So thank you for coming this evening.
I'm I hope that the talk that I'm going to give is going to be of some practical value to to all of you, some of you.
Everything that I'm going to talk through now, I've tried to generalise it and simplify it as much as possible.
I think many of you may look at some of the recommendations and advice that I gave and think, Yeah, maybe that will be useful to me,
but maybe certain things may not apply to any business idea that you have now that you have in the future.
But I hope that it will give you a good sort of basis upon which to think about marketing and product development.
So in terms of outcomes from this session, there's really three major things that I want to talk about.
And I would like you to walk out of this lecture theatre with a pretty good understanding
of and that is on first and foremost research how to you go about doing it,
what you really need to do versus everything that you could possibly do.
We're going to try and practically focus on essential research.
Then once you've researched the markets or the products or the opportunity that you're looking to exploit,
how do you then take that well-researched idea and actually deliver it into a
tangible product or service that people are going to want to actually buy?
So that's the delivery part. And then when I use the word markets, I mean marketing.
How can you then take this this finished? Well, research products that functions correctly and that people want and that people want to buy.
How can you actually let people know that it exists? How can you get people excited about it and actually want to buy it?
Now, that sounds to me like quite a tall order for 45 minutes.
So as you'll see, I will be pretty brief as we go through.
So in a nutshell, we're going to look to grasp the basics of market research,
to understand what the role of products is, to help you to have simple tools for focusing on the right ideas.
Delivering them effectively and then marketing them successfully.
So the first sort of part of this will be market research.
I know we all know what market research is. Presumably all of you being stopped in the street.
Or have avoided being stopped in the street and have walked straight past someone asking you questions.
That's obviously one part of market research and there's many others.
So in terms of an introduction, then it is quite simply the gathering and analysis of information in order to qualify or identify opportunities.
So what that doesn't mean is that market research is something that you use to prove that your idea is is great.
It could actually be something that shows you, well, in fact, maybe my idea isn't quite right.
Maybe I need to adjust it. Maybe I should ditch the whole thing and go and find something new.
So market research would very much be used as a kind of a gate post as you look to progress your your venture.
But in other respects, it can also help you once you are fully up and running any product.
Some of the products that I manage at the moment and have managed in my career,
whether heavyweight research or just light touch analysis of what our customers are doing.
You often find the research can help add value by helping you sort of really pinpoint who your customer is or who they should be.
It can help you sort of describe what their traits are, what are they like, what what films do they watch, what age group they and where do they live?
What kind of they drive? What sports do they like? What football team do they support?
You can market research can help you effectively build up a persona if who your customer is.
It can also, depending on how you approach it, can help you understand what is their propensity to actually buy something you might.
Many of us here could probably think of a hundred things that we would like to have,
and there's lots of companies trying to sell you products all the time, but that doesn't actually mean that you're going to go and buy them.
So part of your research needs to think about that very practically.
You know what? What is the propensity of my target audience to actually buy research could also help you sort of define a price point.
So you've you've qualified your idea. You know how you're going to sell it, see?
But you need to think, okay, well how am I going to price it relative to the competition,
relative to the cost of my raw materials, relative to the cost of distribution and so on?
So and then the last one obviously is just how can you benchmark with the competition so that you know where you fit in,
whether your product is completely brand new and game changing,
who you might be looking to go into what is already a competitive field so all of this can qualify your opportunity.
Also, as I said, it could disqualify your opportunity.
So moving on to the next slide, I. Market research, in a way, is just a nice, methodical name to give to good old fashioned common sense.
I think any of you or any of us who kind of work in it, if you've worked in business,
if you've done a job for any sort of corporate organisation, you've probably unconsciously done market research.
You might have had a conversation with a customer, you might have had a discussion with a sales person,
you might have been involved in engineering the products of that company.
And in so doing, you are actually involved to some extent in what you could call market research.
However, it is very useful for us to take a step back from that practical experience and actually try and apply a bit of a bit of a framework.
One way of doing this, it's just these seven steps that are defined here.
Now, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm in the company of very experienced academics,
and many of you are probably research professionals who who who know exactly what research is.
But for those of you that are doing this, this is just designed to be a very quick introduction.
So first off, define the opportunity or define what the problem is.
So when I say opportunity, this might be if you truly are looking to launch a new product, well, what do you think the opportunity is?
Equally, if you already have a product that's powerful and live in the marketplace,
you may be looking to improve its performance in some way, whatever it is that you're trying to achieve with this research.
Just just be clear about it from the outset. Otherwise, you spend a lot of money, you waste a lot of time, and you get nothing out of it.
