Hidden in Plain Sight

The Hidden in Plain Sight Tour

To celebrate the launch of Hidden in Plain Sight, I will hold a few presentations in major cities around the world to illustrate and discuss the main ideas of the book.

The first three events of the tour will take place in New York, Los Angeles and Miami and will be co-hosted by Vivaldi Partners and my good friends at IESE Business School, Madrid/Spain (where Micheal Porter just spoke last week).

If you live in the New York area, feel free to come and hear me speak tomorrow evening. Here are the details:

Date & Time: May 22, 6-8:30 p.m.
Location: The Gabarron Foundation Carriage Center for the Arts, 149 East 38th Street, 10016 New York, NY
RSVP: Please send name, company name & telephone number to sjohansson@iese.edu
Notes: Event sponsored and hosted by IESE and supported by the Spain-US Chamber of Commerce, the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, and the European-American Business Organization.

You can find more detailed information on dates, locations and RSVP for the events in LA and Miami here.

P&G Plans to Build 60 Million Relationships

This recent Advertising Age article by Matthew Creamer describes an important development at P&G. It illustrates the many ways in which the world's largest packaged-goods company is reinventing marketing and its fine-tuned TV advertising model. The idea of using a cohort segmentation, which is presented in the article, is great and makes a one-to-one marketing approach feasible for companies like Procter & Gamble.

Impressive are the numbers: P&G is targeting 60 million consumers – more than half of all American households.

However, I wonder why P&G just focuses on cohorts of consumers. There isn’t much change in the cohort for Tide or Pantene - these are products which can be used by a consumer for a long, long time. Yes, perhaps for Pampers, there is a stage in life where one enters the market as a parent of a user and where one leaves the market.

I think a much bigger opportunity for Procter & Gamble is to think of the 1,440 minutes in consumers’ everyday life and segment the market not by people, but by the activities, the projects, tasks and concerns in those moments we all live every day. For example, the company could focus on consumer moments like: daily chores when a new baby is in the home. This would focus P&G’s 86 brands around helping people, whether mom or dad or grand parents or nanny in taking care of those chores that take away from spending time with the new baby.

The idea behind this segmentation is not a segmentation of persons but a much more meaningful segmentation of activities, projects or tasks. I call this segmentation the development of “growth platforms” in my new book: Hidden in Plain Sight. By looking at the world, not from the traditional perspectives of brands or products, the 86 brands of Procter & Gamble in this case, and by also not just looking from the consumer perspective or any segment perspective, totally new opportunities in plain sights are revealed.

If Procter & Gamble can change their success model of mass marketing, how many other companies will be able to follow in their footsteps?  Do you think this approach is only applicable to companies like Procter & Gamble with 86 brands?

Ten Questions with Erich Joachimsthaler

Sanjay Dalal, author of the Creativity and Innovation Driving Business blog, recently approached me with his top 10 questions about my new book Hidden in Plain Sight (which he calls a "must-read innovation book"). You can now find this Q&A interview posted on Sanjay's blog. 

P.S. Chuck Frey from the Innovation Tools blog just posted a trackback in which he calls the interview "fascinating" and notes that "this interview has made me decide that I really need to dig into this book, to see what else I can learn!" - a comment which I find very rewarding.

Hidden in Plain Sight featured in Harvard Business Review's Ideacast

I recently discussed some of the key insights from Hidden in Plain Sight with Julie Devoll from Harvard Business School Press. You can listen to a 12 minute summary of our discussion in this week's HBR Ideacast.

Another sneak preview of my book is offered in the latest issue of Strategy+Business Magazine. More specifically, I have contributed an article to the 'Leading Ideas' section of the magazine, which you can read free of charge on the Strategy+Business website.

On another note, I was honored to see that Julie Fleischer from the Innovation Ecosystem blog reiterated her praise for Hidden in Plain Sight by including it in her top 5 innovation books list. Other books featured in Julie's list include Gary Hamel's 'Leading the Revolution' or 'Blue Ocean Strategy' by Kim & Mauborgne.

Is Coke Zero a Tonic for What Ails Coca-Cola?

Join the discussion on Harvard Business Online, where I recently posted a Conversation Starter on the topic.

