Above the Noise
Distilling insights and key lessons from new concepts and current events. In this post, our partner, Ying Li, explains how CMOs can make implementation friendly innovation plans.
Innovation is hard. Trying to predict the surprising ways your customers’ needs evolve and what you can supply profitably is difficult at best. Even if you are correct, company veterans have seen many flashy presentations materialize to nothing. Buy in is low, and with low buy in, innovation’s low chance of success quickly approaches zero.
Your job as an innovation manager or Chief Marketing Officer is to balance a) the creativity of your young innovation team and b) the realities of your supply and distribution network to create an innovation plan with sound business logic, but with enough excitement to mobilize the organization.
Your problem is that innovation is, by definition, a brand-new thing. Your team has no way of knowing how to quantify what will happen because neither they nor anyone else has seen it. This is where a group like Quantum Logik proves valuable. We have deep experience making the qualitative quantitative through our extensive work in making sense out of low data environments across innovation, finance, supply chain, and marketing. We call upon this experience to help you build your implementation plans, leveraging innovative ideas, and using your business logic resulting in organizational buy-in and efficient capture of new growth opportunities.
Demonstrating this, we present a recent client success story below:
Our client, a CMO, came to us with a problem. Her young innovation team, while creative, was having trouble putting together a believable implementation plan. Their forecasts contradicted each other. Numbers grew way too fast. It just did not pass the smell test. She knew she could not present to her operational colleagues.
Her problem boiled down to these major issues:
- Traditional prediction methods like time-series and regressions rely on historical data to extend linear trends into the future. These are not useful as little to no historical data exists for the innovation opportunities to extract patterns
- Top down methods such as Total addressable market (TAM) methods calculate target consumers with broad assumptions. It’s hard to convince senior operational leadership with the vague understanding of the opportunity these methods produce.
She turned to Quantum Logik Consulting as she knew of our experience accurately sizing white space opportunities, helping clients prioritize bets and mobilize the appropriate resources.
QLC’s Solution
The solution was to combine both top-down and bottom-up processes (Figure 2, below) into what we call a Dynamic Segments Occasions model (DSOM). DSOM utilizes macro-level trends and micro-level (occasions) data to jointly determine potential. In this case, S refers to the different segments of the consumers, whose behavior in the user occasions (O) are viewed in a dynamic (D) way to capture the size of the category and platform potential.
By applying the DSOM, QLC helped the client:
- Identify the macro and consumer trends her innovation was addressing
- Size the opportunities presented by the underlying dynamics of segment and occasion change
- And most importantly, build a believable implementation plan, salvaging the hard work of her innovation team.
If this resonates with you across any part of your business, please reach out Ying Li, our DSOM expert at yli@quantumlogik.com