Let a great product do the talking for you, both digitally and otherwise

A great product does get noticed by customers. Earlier, it was through word of mouth publicity and regular ads. With the world soon becoming digital, information started spreading so rapidly that great products started selling rapidly all over the world.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson once stated with style, "Marketing is for companies that have sucky products." While we wouldn't go quite that far, we agree that having a great product does a lot of your marketing for you.

One must invest time in understanding what the users are looking for and then build it accordingly.

The quality of your product can lead to viral growth, which means you can scale back some of your marketing efforts. A great example of this is DropBox. DropBox did almost no marketing in its initial stages, instead relying on a great product to inspire word-of-mouth recommendations and viral growth. And it worked.

If you do have a great product and you can get it in the hands of a few key influencers, you might be able to leverage off this viral growth. Just remember that companies like DropBox are edge cases. Even companies with fantastic products have poured resources into marketing. For most companies, viral growth will supplement traditional marketing tactics, not replace them. We do need to change our approach also.

Three powerful forces:

1.     There is continuous change in customers’ needs, priorities, and preferences, much more than ever before.

2.     There is global innovation: digitization tools enable an exponential increase in the speed of organizations’ ability to harness and apply new innovative technologies to bring products and services to the market faster, aligning them with evolving customer needs. In the digital world, on a global scale, people at any level can collaborate with colleagues, partners, or customers anywhere in the world to create better ways to do their work,  co-create mutual value products and services that people value and cherish.

3.     Global markets and competition: the pace of communication and ability to share information globally across customers and organizations means that new customer needs, new technologies, and new competitors can appear at anytime from anywhere in the world.

Shifting leadership styles to adapt, grow and innovate

What is crucial to success is for the organization to develop the ability and the capacity to shift and target what is needed in the organizational context, is to adapt and grow and deliver organizational strategic objectives. This is achieved by understanding the operating mindsets, and how they impact on the current organizational culture.

We of course need to understand and define processes too.

Processes to enable innovation in a Digital World

Earlier, engineering was totally manual but it is automated now.

With the entry of even more automation in the digital world, we need to transform how we operate, from one end of the value chain to the other. There have been breakthroughs in many areas such as communications technology, analytics, Big Data and the Internet of Things.

These have ushered in an entirely new set of tools to generate more value for customers. Essentially, the goal of reengineering has notchanged, but the means have become significantly more powerful.

For instance, companies have automated specific manual tasks, such as factory work or office functions. For example, Uber, manages more than 1 million drivers around the world with software that allocates work and provides feedback on how the work was performed. Similarly, cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services have automated the provisioning of services, allowing end users to bypass company IT departments and sign up for software services with a credit card.

The processes we suggest are

·         Make your functioning totally democratic. Share your functioning  We need to reengineer the entire process and use an Agile development process, in which the company deploys a solution quickly and uses a disciplined test-and-learn approach to define the model that works across functions. The primary objective should to be to create processes that are simple, intelligent, shared, automated and real time.

·         Simple does not mean foolish. The processes should be intelligent too. Fortunately, digital tools enable companies to gather data in vast quantities, We need to use them well. Something as basic as a feedback form should be shared with everyone so that the right steps could be taken to correct it.

·         Keep a person (human) responsible for each process though everything could be automated. Essentially, this is required as one cannot take a computer or a digital device to task.

·         Ensure real time proceses function quickly. For instance, if someone has purchased a product, they should definitely hear quickly, in fact, instantly from you. The process should be designed for this.

Checklist

a.       Making a list of stakeholders who are always help informed

b.      Ensuring person in charge of each process

c.       Devices and platforms catered to, for each process

d.      Person to whom issue should be escalated to, if there is an issue

e.       A report of the actions taken to resolve all glitches, if any.

f.        Learning from all past mistakes so that it is never repeated.

In sum

With all of this, even if there is an issue with your product, it can be addressed quickly and we would then have everything in control. Even mistakes when addressed could improve our product and in fact improve it. Improvisation in fact always happens only after failures. So, even failures could be a stepping stone to success.

For, it is often said that nothing fails when we wish to correct it. A good product is therefore one which keeps its ears open through its team. Digital platforms do make it possible for us to implement this. Hence, we definitely need to be visible on all social media platforms to enable our customers, both potential and current to reach us. This shall surely make it a win win situation for us and our clients. This is what defines a good, in fact great product.