The Hindu Business Line : DIG out the customers!

Pursuit of profitable business growth is a legitimate goal. But should you be pressing `traditional hot buttons'? Such as: "refining market research, becoming customer-centric, guiding customers to plumb their psyches, co-creating value with customers, integrating customers into your value chain, positioning more distinctly, or sharpening your new product development process".

No, you can instead `re-see' your customers in entirely new ways and discover the biggest opportunities that are `right in front of you,' advises Erich Joachimsthaler in Hidden in Plain Sight, from Harvard Business School Press (www.HBSPress.org) . He bemoans that the biggest, best, brightest, and most successful opportunities for innovation and growth are right here, in front of us; only, we often can't see them or don't act on them.

To those who want to correct their vision, the author offers the DIG model, a framework called the demand-first innovation and growth. "Demand-first because it provides companies with an unbiased, untainted view and an outside-in perspective of the demand opportunities before their own offerings are taken into consideration."

DIG has three parts — the demand landscape, the opportunity space, and the strategic blueprint. The `landscape' study is important because people buy products and services as "means to get things done or to spend time their way, to enjoy and experience life." Explore, therefore, people's quests beyond needs and wants, advises Joachimsthaler. He cites a Punjabi proverb thus: "If you have to see heaven, you have to die yourself."

Experience and watching are critical to map the landscape, as "people cannot tell us what they do not know and have not experienced." Try out `observational, anthropological, and ethnographic methods or self-reports' to gather data, as in the following examples: "Nokia employees spend a month in the offices of mobile phone users. Microsoft shadows office workers around their use of the Microsoft Office Suite. GE Healthcare observes physicians in the operating room... "

Reframing the opportunity space, the second part of DIG demands the use of "conceptual lenses and structured innovative-thinking tools that deliberately force perspectives from different angles." Thus, you would be able to "cleanse the doors of perception and lift the smokescreen."

P&G, for example, saw opportunity in the pet-care sector and acquired the Iams brand, about five years ago. The company broadened the distribution of the products `beyond exclusive pet stores', and is thinking of more. Perhaps, Iams-branded MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) for dogs and cats, and insurance for pets, postulates the author. "On the horizon could be Iams-branded grooming parlours, bedding, pet clothing, and travel accessories."

The third part of DIG involves the formulation of the strategic blueprint for pursuing the new opportunities the company has discovered. "The blueprint forces a company to think in terms of not only how to stand out (from competitors) but how to fit in (to people's lives) and how to realise customer advantage."

Among the `parting guidelines' that Joachimsthaler wraps his book with are insights from winners. Embed innovation and growth agenda into your company's DNA, he exhorts. GE, for instance, launched `imagination breakthroughs' in October 2003, and demanded its business unit leaders "to generate five breakthrough ideas, each of which could be credibly supposed to pack a potential of generating $100 million in new organic revenue for the firm."

A book you may like to keep hidden... from your rivals!

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

D. Murali