when you have innovation development spread through multiple sites is on alignment. You need to make sure that everyone's progression is visible and aligned - from project's objectives to market and technical specs, financial assumptions to in-market reality, from global design to local execution. The truth is, when you have teams that are distant, with different functions, you need to ensure everyone is working together in the same direction - and that's no easy task.

Just a couple of examples that highlight this:

- a company that has its development spread across 2 sites (one focused on consumer that then briefs the technical site that actually develops the product) soon discovered both of them were not aligned. The technical site was actually working on projects the consumer team had already scrapped.

- it is frequent that in-market teams innovation cases don't reflect the design teams assumptions, especially in areas like net price, as they simply are unaware of them.

Frequent communication between all sites, both formal and informal, is part of the solution. But it shouldn't be the only. The fact is, it is not enough - and that's a hard lesson for single site innovation companies when they grow bigger. You need to go beyond that.

You need to establish a tool that drives alignment. A tool that clearly states the current state of development at multiple levels - stating clearly its objectives, financial and non-financial targets, consumer and costumer requirements and expectations, competitive considerations, technical development. That is very up-front about where the project is in terms of its development stage and highlights next steps and challenges ahead. A tool that is accessed, commented and updated by the different teams at their multiple sites and can, thus, reflect and spread reality throughout all sites. 

Though this may seem obvious to bigger multinationals and operating framework experts, many times, the importance of this is not well understood by smaller companies that want to expand rapidly or even by teams that don't understand how key updated and spread out information is. Because, the truth is, this is a crucial step (though not the only one) to help multi-sited innovation to be successful. So, if you are working on innovation development that is spread across multiple sites, take my word, and start working on this tool.

Pick up the right measures of success

A recent article in Harvard Business Review pointed out a key problem - too often, many businesses pick up the wrong measures. That means, they evaluate their success and monitor their strategy deployment through the wrong eyes. And this is as true for finance as for in-market performance. Too often, we see "number of consumers using our product" objectives set through "market share" (instead of "penetration"), "sales growth" measuring "equity strength" or brand awareness mixed with communication awareness. So, just remember the mantra of that HBS article:

1) Define your objectives

2) Assess drivers of value, based on the understanding of cause and effect in your market

3) What does it need to be done to improve performance on those value drivers?

4) Monitor regularly and adjust adequately

Take advantage of the situation

If you have a very well defined brand, with a very clear positioning, mission and benefits in it's target consumers heads, you can do something amazing - you can take advantage of tactical opportunities to surf on their social surge. A good example is what Axe / Lynx is doing in Hong Kong, saying that it will help you win 65 Million USD by helping you claim and convert a multimillionaire's daughter to heterosexuality. Isn't this genius like?

http://mashable.com/2012/10/17/lynx-facebook-gay-woman-straight/

Pay what you want

Imagine that you have a restaurant and you decide you will not have prices. Consumers will go, eat an will pay what they want. What do you think will happen? Will most of them leave and pay you nothing?

No! According to an article published in this month's Harvard Business Review, only 0.5% of patrons have eaten free (on a 2 years observations done at a self-service Pakistani restaurant in Vienna). The average pay per meal has been around €5 (which seems is enough to cover costs) and daily traffic went up more than 50%. 

So, is this a viable strategy? Well... we know it covers operational costs, but we have no idea about this strategy's profitability... 

The best brand advocates

I was reading a post by Richard Branson in his LinkedIn blog, when I stumbled upon one of the biggest (and almost forgotten) truths on marketing - the best brand advocates are its staff. They are the ones who know more about the products (and its competitors), who lived it daily, who can strongly relate it to consumer experiences, who can recommend it the most to other consumers (being it friends, relatives, anonymous people on the streets), who can defend them in countless arguments wherever they are in the most absurd situations. So, make sure they understand your brand, products, strategy, potential. Make sure they love and live the brand. Make them take pride in working for such a brand. Engaged employees are one of your best marketing assets!

Creativity and backlashes

When someone does something out of normal, it must prepared for positive reactions (that will mostly be silent) and negative (that will be loud!). The trick, is not only to understand the end game of them (did we generate more positive than negative impact) but also to manage them - meaning to boost your positive and to actually minimize your negative. 

A good example is the latest activation from Cacharel - "Searching for Diana. It was the ("true"...) story of this average guy that met the girl of his dreams during a demonstration and was searching for her throughout Lisbon. Besides massive social media exposure (Facebook, Twitter,...), the campaign actually bridged to newspapers and TV (it had massive exposure right in prime time!). But then, yesterday, the story exploded - it was a fake, an advertising campaign. It received a strong backlash from consumers that felt cheated and it received even more media attention than before - but negative one...

Now, there are a few lessons to take out from this:

- enhance your positive reception - when L'Oreal explains that this activation matches the newest Cacharel perfume campaign communication idea, I get. But I need to be explained. Nothing in the campaign actually hinted at Cacharel. Branding connection was low and too subtle - you had to actually now this connection existed to bridge it to this new perfume. So, the positive PR you could get was not reverting to the brand. You could improve this a lot by using a couple of simple techniques.

- attention to details - the story was blown over by someone that spotted that... the Facebook page that "the in-love guy" created to search for Diana had actually been created 3 days prior to the demonstration where they "met". Blunder! This has put the activation out of the brand's control.

- control the negative PR - brands need to understand that creative and different activations might generate negative reactions - specially the ones that mess up with strong human feelings like love, solidarity, compassion, like this one. Everyone fell for the poor guy searching for this girl - every guy has a "I should have gone there I and get that girl's phone number" situation and every girl wants to be desired by a stranger (especially if it is a nice and handsome guy, like this one). It is slice of life! So, brands need to understand the risks of these campaigns - and they should have plans. Plans for "this will might go wrong anytime if this is exposed ahead of time". You need to have your PR contacts ready to control and minimize this negative exposure, so that people accept this was an ad stunt. 

More than minimize negative exposure, and if it is well done, the end of this campaign (even if ahead of the planned) should be about bridging to the brand's communication core. That their core target has this romance dream, and that Cacharel keeps their dreams alive. If you shatter them by making this (great) campaign look a corporate trick, then, you are losing your "share of heart" of consumers. So, there is a lot to learn from this one - keep an eye on it.

http://www.publico.pt/Sociedade/afinal-a-procura-de-diana-foi-uma-estrategia-publicitaria-1565524

iOS6 Maps

Everybody is now talking that Apple messed up with iOS6 Maps - moving out Google Maps and replacing them by an Apple-owned app. And they are right - the number of flaws in that feature transformed Apple (for the first time ever) in joke material (everybody heard of the new airports that popped up around the world). 

But the fact is that Apple needed to launch its own maps - and for a very simple reason. Maps are at the core of consumer experience in mobile business. As the article that I am linking below puts it, "maps are where the physical intersects the digital" in the mobile market. Consumers actively look for maps that allow them to interact with the real world around them - and they will keep doing so, as companies are able to expand features and information based on geo-location. An important dimension to that will be indoor mapping, that will actually allow navigating through shopping malls, museums, stores,...

Thus, and though already crucial, maps are becoming more and more a core application to future development of consumer experiences. And a company that wants to lead consumer experiences and lifes cannot stay away from it. It is as simple as so.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/forrester/2012/09/21/why-apple-had-to-do-maps-a-mobile-engagement-analysis/