So just be clear about what you're trying to achieve. So you could be looking to launch new products to raise awareness of a current offering that
you've had out there for some time that hasn't been performing as you ultimately want,
want it to, or you may be looking to boost the usage or uptake of something that is well known and is well publicised.
You've already invested quite a lot of money in. So you've defined what it is that you're looking to get out of this research.
The next step really is to to set yourself some realistic objectives.
Again, depending on what it is that you're trying to do,
whether you're trying to fix a price point or you've got some new way of packaging the product and you want to test how customers respond to it,
whatever it might be, look at that overall goal and and ensure that you have objectives that are going to help you achieve that.
But that also crucially map to what your resources are.
You can say to yourself, Well, I've got this new soft drink and I want to knock Coca Cola off the top spot.
But you're going to need billions in advertising spend in order to achieve that which possibly you don't have.
Equally, you should also think about Alright, well, if your objective is X,
if your objective is to introduce a new product into the marketplace and be profitable within two or three years.
And I think you guys have already done good, solid lectures on, on certain aspects of that.
The financial side of this, then you might say to yourself, well what therefore working out,
what do I actually need, what do I need to achieve in terms of gross sales or gross profit margin?
And then working back from that, you might be able to use that to establish a budget that is sensible.
Many businesses and this is a statistic that I Googled only three days ago,
but many small to medium sized businesses tend to on average, invest about 2% of their gross sales in research.
Now, of course, if you were in a business that was extremely research intensive,
it would be a lot more equally if if formal formalised research wasn't really that necessary, it would be a lot less.
But on average, it's about 2%. By the way, if anyone does have a burning question or if you don't understand what I'm saying,
don't be afraid to put your hand up and I will endeavour to answer your question.
So moving on to the third step in market research, this is really to select what research approach you need to take.
Effectively, there are two types that there is primary original research that you would undertake yourself.
It's completely greenfield and new, and you can do that exactly according to your requirements.
Or you can use secondary research where someone else or some other organisation
has already gone out and explored the topic that you are interested in.
Now, usually secondary research isn't going to give you exactly what you want.
Usually, if it does give you exactly what you want,
then you would be mad not to use that secondary research because someone else has done it
is likely to be a lot cheaper than then going and employing a market research company.
Often you may want to do a little bit, a little bit of both.
And again, this will depend on your choice.
You know, you will base your choice on what your objectives actually were in the first place and what your budget is.
For my own part, I when I set up a translation, Start-Up,
which was based on giving initially French people an English CV that was completely audited and checked by a native English speaker,
so that when they applied for jobs in the UK that they presented themselves well without silly grammatical errors.
I could have gone to Paris and stopped people in the street and said, Hey, do you need.
Do you need a CV? Do you think? Are these good? And possibly if I had spend a couple of months doing that a huge expense,
I would have come to the same conclusion as simply going on to Google onto that back end search tool.
And actually just look how many people are actually searching for English correct CV or equivalent phrases in French.
And then from that I was able to say, Well, yeah, there's definitely a market here that was good enough for me.
It didn't cost anything. So I think as well as thinking, do I need priming or do I need secondary, think a little bit laterally.
How could you get the information that you need in order to determine whether your opportunity is actually going to succeed?
How could you get it cheaply and quickly without necessarily having to bring in a marketing company to do it for you?
So on the assumption that you have said, actually, I do need to do primary research and secondary research isn't going to be enough.
Your next step then would be to design a questionnaire.
Now, the questionnaire is not the only way to conduct market research, but broadly, it's probably the best one for us to focus on today.
Now, a question to all. All of us have done questionnaires before.
I've done some good ones. I've done some pretty average ones.
And I've completed a bunch of I don't mean done. I mean I've completed other people have done them.
I have also completed ones that are pretty cool.
I will never forget a questionnaire that I was asked to complete about four years ago where one of the questions asked me.
It said, You know, if you are blind, click here. And for the life of me I can't work out what it was.
Someone then subsequently did tell me that their answer and this is a web based survey.
Somebody did tell me there are certain browsers,
obviously for visually impaired people that can enable you to sort of be prompted with an audible statement that says,
click here, and it will actually just describe the words in the browser to hopefully that that's what it was.
But in any case, what a questionnaire must be is clear and simple.
You need to give obvious instructions for completing it.
Whenever any of us do a questionnaire. I would take a guess that most of you try to do it as quickly as possible.
Unless it's a matter of really dear to your heart, then you might actually sit down and really carefully think about it.
But generally, if you're walking down the street on a Saturday afternoon, particularly at this time of year,
somebody comes up and asks you to fill out a questionnaire and you feel obliged to do so.
You're going to want to be pretty quick and you going to want to get on your way.
So bear that in mind, particularly if you're thinking of some sort of consumer products.
Keep it keep it simple and give clear instructions.
