Jean-Marie Dru on Why Advertising Has to Change: The Thirty Second TV Spot

2008-08-11

I (i.e. Jean-Marie Dru) have always been intrigued by commercials. The agencies I have managed have produced thousands of them. In a thirty-second spot, which averages fifteen frames, simply changing the order of the first few frames can have a radical effect on its overall impact. This fact forces us to understand that in advertising infinite attention to detail is vital, not optional.

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Strategies for Creating New Markets: Choosing Your Target—Time to Market Versus ‘‘Time to Market Acceptance’’

This post is excerpted from Chapter 1 of “Creating and Dominating New Markets by Peter Meyer. The most critical resource that you have is time. Time never moves slowly for a business, and for one that wants to establish a new market, time moves much too quickly. For either the established business or a start-up, time has the highest priority. While most manufacturers focus on time to market, you should not make it your key concern for new markets. The reward is for being the first company to achieve ‘‘time to market acceptance’’

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Formulating the Innovation Strategy: Where in the Value Chain Should We Focus?

This post is excerpted from What Customers Want by Anthony Ulwick. Deciding where in the value chain to look to maximize value creation are important because managers must know for whom they want to create value and who to physically contact in order to get the necessary customer inputs—the metrics they use to define the successful execution of a job. When making these decisions, companies commonly make the following three mistakes, any one of which can derail the innovation process.

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Organization Design: What Support Systems Are Needed?

This post is excerpted from “Designing organizations to compete” by Ian MacMillan and Patricia E Jones. Two questions proposed in this post: “Have necessary support systems been identified?” and “What new skills will be needed to produce the accomplishments?” should be answers in order to adequately address the requirements for a complete design.

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The What and Why of Strategy Innovation: Flexibility of the Discovery Process

2008-08-10

This post is excerpted from “The power of strategy innovation” by Robert E. Johnston Jr. and J. Douglas Bate. This post will looks at five factors that determine whether the scope of a strategy innovation initiative that is right for your company. These five factor include: (i) Size of company; (ii) Size of industry; (iii) Type of industry; (iv) Strategic frontier and (v) Degree of innovation desired

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Customer Metrics: Testing the Net Promoter Metric

This post is excerpted from “Linking Customer Loyalty to Growth” by Timothy L. Keiningham and associates, published in MIT Sloan Management Review. Timothy L. Keiningham and his associates set out to test Reichheld’s claims about NPS. In the absence of peer-reviewed, longitudinal studies about the methodology, they attempted to verify the results by replicating as closely as possible the methodology Reichheld used in his reported research. Does NPS really help companies predict customers’ future loyalty behaviors? Does it link to growth? Is it really better than other commonly used metrics?

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Using Service Blueprinting to Facilitate Innovation at IBM, Marie Stopes and San Francisco Giants

This post is excerpted from “Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation” (by Mary Jo Bitner, Amy L. Ostrom and Felicia N. Morgan). This post will look at how service blueprint has been applied to facilitate the innovation process at IBM, Marie Stopes and San Francisco Giants

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