General Mills launches new business Gluten Freely

General Mills launched a new business & brand called Gluten Freely on March 2, 2011.  This is a new offering for consumer dealing with Celiac disease either personally or with in their family.   The offering provides a wide variety of services including education, recipes, medical information, and integration to your social network.   It provides a one stop shop for both information and products to assist one in sustaining a Gluten Free lifestyle.   The online store offers food and products not only from General Mills, but a wealth of providers and online coupons for some of the most competitive pricing around.

The new business platform is all cloud based.  It integrates together core business capabilities of eCommerce, CRM, order management and B2B integration for fulfillment.   Extensive XRM/CRM management capabilities allow for increased 1:1 marketing potential.  It is capable of delivering content to a multi-channel consumer bases through web, phone, slate formats and is extensible to emerging channels platforms for TV and gaming console applications.   This new platform gives General Mills the ability to rapidly innovate, test, and scale new business like never before.

Check out www.glutenfreely.com and stay tuned for new innovations from General Mills.

www.tomorrowfromtoday.com

 

Vertical Community Nexus – Battle for Digital Vertical Dominance

Vertical Community Nexus is the concept of having the right digital infrastructure and management capabilities in place to own the channels and community for a industry vertical.  The goal of the strategy is to have the best channels & content to create a gravity to draw the online/social community to your channels away from competitors or generic social media sites.  This gives your enterprise the advantage in communicating and analyzing the activities in the vertical.

What is at stake in the coming years is who can establish digital vertical dominance.   As the number of digital channels for direct to consumer channels emerge and their integration into social media conversations enterprises must compete in both the traditional and digital channels to control market share. In today’s digital world most enterprises have web properties, e-commerce, and even active social media participation on major SM properties.   The mantra of the past few years around social media has been to participate and engage at the properties where your customer are.   While this will remain true, the competitive landscape is decidedly shifting towards a strategy that will create a gravity to draw the consumer base and conversation to your enterprise channels.   The advantage here is that by cultivating the channels, content, and conversation around your domain expertise you will be the primary access point to that customer base.

This has many advantages.   If the majority of conversation, expertise, and cutting edge content/information is to be found on your channels, your brand becomes the go-to location for that community.   By investing in the best content, engaging industry experts, and participating authentically in the conversation your brand can arise as a trusted source and be viewed as the leader in both thought leadership and business aspects of the vertical.    By being at the center of all the activity it also provides the foundation to do a deeper level of analytics, investigation, community collaboration, and promotions.   This creates new products, services, and offerings to offer back to the community increasing your value proposition to the audience.

The channels, offerings  and audience create a CAAS – Channel as a Service business model.   Those assets and ability to reach the community attracts business partners in many forms.   Competitors may be willing or need to reach the audience that you control through your channels.  This could be for commerce, advertising, or analytics on the marketplace.   The community, other business, partners, and suppliers may be leading contributors to content  that, again, make your channels the premier source of industry knowledge and news.  Also, verticals rarely operate only within their own walls.   Your enterprise could also be the integration point for cross vertical offerings, commerce, partnerships, and industry conversations.

This is a direct change in online social strategies where your business relies on major social sites to have conversations and content.   It is imperative to embark on this strategy for three major reasons:

1. Relying only on the major Social Channels drives your audience to their channels, their partners, their advertising, their analytics, etc.     You want to participate on those channels, but the goal is to increase awareness of your channels and drive the conversation to those mediums.
2. If you don’t lead, you will lose the audience/community to another competitor.    Then you will reach your customer base through their channels and control process in the future.
3. Once this strategy is in place, everyday, every transaction, every conversation, every piece of content is working in your benefit.   You can’t start this strategy three years late and “catch-up.” It will be too late to grow the relationships, have the depth of content, and history of analytics to guide your next round of investments.

Microsoft Fiscal Year 2011 Kicks Off

Microsoft’s fiscal calendar runs six months of the calendar year with its FY11 year beginning in July of 2010.   The beginning of the fiscal year is always of time of extensive change within the organization.   July and August are pre-dominantly planning and budgeting months as new goals and programs are put into place and organizational structures adjusted to meet the executional requirements.

The goals for the innovation team is evolving in its mission as it has each year for the past five years.   In previous years we focused on emerging technology adoption for enterprise applications.  We’ve gradually been shifting to focus on extensive marketing around these implementations and now this year we are focusing on solutions for consumers.   Another key change is the narrowing of breadth or number of opportunities we will drive this year.   Instead we are concentrating our resources for larger investments over a smaller set of more significant solutions.

The class of solutions we are targeting are being characterized as “Market Moving.”  They are consumer facing and will combine key emerging technology and architectural aspects.   Of these we are focusing on:   Multi-channel ( mobile, online, desktop, devices),  cloud computing services.  The solutions must be differentiated in the market place and drive business ROI/ROMI.   Joint marketing campaigns will be crafted and executed in the partnerships combining events, traditional, digital and social media marketing.

Already our innovation team is sitting down with major consumer brands do strategy envisioning sessions around next generation solutions.    We are exploring the ability to combine brands for a larger reach and consumer value proposition.   Joint marketing opportunities are being identified.

The FY11 year should be very interesting to see these major solutions come to market and create new experiences for consumers and channels for new business models to engage with their customers and community.

www.tomorrowfromtoday.com

Values and Sense not Dollars and Cents

The speed of business and global competition are constantly on the rise.   Continued rapid advancements in technology only increase the complexity of innovation.  To sustain market leadership a company needs to look past short term dollar thinking and develop its internal and external relationships to have the agility to sustain success.