Also start general and then get really specific.
This may sound a bit obvious to say that, but if you start by getting right into the nuts and bolts of it, people will get lost very quickly.
I think you need to warm people up before you actually get to the really specific questions,
the wording of the questions, try and keep them as concise and to the point as possible.
Make it easy to read. That could be as simple as having a big font rather than a tiny sort of arial size eights that nobody can see.
Try to use a mix of open ended, multiple choice and close questions.
You'll find that that gives you a good balance of both qualitative and quantitative feedback.
Now, again, depending on what it is that you're trying to achieve with your business and your products,
you might want to emphasise one more than the other, but often you'll find that having good, open ended questions to fall back on can help you check.
And a statistical anomaly will come on to the analysis part in a second.
But when you do actually come to crunch all of the data that comes back from something like this,
if you've only got quantitative multiple choice answers and you get some oddball responses that just don't seem to add up,
that can be quite frustrating if you haven't got anything qualitative to fall back on,
which might actually be someone actually writing an explanation as to why they've they've answered that multiple choice in a different way.
And often those sort of insights are absolutely crucial. They're like gold dust.
Rather than just relying purely on on their radio button choices.
Equally close questions are good as well, where you actually force the respondents to say yes or no.
You know, do you think train fare increases are good?
Yes or no? I can imagine what the answer to that one is going to be generally.
So going onto the next one, then, if you once you've got to the point where you have drafted that questionnaire, you've kept it simple.
You've used this balance of different kinds of question.
I would strongly recommend that you actually test it before committing your time or your money or both in a significant proportion.
And what that could be is something as simple as you get the questionnaire and you run it by
six family members or five friends who who know absolutely nothing about your business at all,
put it in front of them and see whether they can navigate this questionnaire, see if they get stuck.
Actually, watch them sit over their shoulder and see if they sort of have to reread certain
questions that will help you understand whether actually you need to tweak a few things.
All of us with the best will in the world, we all need a second pair of eyes, particularly when we're writing something like this.
So you being as concise as possible in the first place will mean that those those little edits that you need to do in the test phase,
a minor and not major. And then lastly,
just just make sure that you're trying to avoid questions that are really leading or ambiguous or that are unanswerable or are two questions in one.
I mean, a leading question is something that unconsciously rules susceptible susceptibility.
Now, particularly if one of you has got a fantastic idea that you feel extremely passionate about, maybe that's why you're here on this course.
Now you may be thinking to yourself, I'm going to make this succeed at all costs.
And you might actually write questions that actually give you the answers that you want to hear.
Rather than giving you the answers that you need to hear.
So I think you need to be very, very conscious of your own ability to put bias into questions to generate favourable answers.
Ambiguous is obvious. You know, if, if, if the if the question can be interpreted in three different ways, then it's not a good question.
If it's unanswerable, then obviously it's a waste of time.
Two questions in one could be something like, you know, do you like chocolate and vanilla ice cream?
Well, what if you only like one? If the answer is only yes or no, then, then, then you're stuck.
Okay. Going on to the next step back one. Collecting the data.
Now, the best way to to actually go out once you've got your questionnaire and actually collect that data back, the best way to avoid bias,
not only in the writing of the question, but in the asking of that, is to actually use professional researchers.
Goes back to the point I made just now, and they have no emotional attachment to your product or your business.
So they're more likely to ask the questions in an objective way.
But also, they they are trained to, you know, elicit responses and to make observations that a non-professional would not be able to do equally.
That costs money and an alternative way of doing it.
Again, depending on the product or service that you're trying to use would be an online survey.
Now it's a lot cheaper. You don't have to worry about sort of flagging someone down in the street.
However, you generally are going to need to put that survey in front of a lot more people
in order to encourage people to actually bother to click through and complete it.
Now, of course, you can incentivise.
People to complete that survey, but that it is generally a cheaper method now if you are going to do an online survey.
This is a shameless plug. It's only because I've used them and I find it quite, quite simple.
There's something called SurveyMonkey. They have a free version, so you can actually do a free online survey right now.
Won't cost you anything. I think it will limit you, I believe,
to the number of responses that you can get anything more than 200 and they'll
charge you that that's something right off the shelf now that you could use.
So you've you've executed the survey, you've done it yourself.
You've used a market research firm or you've executed it online.
You then need to analyse the data and try and draw conclusions from it.
So firstly, you may need to sort of edit there could be some obvious cases where someone's kind of half filled it in
or they've just filled it in in a way that they haven't actually given any thought to the questions.
And you'll probably be able to observe that somebody has just done. Yes, yes, yes.
All the way down, no qualitative input at all. You might feel and this would be your choice,
that you might want to remove them from the respondent pool because they're clearly not not really adding any insights.
