The Relevance Formula:
Three things your company should focus on to succeed
Are you the type of organization that wants to maintain market relevance? Relevant means increasing shareholder value, fulfilling customer demands and defining you industry's ecosystem. These are bottom line statements for any industry. But the question is, who is actually achieving this?
Apple, Coke, BMW and Disney are part of the top ten list of brands that have know how to remain relevant over the years. It's not always smooth sailing at the top, and competition is stiff, so there must be a special sauce, an algorithm - the X factor.
In the next page you'll get a peak into understanding how your organization can drive relevance. These insights are a culmination of best practices that stem from a decade of award winning trend watching, scenario planner and entrepreneur ship in EMEA.
Relevance has a formula:
Relevance = Brand Equity / (Horizontal Short Term Sprints + Scenario Planning)
The three things companies need to focus on to be prepared for success, and thus relevance is as follows:
Brand equity is your bottom line. Numbers are only part of the story because loyalty and experience represent the strength of your brand's longevity. There is no shortcut to the field research need to understanding your multiple market fragments and the voice of your customers. Yes that's right- multiple; the single serving world went out with the mobile Internet. Even if you don't have a B to C operation the client interface with your product or service is how they know you and why they buy you. Therefore think about how you're training your value added resellers, and is your supply chain lean or are there even metrics in place to measure how you're doing? Intel is a top ten brand but most of us never met Intel, went to an Intel store or even directly purchased a microprocessor. Their commitment to innovation has proved Moore's Law right every 6 months. They haven't slowed down innovation because fast processor power is relevant. Although ubiquitous, their sticker on our computer gives us confidence because of their brand equity; anything else would be second best.
Brand equity is pretty straight forward but, the challenge comes form the bottom half of the Relevance formula.
Horizontal short term sprints comes from agile management also know as SCRUM in software development. This method enables horizontal teams across departments that would otherwise be locked in silos. Are you a large organization and like a Titanic when it comes to quickly adapting to market changes? A rigid silo company organization is often to blame. Your departments don't communicate with each other rather, they compete with each other and generally have a bureaucratic managerial procedure that takes forever. As a result, you're too late and over budget again.
Change management, often co-organized by an outside agency, is a useful investment to enable your organization to break the silos. Your company has talent; so maximize their skills by working in mixed teams across departments. Horizontal is the opposite of vertical, take talent from each department and put them together on specific project teams with real power and decision-making authority. Be critical together, creative, innovate and test. If you're going to fail, fail fast. Pivot and make your next move the right move. Horizontal thinking brings cross-departmental insights and rapid prototyping, which are two important strengths of short-term sprints.
Now lets combine the short term with a long-term position model called Scenario Planning.
What if engineering could communicate as well as sales and marketing? What if you're entire organization had the opportunity to share the company’s vision and road map. You'd boost moral and loyalty throughout your organization in addition to being strategically way ahead of the competition. Scenario Planning is the ultimate group strategy activity that gets your team to share insights and make decisions. This methodology involves picking out the driving forces in your industry and customer segment. Your team will use cut-out pictures and words and place them on axes with four future scenarios. This is a visual method with an arts & crafts feel to it but, be sure, it's serious business.
Originally designed by Shell, another top-ten brand, to bring long terms oil drilling projects into reality. Scenario Planning can be done once a year and is great during the company retreat in-between paintball and wine tasting. It's disarming when you use pictures and story telling in a structured format. You'll learn so much more about your team and even engineers find it easy to share, when they have a picture in their hand.
Focusing on the Relevance Formula is going to drive success. To get started, start talking about it. The first part of change is having the desire to change. You'll need to build consensus and show your team examples. Visit these two prezi’s – ‘Solution Selling’ for agile management and ‘Portal To Your Dreams’ for an example of Scenario Planning method. Staying relevant requires courage at the management level. Staying relevant to the market is a constant internal process and starts with one activator - you.
