Retail loyalty Innovation

During the last 2 years, it became obvious that discounters maintain the strongest growth during a recession. But ths advantage in price differentiation turns into a burden if low-price competition increases, because the average customer loyalty is low. Furthermore, customers become more demanding and value companies that focus on their needs. In order to maintain her market leading position in the Dutch retail market, such a retailer has to cope with these two developments.

Customers want more than the lowest price.
Kruidvat decided to capitalize on its strong market presence and customer exposure and build customer insights by setting up a bi-directional dialogue channel, “ Jouw Extravoordeelkaart”.

So what’s so innovative about the “Jouw Extravoordeelkaart” ?
The “Jouw Extravoordeelkaart” is a combination of a “deal of the day“ website and a loyalty program. To participate, customers need to register on the website where they get one strongly discounted personalized offering. The customer can download the offering voucher within 15 hours and hand it in within a week. When using the loyalty card a customer receives 1 point for every Euro spent. The customer can return points for free products.

What is the added value for Kruidvat?
The loyalty program enables Kruidvat to capture the interest of the customers and trace their buying behavior on an individual level in order to customize offerings. Subsequently, Kruidvat aims to increase the number of store visits and the amount of purchased goods per visit. Finally, Kruidvat can develop customer insights and increase customer focus and satisfaction.

Personal findings
What I like to share are my findings from the project. First the value proposition fits very well with the brand and her strenghts. Second it really add's benefits to the consumer more than just another card with points. Third the market receives is very well looking at the blog's and online media and usage in the stores. Fourth it was great to see a group of individuals become a team and put a lot of effort to make the new introduction a success.
let see how the program evolves!

Innovation capability during recession

A preview from the innovation survey by Capgemini Consulting, in conjunction with HSM, the sponsors of the World Innovation Forum, conducted over three hundred and seventy executives to explore the concept of innovation and to identify areas of commonality amongst them.
Innovation leaders stressed the importance of organizational factors in supporting innovation.
The challenge is in operationalizing and executing. Our respondents agree that while this is difficult, it is critical to long-term survival. Some have fundamentally restructured the way their organizations do business to support innovation; others propose new partnership models to support open source innovation and new approaches to the process of ideation and experimentation.
Our respondents consistently agreed that innovative companies are always looking outward, focusing on how to better serve their customers’ needs, including currently unmet and as yet unknown needs. New tools, technologies and media make it easier than ever to communicate with customers, and the most successful innovators are taking advantage of them to maintain meaningful customer conversations.
Innovators are also engaging customers earlier in the development process, shifting from a top-down research and development model to a bottom-up, decentralized model that takes advantage of customers’ first-hand insights to address their unmet needs.
One of the findings: Companies with higher innovation success rates are using the recession to transform their business rather than cutting back. In fact, one-third of respondents are actually using the slowdown as a catalyst to increase their efforts at innovation. (So far the preview.)

So how are you doning? If you what to do a quick check on your innovation capabilities use my 10 questions. (). Let me know what your findings from your response are.
If you are interested in a more in depth survey Innovation capability survey send me a mail.

Success factors (continued)

The innovation project just started. The project approach agreed and the kick-off held. Everybody understands the objectives. At this moment the launch date to bring the innovation on time to the market is a well known succesfactor. But there are more succesfactors related to time. Can the team deliver the desired results base d on the desribed high level requirements? Whats the impact of the business requirements?
Often these requirements are handed over to a specialist like business analist. Who in turn will often talk with process design and functional team members. These will hand over to the technical teammembers and the testteam (if they are already available). How to keep these handovers smooth and the interpretations correct. Do we really understand?
A different approach is to have each deliverable especially the business requirements shared with the whole team. This builds time to understand and time to respond. It helps at the requirements phase to specify the what more clearly (instead of the to early how). The (im)possible hows can be rephrased into what's. directions on how (technolgy enablement) can be shared. Add the questions 'what and how do you whant to test this requirement' in the early stage help to set the acceptance and test criteria. This takes away misunderstanding and overstated requirements. In most projects extra nice to haves type of requirements are put in to get more because common practice is the client always get less. Let give the client what he really needs. Let's make sure we all really understand reducing the misunderstanding and redo's. Thus getting clearer business requirements. An additional benefit of taking time to really understand is less change requests during and at the end of the project.
The early involvement of client and customers to specify the way they want to test the requirements shows their support and helps the time to accept the solution and time to understand at the earliest stage (in stead of a time in the future).
The better understanding created better collaborative working among the teams, better estimated which improve lead time and thus time to markt.
Taking this approach the projectteam was able to deliver the client and customer what they really need as a working solution on time.

Excellerate

The idea has passed the gates and now needs to be launched succesfully. What are those succesfactors to make this happen. The project lead has the challenge to define and manage the succesfactors. In the comming series I will describe these.

As most of you know, the project leader faces the challenges to deliver the desired results on time. He has to understand the project results, getting the resources and coping with changes in the business environment at the same time. How to keep up?
A Regular approach like business as usual meeting s to take decisions, share latest information through e-mail and regular meeting. Adapting to the change and getting the client feedback just take too long.
To keep up with the high information flow and have quick decision making we need to the client and preferable the customers to be near full time, innovation project members.
During the set-up of the innovation project leader assigns clear roles and responsibilities. He also sets up daily meetings to share information and give feedback enable the business and the project to adapt.
The daily meetings with the projectmembers , the client and customer involvement contributes to the succesfactor 'time to understand' and 'time to respond'. These are two out of six success factors of time.
His project could keep up with the latest business changes due to the daily meeting (face to face as weel as conference calls)
These and other success factors are coverd in ‘Excellerate’ Capgemini’s approach to boost innovations.
Next time more on the other success factors of time

Welcome

In this blog I will share my experiences on business innovation managment.
Not only on the subject but also on topic which inspire me and hopfully you in making innovations succesfull. If you like you can respond.