The 30 Elements that can Help CEOs Attain Product Nirvana

A management expert inspired by Maslow has identified the elements that make consumer products “valuable” beyond their monetary cost. It took Eric Almquist, a partner at Bain’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice, and his team around four years to establish 30 elements of value.

The 30 Things Customers Really Value

Breakthroughs may be worth pursuing, but most companies benefit more from incremental innovation efforts that add new forms of consumer value to their present products and services. The trick is to determine what elements to add in order to boost the perceived value of your offering. You don’t want to expend resources adding features that consumers don’t care about. While what constitutes “value” can be … [ Read more ]

Taking the Measure of Your Innovation Performance

Many executive teams still treat innovation as a black box, the serendipitous achievement of a few gifted individuals. But our survey found that innovation leaders consistently outperformed laggards on five manageable capability areas. The disparity suggests that innovators rely on a systematic approach, not just on finding people who happen to be innovative.

Putting Social Media to Work

As part of a broader customer engagement strategy, social media can be an effective and cost-efficient marketing, sales, service, insight and retention tool. Our recent survey of more than 3,000 consumers helped to identify what makes social media effective.

Editor’s Note: this paper will likely become dated somewhat quickly, but some of the content seems to me of lasting value.

Economics’ Gift to Marketing

Most new products fail and most high-volume marketing campaigns generate slim returns. Companies trip up when they try to estimate customer demand through weak market research, extrapolation from the past, or plain instinct. Fortunately, the science of discrete choice modeling is a powerful antidote to ignorance. It allows companies to estimate demand and know exactly how and why customers will make decisions, minimizing the business … [ Read more ]