Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute Your Company's Next Big Growth Strategy

by Erich Joachimsthaler

Companies must innovate to grow, but they often forget to look beyond their own brands. Take Sony, for example. Its success with consumer innovations like the Walkman blinded it to obvious changes in how, when, and where people wanted their music. Apple capitalized on those changes in demand with the iPod, providing a new way of listening to music and of managing one's entire music library.

This book explains how you can spot these opportunities that are hidden in plain sight. It introduces the demand-first innovation and growth model that will show you how to become an unbiased observer of people's consumption and usage behaviors. Refining this skill helps companies generate organic growth through new products, services, solutions, and experiences that truly enhance peoples' lives. Revealing the innovative processes of such organizations as BMW, Zara, General Electric Healthcare, and Frito-Lay, Hidden in Plain Sight offers you a new approach to identifying and executing your company's growth strategy.

Genres: Business

253 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 16, 2007

Reviews

[Jennifer Sertl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hidden In Plain Site by Erich Joachimsthaler

I wrote this review over five years ago and posted it on Amazon. I will be seeing Erich in NY June 20th and thought I would share his work with you. Even before IDEO was asking us to be anthropologists, Erich was nudging us in that direction. . .


The best investment you can make for your company this year is to get Hidden in Plain Sight. Joachimsthaler will help you understand your customers in a unique way and educate you on a method that will enable you to find and execute your company's next big growth strategy. It is a promise delivered. Many companies are working on differentiation strategies marked by these typical questions:
* How can we enhance our product?
* How can we get our product on-line with a paypal account?
* How can we get more market share?
If these are the types of questions your sales and marketing teams are spending time on , you may be in big trouble. These are good questions, but in today's market place, they are irrelevant. The questions are from the "inside-out." We were taught that you have to have a value proposition and get exposure to sell a product. Today's consumers are driving the economy. If you don't have an "outside-in" mechanism to observe, study, and explore customer utilization, you won't be able to compete in the near future. The strategy is studying "point of utilization" versus "point of purchase."
Anthropology, sociology, and psychology are being used more and more frequently to help businesses better under stand their customer's needs and wants. Only by studying the macro-environment of your customer will you be able access why they are picking one product over another. This book offers some very thorough case studies with both methodology and results from Frito Lay, BMW, and GE. While these companies have greater access to resources, the methods shared can be applied by start ups and small business. It is not the size of the company; it is the level of listening and observation that creates the strategic breakthroughs. Here is the logic: each individual has 1440 minutes a day. A company's goal is to get access to an individual's minutes. Statistically it has been found that people only spend about 15 minutes a day purchasing. So, what do they do with the reaming 1425 minutes? Your consumers are living their lives when they are not consuming your product. So if you want toincrease wallet-share you have to have intimate knowledge of how each individual spends their "episodes and moments of activities." This is what Joachimsthaler calls "capturing the ecosystem of demand." The more a company understands the macro-environment of each customer, the more able the company to ensure relevance and utilization. Customer satisfaction surveys and traditional marketing techniques still have a function, there just needs to be a balance of intention. Past, present, future focus will enable you to ensure that your company's product or service falls inside of a customer's 1440 minutes a day.
Besides the humbling reminder that our product or service is only a small fraction of our customer's experience, another benefit of Hidden In Plain Sight is an easy to use matrix for deciding the best customer research model. There are four primary intentions with research:
1) To explore - I know I want to innovate, but what is the customer demand landscape?
2) To define--I know the customer demand landscape but where is the opportunity?
3) To enrich--I know where the opportunities lies; how can I leverage these so my product or brand can play a compelling role in customer's lives?
4) To refine--I know I want to innovate; how do I refine or test my innovation to exactly fit into customer's lives?
The most challenging aspect of deploying any of these strategies is that of truly listening to customer's complaints, feedback, and dreams. You have to forget what you produce and listen from the standpoint of being absolutely concerned about the human being. That is why much of this research has to be conducted by a third-party. Our ability to leverage these methods is our ability to detach from our company and our own preferences. Now I am looking forward to reading that book.

Jennifer Sertl
Author - Strategy Leadership & the Soul
President, Agility3R

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joachimsthaler offers what he claims is a "new model of strategic innovation for achieving profitable business growth" by abandoning "some of the tried and proven conventions of innovation, marketing, and strategy formulation" and by discarding "some of today's common assumptions and management practices and adopt a fresh way of planning an executing your strategies today and your innovation and growth strategies of tomorrow." The key word is "some" as he explains how. After discussing "hidden opportunities to innovate and grow" in Part I, he focuses in Part II on several companies which exemplify a demand-first innovation and growth model (e.g. Frito-Lay, Allianz, GE Healthcare, and State Street) and then shifts his attention, in Part III, to various strategies by which to realize customer advantage.

Joachimsthaler asserts - and I agree - that many senior-level executives lack the ability to see - really see - "the opportunities presented by the changing consumption or usage behaviors of people [their organizations are] trying to serve. [They] cannot spot or recognize and pursue the abundant opportunities that exist in plain sight." Why? Joachimsthaler suggests several reasons which include routine but disparate processes which fragment a company's view of its customers, perpetuation of the status quo which limits a company's perspective on its competitive marketplace, a mistaken belief that "the key to growth lies in identifying customers' needs and wants [and/or] providing solutions for the tasks or jobs it knows customers must take on and get done," and an "inside-out" perspective which results in what Theodore Levitt once characterized as "marketing myopia."

[Lori Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A should-read book on innovation for knowledge workers and entrepreneurs.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Case studies were okay, but the book overall was quite repetitive. It could have been slimmed down to an article.