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Don’t worry, this isn’t another article on how to get back in shape after the festive period! Being efficient in how you use your time, resource and budget will always be a hot topic (you can still watch our webinar from last year on this here). So today, Tom Carvell, Principal at STRAT7 Advisory, shares how to get more value from your core product portfolio without costly NPDs by using commercial innovation.
According to Gartner’s 2023 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, 75% of senior marketers are being asked to do more with less. If this rings true for you, I’m sure you agree it doesn’t get any less frustrating the more you hear it!
‘Doing more with your core’ may sound dull compared to its cooler and more edgy cousin, breakthrough innovation, which we’ve talked about previously, but I promise you can be just as rewarding. You can be creative with commercial innovation, update packaging, visuals, claims, positioning, or the sensorials and emotives that affect how the product tastes, smells and feels.
These changes can have a huge impact on how consumers access, perceive and experience your product and brand. But before diving in and brainstorming the changes you could make, you need to make the right strategic decisions about what will add most value for your consumer and business.
Here are three areas to address to ensure that innovation within your core product portfolio adds real value.
1. Optimise the consumer experience
Perceived value hinges on consumer experience of your products and determines how likely customers are to stay loyal to your brand. If you are losing customers through a high churn rate or find that competitors are stealing share through a superior UX, it may be prudent to focus your attention on optimising the product experience.
The best place to start is with ethnography – observing how consumers interact with your products and interrogating them based on your observations. This will identify tensions which are (consciously or unconsciously) holding back satisfaction, as well as shining a light on unmet needs which, if met, could further delight consumers. There may be quick wins by addressing the tensions and needs through changes in the packaging or design, or by enhancing the sensorial experience with new tastes, smells, textures etc.
Pampers demonstrated textbook experience optimisation when they identified nappies were leaking as a result of improper application due to babies wriggling during changing. They added a simple graphic to the inside of the product to help parents align the nappy correctly which helped to improve the changing experience and performance of the product – all without radical design changes. This helped propel Pampers to being the global leader of the category.
2. How to navigate change successfully, both internally and externally, by cracking the code through customer centricity
Businesses can find themselves on the back foot, unsure how to tackle so many challenges at once, and at the mercy of more agile and adaptable competitors. The key is to develop internal capabilities and leverage external expertise to establish a ‘sensory system’ that consistently detects and acts upon market and customer changes.
A successful customer-centric model places the customer at the core of every business decision, with an operating model that supports this. Deep understanding of customer needs, preferences, and behaviours guides product development, marketing strategies, and service offerings.
3. Practical solutions and our structured framework, STRAT7 Path, to evaluate true customer centricity
We have developed a proprietary assessment framework which establishes the level of maturity of the business on its journey to customer centricity.
Organisations that fail the customer centricity test are more likely to face risks, including:
- Loss of customer loyalty, retention, and the risk of negative reputation
- Missed revenue opportunities
- Competitive disadvantage
- Innovation stagnation
- Difficulty in adapting to change
Whereas those that pass the customer centricity test are more likely to reap rewards, including:
- Enhanced customer experiences
- Competitive advantage
- Impactful innovation
- Positive reputation and brand image
Adopting a customer-centric approach should, therefore, be viewed as – at the very least – a survival strategy, and really a way of getting ahead.
Our upcoming webinar looks at how pharma and healthcare companies can adopt a more customer-centric approach, meeting the changing needs of their customers while delivering more value to them.
If this has piqued your interest, join us on Wednesday 22nd November 2023 as we explore and redefine what it means to be customer-centric in the pharma industry.
Join our webinar to find out more
Date: Wednesday 22nd November 2023
Time: 2pm GMT | 9am EST
Hosted by: Björn Dufwenber, Managing Director, STRAT7 Advisory and Lizzie Eckardt, Head of Health & UK Managing Director, STRAT7 Incite.
Guest speaker: We’re delighted to have Lucy Mitchell, Head of Business Intelligence, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, join us to share her journey with customer centricity to date.
