Посты с тэгом: marketing

Innovation Training and More From LinkedIn

Published date: June 22, 2015 в 12:22 pm

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Learn innovation, group creativity, and much more at Lynda.com, a division of LinkedIn. Check out these courses with a 10 day free trial:
1. Business Innovation Fundamentals: Innovation propels companies forward. It’s an unlimited source of new growth and can give businesses a distinct competitive advantage. Learn how to innovate at your own business using Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method based on five techniques that allow you to innovate on demand. Topics include:

  •     What is innovation?
  •     Understanding the myths about creativity and barriers to innovation
  •     Understanding the characteristics of innovative products and services
  •     Using the five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking
  •     Creating new services and processes at work
  •     Running innovation workshops
  •     Involving customers in innovation
  •     Mastering innovative thinking

2. Understanding Consumer Behavior: Consumer behavior is all about the way people buy and use products and services. Understanding consumer behavior can help you be more effective at marketing, design, product development, and every other initiative that impacts your customers. You’ll learn how consumer behaviors such as motivation, appetite for risk, personality, attitude, and perception, as well as feedback from friends and family, impact buying decisions. It discusses how individual consumers as well as organizations buy products and services, and how you can connect with them after a purchase.
3. Managing Team Creativity: Do you ever think, “I’m just not that creative”? You’re not alone. But companies increasingly expect their employees to think about problems in new ways and devise unexpected solutions. The good news is that creativity is not a gift, but a skill that can be developed over time. Learn nine simple tips to boost your creative output at work and learn how to think about the world in a different way, break problems down into manageable parts, divide and conquer a problem, and evaluate ideas systematically.
4. Marketing Fundamentals: Whether you’re rebuilding your marketing program from the ground up or leading the first campaign of your career, this course will help you lay the foundation for a successful marketing endeavor. This course explains marketing’s role in an organization; provides frameworks for analyzing a business, its customers, and its competitors; and shows how to develop a successful marketing strategy and use that strategy to inform everything from pricing to promotion.
You’ll also learn to address tactical challenges and present the plan to get buy-in throughout an organization, from the C-suite to the sales team, as well as use the marketing plan to guide outside agencies and vendors. Finally, you’ll learn how to launch the campaign and measure its performance. Topics include:

  •     Marketing in an organization
  •     Assembling the team
  •     Creating the marketing plan
  •     Analyzing your products, customers, and market
  •     Segmenting customers
  •     Creating a value proposition
  •     Developing a strategy
  •     Setting goals
  •     Setting prices
  •     Using social media
  •     Presenting your plan to leadership

5. Improving Your Judgement: Want to make better decisions at work? In this short course, you’ll learn ways to confront your hardwired cognitive biases, in order to make good decisions and exercise more balanced, sound judgment. Topic include:

  • The base rate bias
  • The confirmation bias
  • The availability bias
  • The hindsight bias
  • The overconfidence bias
  • The sunk cost bias

6. Branding Fundamentals: Get a framework for branding, and learn how to develop and launch a brand and measure its success. This course explains how to define and position a brand and communicate the brand effectively internally, to employees, and externally, via social media, PR, advertising, packaging, and other channels. It explains how to measure brand performance in categories such as authenticity, relevance, differentiation, consistency, presence, and understanding. The course concludes with solid steps for periodically reviewing the brand and its effectiveness, especially when there are significant changes that could impact the brand. Topics include:

  •     Identifying your core values and drivers
  •     Linking your business model to the brand
  •     Identifying customers
  •     Developing your brand promise
  •     Expressing brand identity
  •     Creating a brand book
  •     Expressing brand in social channels, through advertising, and in packaging
  •     Measuring brand performance

7. Writing a Marketing Plan: A solid roadmap makes any marketing effort more successful. This course will help business professionals write and leverage great marketing plans. Learn how to assemble a team to create the plan, analyze an existing market, and break down the plan’s components into focused sections. It offers advice on how best to present and leverage the plan throughout an organization. Topics include:

  •     Planning for a marketing campaign
  •     Writing the situation analysis
  •     Writing the strategic, tactical, and budget sections of the plan
  •     Leveraging your plan

 

Innovation Adjacencies

Published date: March 18, 2009 в 1:39 pm

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Finding adjacent market spaces is an attractive way to grow.  Adjacent markets are not too far away from your core business in terms of channels, technology, price point, brand, etc.  Adjacent means: lying near, neighboring, having a common border, touchable.  Although chasing adjacencies can be distracting, it is a much easier to sell internally.  Adjacencies seem more achievable than far out, ethereal white space opportunities.

Adjacent markets are even more appealing when you apply a systematic innovation method to it.  Giving yourself the gift of novelty in a new market space right next to your own seems like the best of both worlds.  The trick is finding the right adjacencies.

The starting point for thinking about adjacencies is to ask yourself, “Adjacent to what?”  It is much harder to find adjacent spaces when you don’t have a clear understanding of your existing spaces.  For this, I recommend a framework called The Big Picture developed by Professor Christie Nordhielm at The University of Michigan.  The Big Picture outlines four quadrants that, when properly constructed, completely define any market category.  Here is a visual of those quadrants.

Innovation Allocation

Published date: August 19, 2008 в 10:09 am

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Who leads innovation in your company: marketing or R&D?  It’s a trick question, of course.  But it’s a useful question for Fortune 100 companies to consider.  Has your company made a conscious choice of how it “allocates” this leadership role?
Allocating innovation to one group over the other will yield a different business result.  The approaches to innovation by marketing are dramatically different than approaches to innovation by R&D, so the outputs will be dramatically different.  The question becomes: which group will outperform the other?   Technical-driven innovation or marketing-driven innovation?
But there is another layer of complexity.  Allocating innovation resources to one group over the other will also yield a different kind of innovation.  Market-driven innovation speaks to what is salable.  Technology-driven innovation speaks to what is technically possible.  Which group delivers the type of innovation that is best suited to the company’s growth strategy?  Now the decision of who leads innovation becomes even stickier.
This question is a bit like deciding how to allocate your money in an investment portfolio. Which allocation of funds will give you the total return and the type of return (tax advantaged, etc) that you need?  The tempting answer here is to assert innovation leadership should be shared between the two.  Diversify your innovation allocation just as you would diversify your personal investment allocation.  I’m not so sure.  Here’s why.
For a company that knows exactly what its customers need, then it’s just a matter of developing it. A technically-led innovation approach makes the most sense. L’Oreal, for example, does virtually no market research with its customers.  It gathers no “Voice of the Customer.”  Yet it knows exactly what customers need because…..L’Oreal tells them!  In that case, innovation is led by the technical team to deliver the beauty compounds and formulas that will thrill their customers. The innovation approach here is described as “Problem-to-Solution.  Engineers lead this because they excel at solution matching.
A company in the refrigerator space such as GE or Whirlpool needs a different approach.  Breakthrough innovation is more likely to be found in the “Solution-to-Problem” mode, best driven by the commercial marketers who excel at problem matching. The marketer needs to use an approach that relieves them of their preconceived notions about what customers want. They seek to avoid “fixedness” around their current product so they can solution spot more freely.  Only then will they be able to envision new concepts of home refrigeration that never would have emerged with a technical approach.
The best companies maximize their innovation investment return by consciously allocating leadership to either marketing or to R&D.  In the end, innovation is best driven with a team approach but with clear role accountability and direction depending on market conditions and corporate strategy.

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