Entries from May 2009 ↓

More on strategy from the week of May 25, 2009…

• We had a good Twitter conversation this past week on Balanced Scorecards.
• David Locke and I had a conversation offline to try and sort through the definition of tactic after I tried to dispel the myth that just because your task is big, does not make it strategic or even more strategic than other tasks. The one definition of a tactic that we liked, pulled from the above mentioned LinkedIn answer was the following, “tactics are the real-time adjustments and decisions you have to make during execution of your strategy” courtesy of Allan Neil.

Image Source: LinkedIn.com

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post.

A world wide rave: What the heck is that?

A World Wide Rave is when people around the world are talking about you, your company, and your products. Whether you’re located in San Francisco, Dubai, or Reykjavík, it’s when global communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web. It’s when online buzz drives buyers to your virtual doorstep. And it’s when tons of fans visit your Web site and your blog because they genuinely want to be there.

This book challenges you, with highly effective examples, to think about the ways you engage your buyers. By using blogs, e-books, videos, Twitter, Facebook, podcasts and any other online medium you are able to connect with your buyers in ways that weren’t possible before, but more importantly using the tools that they are using today. The evidence shows that if you understand their problems, tell them stories, and enable them to share those stories people will choose to do business with you.

There are six rules to creating a ‘world wide rave’ and they are:

1. Nobody cares about your products (except you)
2. No coercion required
3. Lose Control
4. Put Down Roots
5. Create Triggers to Encourage People to Share
6. Point the World to your Virtual Doorstep

I highly recommend you read the book to learn more about these six rules, but the gist of them is to stop talking about you, be open, freely share, have an online profile, be prepared to fail and have an online home.

One final point, Scott makes a great case that creating a ‘world wide rave’ will not happen overnight. You have to submerse yourself in understanding your buyer persona, their problems and start sharing. As product managers we already know that, but it is always nice to read additional reasons to reinforce that.

Now the challenge is adding at least two new activities, either starting a blog (targeted towards your buyers) or writing an e-book to your roadmap.

About the Author
David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of five books including World Wide Rave, The New Rules of Marketing & PR and Tuned In (with Craig Stull and Phil Myers). Check out his blog Web Ink Now and follow him on Twitter @dmscott.

Image source: worldwiderave.com

The next question is what else can I do that will make me strategic? There are a few topics that fall out of this, but something that I wish was a bigger part of our portfolio of regular activities is writing call reports. Pragmatic Marketing’s recent survey reports that somewhere between 25-35% of product management people visit customer sites. Sometimes you will hear people talk about customer visits or trip reports, but in this case I am referring to the output from a customer visit. Call reports and customer visits work together. Also, the act of writing it down, as a call report, is much more important that actually going on the visit.

Often you will find the content of a call report consists of the details from a customer visit by sales or account managers who list who was visited, the date, the reason for visit, what was discussed, any actions required and anything else that needs to be reported. I like to file these under ‘Good to know.’ From a strategy perspective, they are hardly actionable.

The reality is you want information that supports your strategy (or helps you define it). Your strategy will consist of things you need to build (among many other things) and to support the development of those solutions you want observed and documented scenarios of the way people work or live. Not just anybody though, potential customers. Bear in mind, and this is important, you want to know WHY (i.e. the impact of doing or not doing). At this point you aren’t thinking solution, you aren’t constrained by product and you have an open unconstrained view into what and why they do the things they do. The key to all of this is observation.

Call reports alone, can be sufficient to justify your strategy if you talk to enough of the right people. Also, call reports will be a primary method of information gathering in your market sensing program.

Here are a couple additional resources on customer visits:

• Understanding Market Needs Through Customer Visits By Gopal Shenoy (via Pragmatic Marketing).
• Avoid excuses for not conducting customer visits by Jeff Lash

Image source: Positive Psychology News Daily

First, the red and blue ocean concept is very simple. Red oceans are well known and typically crowded with competitors where as blue oceans represent a potentially new market with a real opportunity and no competitors (we know there are always competitors).

The book was organized into two parts, first discovering a blue ocean and the second formulating a blue ocean strategy. In the simplest summary, maybe too simple, discovering a blue ocean seems to consist of finding new opportunities within your market that extend your offering (i.e. product, feature, solution, etc.) beyond where solutions exist today. The take-away from this is that you need to be open to (and probably exclusively focused on) the possibility that the market needs do not exist today and some market sensing will need to be executed. Basically, I like to spell ‘blue ocean’ like this I-N-N-O-V-A-T-I-O-N . That being said, the first section offered some interesting tools and suggestion for analyzing your market and contrasting your offering with your competitors to identify where you are successful and potentially competing to your own red ocean death. See footnote [1] for more information on those tools. The second part of this book runs through some basic strategy concepts for formulating the strategy.

One term I really liked from the book was ‘value innovation’. They define ‘value innovation’ as a process that focuses on value creation. Not rocket science but that extra word, value, really helps keep you focused on your innovation, now value innovation, activities.

Overall, this was a decent read. I picked up some interesting new terms and some best-practices on uncovering potential opportunities. I also learned bits and pieces about sequencing strategy (utility, price [2], cost and adoption), overcoming organizational hurdles (leadership) and building execution (fair process[3]) into your strategy.

[1] If you are interested in another product management related review – including working examples of the tools, please read Personas Make Blue Ocean Strategy Proactive on the Tyner Blain blog.

[2] Interesting discussion in the book about determining target price and then using that to shape the cost. Not vice-versa.

[3] Fair process builds execution into strategy by creating people’s buy-in up front.

Image source: Amazon.com, Inc.