Category: marketing

Many companies lack a formal product development unit. Instead, ideas are casually pitched to the CEO, and the next steps depend on their mood at the moment. This approach often falls short in delivering consistent innovation, resulting in products and services that closely resemble competitors’ offerings. If you’re a monopoly, your products might become stale over time. To stand out, you need innovative ideas that provide real value to your customers.

The challenge? You may not have the resources to hire a full-time R&D team, and even if you could, you might not trust newcomers to handle the job effectively. So, how can you consistently set your offerings apart from the rest?

Recently, I experimented with an approach outlined by Alex Hormozi in his book, “$100m Offers.” This approach revolves around the customer experience and has yielded promising results. I highly recommend this method, as it takes an inside-out perspective. Let me walk you through the steps I followed, using a local example.

Step 1 – Envision Dream Outcomes

Start by listing the experiences you want your ideal customers to have. Even if some of these experiences seem unattainable, record them. The goal is to capture what your customers truly desire.

Step 2 – Identify Customer Pain Points

Think about the moment a customer considers your offering. What are the hurdles and obstacles preventing them from achieving their desired outcomes? Consider issues that arise during and after using your product or service. For instance, let’s imagine you own the Krispy Kreme franchise in Jamaica. If someone has never tried your donuts, what challenges might they face?

• Traffic around the store’s location is congested.
• There are long lines inside.
• The customer is on a diet.
• They don’t like overly sweet food.
• They had a bad experience with a competitor’s product.

This is just a starting point. Keep going until you’ve identified at least a hundred pain points for your offering. The more you list, the deeper you’ll delve into the customer experience, leading to more valuable insights than traditional surveys.

Step 3 – Propose Solutions for Each Problem

Address each pain point with a solution, expressed in the form of a “How to…” statement. For example, “I am on a diet” could be solved with “How to enjoy our product while sticking to your diet.”

But don’t stop there. Be thorough.

Step 4 – Design Strategies to Implement Solutions

Let your imagination run free in this step. Create offers, or “vehicles,” that correspond to each “How to…” solution from the previous step. Give these vehicles catchy, descriptive names that would grab your customer’s attention. Be comprehensive and include even those you may not intend to provide.

For example, considering the solution “How to enjoy our product while on a diet,” what could you name the corresponding vehicles to attract customers?

• The 47-Calorie Donut Hole
• The Perfect Donut for a Dieter’s Cheat Day (Help dieters plan effective cheat days with this brand.)
• Free Traffic Morsels (Offer complimentary pastries for people stuck in traffic.)
• Our Lowest-Ever Calorie/Fat Gram Donut (Give diet-conscious customers a guilt-free treat.)
• The Unsweet Spicy Donut (Appealing to dieters who prefer savory over sweet.)

This list took me just 10 minutes to create. You don’t need to be exceptionally creative; following this structured process can help you brainstorm at an impressive pace.

Step 5 – Evaluate and Prioritize Solutions

Assign two measures to each vehicle: its value to the customer and the cost to your business to offer it. Use these measures to rank your offers and establish a timeline for implementation.

In conclusion, these lists can jumpstart your innovation. Thanks to Alex Hormozi, these lightweight forms of R&D leverage the everyday experiences you’re already gathering.

This article appeared in an earlier form as a Jamaica Gleaner column.

In your company’s strategic planning activities, you hope to make more than incremental improvements. Instead, your team dreams of brilliant decisions and breakthrough results. But are these a matter of luck? While fortune plays a role, Digicel’s introduction to the mobile telephony market is an example of a new competency: “category design.”

Christopher Lochhead would be proud of Digicel. He belongs to a cohort of content creators who call themselves the “Category Pirates.”

Responsible for several best-selling books, they argue that companies should not compete with other firms in existing categories. Instead, they should create and dominate brand new ones.

While this is far easier said than done, consider the example of Digicel.

Back in early 2001, cell phones in Jamaica were reserved for the privileged few. One would drop off a handset at a Cable and Wireless office for a few days, weeks, or months. The duration was unpredictable, and you needed to visit the building to see if the job was done.

You couldn’t help but notice employees who appeared annoyed at the intrusion. To the company, this was a minor operation…a nuisance. Many believed the local demand for this service was tiny. As a result, cell-phone signals were sporadic, perhaps offered in just enough locations to keep customers from complaining too much.

Looking back, it may seem that Digicel’s subsequent capture of 70% market share showed the power of competition. However, the company was actually doing something else your organization should consider: crafting a new category of service where no competitor existed. Here’s how they did it in spite of considerable risk.

1) New Technology

If Digicel were just another adversary, it would have used the same TDMA/CDMA technology C&W was using. Instead, it made a big bet on an approach Jamaicans had never seen: SIM-based, GSM.

To sign up, people would not only have to buy a phone but also a chip. Consequently, there were more moving parts. With the island’s low literacy rate, some believed people could not manage the sequence of actions required.

2) Island-Wide Coverage

If Digicel were merely competing with C&W, it would have fought to steal away high-value corporate and individual accounts in Upper St. Andrew. After all, they were existing users who could afford another monthly bill.

Instead, Digicel defined a new market. It offered service to some 75%+ of Jamaicans, only excluding the handful in the most remote locations.

This was a revolutionary strategy, and there was no guarantee it would work. Could ordinary people cover the added expense? Would they travel to a store (sometimes far away) to purchase a SIM card? How many were willing to learn how to use this new technology?

3) Customer Non-Care

C&W was well known for the poor service it offered to Caribbean customers. As a former part of the government, it appeared to be staffed with the worst of the former civil servants.

Digicel promised to offer a level of face-to-face service that was unprecedented. In the early days, it clearly delivered a stunning degree of customer care. Also, it undertook reward programs and prizes that gamified the business of mobile telephony for the first time. For several years, they offered cars as gifts for lucky customers during their annual Christmas promotions.

In retrospect, these three moves may seem to be obvious. But back then, it was a huge risk because each one relied on the other. Assumptions were made which could only be proven on launch day.

Yet, it still worked. Other islands in the region were envious as Jamaica rid itself of an unwanted monopoly…within days.

But this was no incremental improvement over C&W’s service…like yet another copycat pan chicken stand on Red Hills Road. It was a radical new strategy that combined fresh elements which had never been introduced to the Caribbean at scale.

Note that we Jamaicans love to “follow-fashion” each other, favoring the apparent safety of large numbers. It drove us to Olint and Cash Plus. Today it’s driving us to build high-end apartments on every available open lot.

It takes courage to bring about a new future, using only imagination and vision. But the good news is that this capability isn’t unique. This power is available to your organization.

But first you must understand that the essence of a breakthrough strategy is not duplication. Or competition. It’s “difference making” in which leaders define a new category in order to unlock fresh value.

Digicel did it, and so can your company in its next strategic planning session. I don’t intend to imply that doing so is easy. But there are proven methods for giving your creativity free rein that could lead to outstanding results.