To invest in relationships or to focus on the next business transaction is an ever increasing dilemma for companies.  Investments in transactions can improve a relationship.   The quality of the customer experience,  the speed or simplicity of the transaction, the overcoming of customer issues are all significant part of the relationship a customer has with a brand.

The operational aspects of many organizations are under process efficiency and refinement.   Much of this is tied or driven by the pressures of quarterly and annual revenue cycles.   The beating of the revenue drum can drown out all other aspects of relationship management.   The risk is that a company becomes so revenue focused that all of its behaviors and planning activities center around only that metric.   The growing corporate religion will put dollar numbers ahead of any relationship investment both with the customer and ultimately its own employees.   This type of corporate culture quickly becomes visible external to the company and the brand itself begins to embody this value system.  Customers quickly become familiar with this brand reputation.   Long term, this will cause an erosion of the relationship and challenge the sustainability of not only growth, but of the current revenue base.

Signs of being “one of those companies” and the best practices to turn it around:

can your corporate culture be agile or innovative

At today’s speed of business, emerging markets, and global reach, the need for corporations to be able to see opportunity, innovate, and be agile in changing course are paramount to success.

The key enabler is not found in creating new titles like “innovation officer” or a company meeting where the words can be bandied about as slogans.   It’s time to check in on the DNA of corporate culture by looking at the day to day actions of its operational structure.   Let’s take a look at how we get things done to see if we are poised to take advantage of what tomorrow may hold.

Core components that make up a healthy culture:

Toyota’s Crisis – What can we all learn

Toyota’s recall of millions of current model vehicles is a major event that the world is watching.   It is more than a challenge of engineer investigation or in a financial set back.  Toyota now has to execute in terms of providing world class customers service and brand management.  This creates on of the largest and most relevant case studies for every company to learn from their success or mis-steps.

Let’s identify some of the key aspects of this execution plan to show some of the breadth of their organization that will need to be leveraged to survive the crisis:

1. Immediate outreach to their customer base that both owns an affected model to the how to proceed to prevent any injury or property damage.
2. Messaging to every customer, potential customer, business partners and employee as to how the company will solve this situation and the expectations everyone needs to meet.
3. Increase their internal capacity of their customer service and marketing channels to handle the volume of the people affected
4. Broad social media monitoring and participation to represent the pro-active steps and individual situations visual through these channels.
5. Deanship support and education on how to manage the customer’s needs.
6. Engage their engineers and federal regulations resources to find a solution to the product defect.
7. Re-engineer and retool the manufacturing processes to produce the volume of parts replacements for the recall and support the manufacturing pipeline of new vehicles.
8. Recall all defect parts out of the current supply chain and reclaimed parts from existing vehicles.
9. Refill the supply chain to support the recall and existing manufacturing
10. Plan a comeback strategy to win consumer confidence with marketing, 3D party testing and reviews, media participation, customer stories, improved warranties, and setting the bar on how they execute resolve this crisis as the ultimate consumer care story.

This only scratches the surface of the amount of actual effort behind every item we touched on.   The scale and commitment level will be of a near war time mobilization level.  This story will be followed, studied, created best practices, pitfalls, and be taught to business students around the world for years to come.   The world is watching and we can all learn something from their trails.

Could your business have the customer service, marketing and organizational capabilities required to respond to this kind of unplanned set back?

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The Leaderless Gap in Corporate Culture

We see the titles and the positions filled on the organization charts, but where are leaders and managers?  A resulting void is created between the workforce and the corporate executives.  Certainly, all the roles are filled and everyone’s calendars and inboxes are full, but the “doers” and “sayers” have never been as disconnected in America’s corporations.  The terms of leadership and management have become more titles that a description of attributes and activities that we expect from these roles.

Current corporate leadership is often remote and removed from the workforce.   This results in a lack of relationships and insight into the working mechanics of the operations in which the companies efficiencies are based on.  Planning takes on an academic quality since it is more based on strategic “wishes” than the improvement and investment in current state of actual capabilities.  Usually in these cultures, the emphasis is on individual accomplishments on the executive level.  The individuals goal is to move into and through roles as fast as possible as the ladder is climbed.  The overall plan revolves around highly abstracted and subjective scorecards that can be interpreted to show success.  Plans rarely invest the community, operational capabilities, and customers.   Thus the ability to sustain or improve builds a straight path from good to mediocre.

Changing Corporate Culture

The organizational architecture framework “Autochthony” provides a structured approach for how to assess your current organization.   It can help break down the chain of dependencies that keep an organization from improvement and re-envisioning itself as it needs to adapt to the times and market in which it is competing.   It also provides a visualization to see what areas of an organization are maturing disproportionately to another.   In many cases organizations continue to through dollars and programs into tactical aspects of maturity and efficiency.   These efforts tend to fail because they ignore the investments that need to be made at the cultural values and leadership/management changes that would need to embody the new behaviors they wish the operating groups to exhibit.

Visit the Autochthony site to learn more and contribute: http://autochthony.pbworks.com/

Pay special attention to the detailed matrixes in the child pages.  The order of investment occurs from left to right and bottom to top on the diagrams.  An organization my have to move backwards on the maturity curve to fix or align foundational aspects of the culture before moving to the operational elements.   Note:  I didn’t see the detailed assessment spreadsheets on the site today.

http://www.tomorrowfromtoday.com