Seeideas Inc. - Online Actions

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What Your Subscription Includes
This online publication addresses important topics with action steps, focused on the ingredients for a well planned, successful customer-driven process.

When you subscribe, you will receive: 1. Free access to past and bonus issues to help build your knowledge of customer-driven initiatives, 2. Free future seminar to explore important topics on customer-driven initiatives and 3. Free Online Analysis to provide you with a strategic assessment of your approach to customer-driven initiatives.

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Sample E-Newsletter

When Your Best Isn’t Good Enough.
This e-newsletter relates to the Seeideas® customer-driven process Objective highlighted/underlined below.

Objectives

Support prudent investment decision-making on your initiatives

Enable shortest time-to-market on your initiatives with respect to competition

Empower best initiatives with respect to competition

Phases

	Identify opportunities for initiatives within your marketplace
	Develop initiatives to requirements of your customers
	Evaluate marketplace receptivity to your initiatives
	Activate production and marketing plans for launch of your initiatives
	Search for improvements in your initiatives and restart process

Situation
Let’s assume that you were training for your community’s 5K mini marathon, that you’re a fairly competitive person and that you intend to place in the top 25% of your age bracket. In preparation for this event, several times before the race, you hit the road and run a training course comparable to the upcoming race. Each time you finish the practice course your time improves by a good margin. So, you begin to feel good about your progress and your prospects for finishing reasonably well in the race.

The only problem is, you have no idea to what extent the other runners have trained and whether or not your time will hold up against theirs. While there’s nothing wrong with personal improvement goals, remember, you entered this race to do well against your competitors.

Race day comes and you give a heroic effort. As the times are posted, you recognize that, while your time is your personal best, it placed you in the bottom 25%, not the top 25%! In your post-race discussions with the other runners, you hear stories about training programs that were much more rigorous than yours. In essence, you realize that your training and self-evaluation was done in a vacuum without any competitive standards or benchmarks, which led you to an incorrect or biased view of how well you’d do in the race.

Many business decisions, especially those related to new and/or improved products/services, are made without the benefit of a serious evaluation of competitive marketplace offerings. Here are several Action Steps that will help ensure that your best efforts and decisions will be good enough because they will be developed in a competitive context.

Action Steps

		*Short Term (within 6 months)*
	1.	Form a core competitive assessment team of about five people with a three-year commitment to build a reservoir/library of information and perspective on your competitors.
	2.	Identify your top ten competitors, their most important products/services and what you believe to be their unique critical strengths and weaknesses.
	3.	Acquire the products of these competitors or in the case of service companies, “mystery shop” them and display these samples and findings in an area where they can be critiqued and discussed.
		*Intermediate Term (within 1 year)*
	4.	Reverse engineer or break down the components of your competitors’ products to fully understand how your products/services technically compare to theirs.
	5.	Institute a marketing research study among a moderate to large sample of customers served by your company and your competitors to map out the performance of your products/services and your competitors on issues of importance to customers.
		*Long Term (within 3 years)*
	6.	Develop and implement an innovation process that is literally driven by customer requirements, in other words allow the “voice of your customer” to inspire your future developments.
	7.	Train every person in your organization on how to be part of a bigger, informal investigative team that can add to your competitive intelligence gathering process.

Takeaways
Many organizations succeed because of an in-depth understanding of their competitors. Some do this in small, local geographical markets and others do it on a global basis. In either case, it’s important to build a holistic view of your competitors – who are they, what are their priorities, where are they likely to move next, when will they make their next move and why are they doing it?

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If you would like to discuss any of this information, please call me at (513) 459-7479 or email me at sschwandner@seeideas.com.

Sincerely,

Steve Schwandner President