Tag Archives: business thinking

February 26, 2016 · 9:35 am

We’re All Termites

This Foodie Friday, let’s talk about eating wood.  There have been a whole host of articles written about it.  We all do it,  unknowingly most of the time.  Oh, you’ll not find “wood” on any label, but you will for sure find “cellulose” or some variant thereof.  As The Street explained it:

Cellulose is virgin wood pulp that has been processed and manufactured to different lengths for functionality, though the use of it and its variant forms (cellulose gum, powdered cellulose, microcrystalline cellulose, etc.) is deemed safe for human consumption, according to the FDA.

Don’t we all need a little more fiber in our diets?  It’s in shredded cheeses, ice cream, and pretty much any “low fat” version of your favorite food.  To my knowledge, it doesn’t lead to an insatiable urge to gnaw on a table leg.  I think the real issue is one from which all of us can learn, and it’s our old friend transparency.
Sure, it says cellulose on the label, but when it also says “natural” or even “organic”, I think that there is an expectation that the product is made from the same sort of stuff that you might find laying around your kitchen.  It’s disappointing (or worse) when people hear that wood fiber is being used as a filler to make the product cheaper to produce among other things. Of course, that’s one of the trade-offs that consumers never think about.  Do you want a less expensive, potentially better for you product or do you want it to cost more but be made from the same ingredients you’d buy at the market to make it yourself?

There are tradeoffs like that one in a number of areas.  Do you want a secure phone, safe from hackers, or do you want terrorists to be able to plot without governmental monitoring? Any trade-off involves a sacrifice that must be made to get a certain product or experience. To me, it isn’t so much about what’s being sacrificed as much as consumers aren’t helped to understand how these conscious choices affect them. I think we can all do better in helping them to do so.

I don’t suspect any of us is going to sit down with a nice bowl of wood fiber anytime soon, but I bet you might read the label a little more carefully on your next bowl of whatever.

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , ,

February 25, 2016 · 1:28 pm

Retention And Acquisition

Where do you come out on the retention vs. acquisition question? What I mean is do you think it’s more of an imperative to keep your current customers happy (retention) or to keep filling the revenue pipeline with new customers (acquisition)? A study from the Forbes Insights folks says that: 

42% of respondents said that expanding their customer base was an important strategic priority for their company. And, nearly one-third of executives worldwide said that retaining their existing customer base was a priority.

This is from a study called “Mastering Revenue Lifecycle Management: Customer Engagement Leads to Competitive Advantage,” which talks about a systemic approach to maximizing revenue throughout the lifetime of the customer relationship. On the surface, this struck me as strange since I’ve always felt it was more cost effective and easier to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one. The Ipsos folks say that I’m off base – the whole “it costs 5x more to find a new customer” is a myth.

Maybe it has to do with how “old” a company is.  The study found that more than 70 percent of respondents from mature companies believe that enhancing customer loyalty is their organization’s primary goal, as opposed 39 percent of less mature companies.  That would make sense since one would expect that the longer a company has been in business, the larger a customer base it has.

Maybe I’m just partial to the “fewer but deeper” relationships thinking, but I fall into the retention school with respect to priorities.  Let me repeat the question with which we began: where do you come out on the retention vs. acquisition question?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , ,

February 11, 2016 · 10:33 am

The Pony

You’ve probably heard the old joke about the kid and the pile of horse manure.  There are many variants, but the basic story is that a kid is digging through a huge pile of horse manure.  When he is asked why his response is “with this much manure, there has to be a pony in here somewhere.”  It’s a story a use to help clients understand the nature of data.  Any of us who are in business see more and more of it each day.  In fact, we’re probably setting up systems to provide more of it to us as well.  The unfortunate truth is that most of it is…well…manure.

a Shetland Pony. Français : Un poné (Shetland).

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We’re after the pony, or at least we should be.  The pony is the actionable insights that are contained within the data and not the accumulation of data itself,  It does take a lot of digging, and that digging can begin only after we set up systems to gather and to organize the flood of data.  Knowing that website traffic grew as measured by session count tells you very little.  Understanding how it grew or if that growth was because a bunch of referrer spammers hit it gives you actionable information (update the spam filters!). Knowing that your store sales were up 5% without understanding that you’ve lost market share can cause you to think that you’re doing well when in fact you’re losing ground.

Say “so what” to yourself a lot.  If you can’t explain why a piece of data is meaningful, you need to discard it because it’s the manure surrounding the pony inside.  If you can’t put something into a broader context, push to do so. If you can’t determine a course of action based on a particular nugget of information, ignore it and keep digging until you get to the pony.  Make sense?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting

Tagged as , , , , ,