Marketing Malpractice is Preventable According to researchers at John Hopkins University, the biggest mistake doctors make is misdiagnosing patient problems. It’s estimated that misdiagnosing errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 people each year and resulted in nearly $39 billion in malpractice claims paid out from 1986 – 2010. While “misdiagnoses …
Keeping the End in Mind I recently flipped through an old copy of the book with the understated title, “Successful Large Account Management,” by Miller, Heiman with Tuleja. The opening to the chapter on setting strategic goals is so good and relevant to creating value for customers, I wanted to reprint it here verbatim.
“Just do it.” I love this Nike slogan. It conveys a can-do attitude that encourages me to stop procrastinating, get off the couch, and take action! But, just do what, exactly? Take what action? If you want to drive growth through innovation, how do you know where to focus and what to do? There a lot of companies “just doing it” and most of them are just failing! In many cases, entrepreneurs are wasting time and money pursuing the flawed approach of launching a minimally viable product and “failing faster” before they have clarified the market need. This is a huge waste of time if you don’t know what the customer is trying to get done first. Let’s take a look at how Nike is winning and what we can learn from them.
Many entrepreneurs and large companies have mistakenly assumed that Thomas Edison believed in failing faster to learn what customers want. Not true! He learned the folly of this approach early in his career. His thousands of experiments were done only after he validated the customers’ needs. In the 2nd half of an interview with Forbes, Urko addresses this misunderstanding
Urko’s Forbes Interview #1: How to Validate a Market (First published in Forbes, Jan 8, 2013, by Gregg Fairbrothers and Catalina Gorla, Contributing Writers) We’ve been talking about market validation. So far we’ve argued why it’s really important and the value it can bring. But how do you do it? This week we spoke with …
Eric Reis has created a movement with the publication of his book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Based on his experience with consumer software, he encourages entrepreneurs to launch “minimally viable products,” run as many “experiments” with these minimally viable products as is possible to accelerate learning about what customers want, and thereby “pivot” to a value proposition that customers want. It sounds quite compelling until you realize that this entire approach is based on one of the great myths about innovation: that customers have latent unarticulated needs, needs that they cannot tell us.
People use metaphors to understand complex phenomena. Metaphors help us to quickly grasp the nature of something elusive. Sports provide us with many excellent metaphors for business and life such as, when we’re trying to anticipate market trends, we might tell a colleague “Skate to where the puck will be.” Or to encourage a salesperson to make more calls, we say “You can’t score if you don’t shoot.”
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