The blogosphere on Hidden in Plain Sight

Hidden in Plain Sight is sending it's first waves across the blogosphere. I have just discovered two posts by fellow bloggers, Julie Fleischer and James Todhunter, who captured the essence of what Hidden in Plain Sight is all about.

Julie wrote a fantastic review of the book on her Innovation Ecosystem blog. Here’s what she had to say:

“Erich sets out a thoughtful, provocative and detailed argument that puts traditional innovation & marketing methods to shame. (…) What I appreciated most about this book is that it challenges innovation orthodoxy. Joachimsthaler offers solid perspective, strong rationale, a detailed, well-documented approach and deep case studies.”

On the Innovating to Win blog, James Todhunter presents a concise summary of the Demand-first Innovation and Growth model (DIG) featured in Hidden in Plain Sight. Furthermore, he exemplifies how the framework can enable an organization to better understand the potential for innovation hidden in its opportunity landscape.

I deeply enjoyed reading these posts. On their blogs, Julie and James challenge the discourse on innovation orthodoxy, and I believe it is important that we continue to stimulate this discourse. I am looking forward to their future contributions on the topic.

Hidden in Plain Sight ranks #5 in Amazon pre-order list

Following the positive press on the book, I have just learned that Hidden in Plain Sight is among the most popular pre-order books in the Business & Investing category on Amazon.com.  This is exciting news as we are just about a month away from our official release date.

"The latest on listening to customers" - The Financial Times

As we are approaching the final month before Hidden in Plain Sight's release date on May 17, the book has already gotten a fair share of attention in the media (and was just named Harvard Business Online's featured book for April). Here is a selection of the most recent coverage:

The Financial Times reviewed Hidden in Plain Sight on Wednesday (April 11, page 7), describing it as "The latest on listening to customers":

"The book might well have been subtitled “innovation in the age of customer-centricity”, since its overall theory is that these days the secret of success is to look at things from the perspective of how customers really behave. Rather than focusing just on the product and how to improve it, or on what the competition is doing, ask instead what you can do to get a larger share of the 1,444 minutes that make up every customer’s day."

To achieve the latter, I introduce a comprehensive framework in the book which I call the Demand-First Innovation and Growth (DIG) model. It ensures that breakthrough strategies for innovation are formulated based on a full understanding of the total demand from an outside-in customer or consumer perspective. For more on the DIG model, check out TheStreet.com for a streaming video interview where I run through the model and its implications step by step.

Another interview with me is featured on the DemandGen Report blog. It does a good job of highlighting some key aspects of digging the DIG, especially regarding the application of the model beyond consumer products. Since Apple is a prominent case study in the book (among others), some might think that the DIG is only applicable in a B2C context. However, many of its applications as part of my work with Vivaldi Partners have in fact been carried out with B2B companies. The model is versatile, and has clearly demonstrated its prowess in both B2C and B2B markets.

Hidden in Plain Sight is now available for pre-order at Amazon, Harvard Business Online, Barnes & Noble and CEO Read (also for bulk orders).

How to Find and Execute Your Company’s Next Big Growth Strategy

Why do some companies have their fingers on the pulse of the marketplace, offering innovative – and profitable – products and services that customers can’t live without, while other companies tread water, struggling to stay competitive?

I believe that opportunities for innovation and growth are everywhere. The problem is that most companies are blind to them, looking at the world through the lens of their own technologies, products, and successes, miscalculating what their customers really want and need.

Companies focus too much attention on making incremental improvements to existing products – irrespective of whether this is meaningful to the customer. They chip away at the most minute advantage in the hope of extending the life of an innovation – initially finding success, but ultimately having the rug pulled from beneath them as a competitor develops an entirely new approach.

In my new book Hidden in Plain Sight (Harvard Business School Press, May 2007) I present a radical approach to reinventing business strategies, building brands, and establishing a culture of innovation, which helps companies reorient their vision and spot opportunities before their rivals do.

This blog enables me to further elaborate on the topics and case studies covered in Hidden in Plain Sight. Moreover, I am looking forward to discussing them with with you - my readers and fellow bloggers - by responding to your comments and blog posts. In order to make it easier for you to follow this blog I've set up an RSS feed, please feel free to sign up.