In any case, you need to collate all of that information. A simple way of doing it is just getting it all into an Excel spreadsheet.
Then with those answers that were quantifiable.
So ones that were possibly multiple choice, you know, strongly agree, strongly disagree.
Somewhere in the middle, you can you can easily crunch that information in Excel and come up with some interesting statistics.
You can then separate out the subjective information. So this is the stuff that people have actually written that's unstructured.
But crucially, the third is what does all of this really mean?
And that only you can do that.
I think you need to look beyond the obvious results and try and think, well, what does this tell me that I didn't know before?
Now, if you're very lucky, it tells you, great. This is a this is a fantastic opportunity.
And there's even more interest out there than I originally thought possible.
Or it might say to you, Well, why is it that there isn't quite as much interest as I originally thought?
So you really need to probe and read between the lines on that information.
Which brings us onto the last step, which is once you have established the conclusions to achieve that research.
Well, great, that's nice. But you've actually got to do something with it and apply these findings to your business.
So this this could encourage you to do a number of things.
You might actually want to adjust your products that might be some feature or aspect or function of it that your research suggests to you.
This needs to be changed in order for me to be successful.
That's one. Another one. It might actually make you think I need to discount this products.
And it could well have been.
The reason you embarked on a given piece of research was a given product, wasn't performing, and then you would just want to establish why that was.
Was it the price? Was it the way that you were distributing it?
It may well be that after that research, you come to the conclusion that it's no longer viable to continue with that product.
Either way, you need to make a decision. The third one might just be that you need to change your marketing activities.
Your research might show you that most of your customers are actually in Oxford, but all of your marketing spend has been in London.
If that was the case, then it would be hopefully a relatively straightforward case of therefore changing the focus of your marketing activities.
Well, last but not least, you may need to alter your prices.
Now, it may sound counterintuitive, but that actually may mean increasing your prices, not necessarily decreasing them.
It just depends on on your analysis of that research and obviously your overall financial management of the company.
But whatever you do when you do get to this point, I should have said this right at the beginning of this particular chapter.
Be careful. Research is research is not perfect.
You're simply taking a very small sample of the world and you're extrapolating quite important conclusions off the back of it.
So if if you feel that you need to adjust the product, discard, change your marketing activities, change your prices.
Be be prepared to sort of test that hypothesis before you put all of your resource and money into into actually pursuing a change of course.
Just just think before you you leap. Any questions are told on market research.
Yes. Yeah. I want to be able to speak to other types of corporate executives and questionnaires.
Other types. Mm hmm.
Well, I suppose I'll be testing more in a software development sort of context.
Or. Could you. Can you give an example of what you were, what you were thinking?
Okay, so you've written a book. Mm hmm. You want to know how it's going to sell?
Best it could be based on. Because of the colour of the cover.
3500 people would sell or you market the book at £30 in one store.
Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't have to be a software application, but very basic testing.
Yeah, I think I think you're quite right to bring that up.
And I mean, possibly at various steps in this, you can find that useful.
I mean, this, that right now, that could actually be a good way to validate a given course of action.
I mean, regardless of whether you use the questionnaire or AB testing to get to this point, if you were to, for instance, want to change your pricing,
that that would be a great method of actually determining whether or not you should roll out the £20 or £50 price increase.
If you could have done a pilot in 50 shops where you tried both and then you crunched the data.
I think going back to. If we go back.
So to go back to this stat. Yes, I mean, HIV testing could could absolutely be an approach.
But I think what that implies is that you have a sort of a bipolar choice in front of you.
So, you know, kind of as you said yourself, it could be that you you're considering either yellow or red packaging.
And, of course, it doesn't necessarily have to just be two choices. It could be three.
To be honest with you, I don't have a huge amount of experience in AB testing, but when I have been peripherally involved in it,
I have noticed that yeah, it's usually only effective up until three variables.
But yeah, that's that's definitely a good a good one to consider.
Any other questions at all on research?
Any aspects of it? Okay.
So. How are we for time, by the way?
First check. Great. I've done half an hour.
Yeah. Correct. Okay. We'll speed up a bit. Product development.
This is effectively the third part. So assuming that your the research that you've conducted,
the findings that you have gleaned from that and the changes that you have made have
given you confidence in the actual sort of product that you're looking to take to market.
Now, of course, this, this whole lecture is focussed on sort of empowering you to take something to market.
A lot of this is equally important if you've already got a business that's up
and running and that you you already have a range of of different products.
But to focus on on actually getting new things out the door, there's really three phases to product development that I would describe.
The first one is the generation of ideas. We all have ideas all at the time, and that's fantastic.
The more ideas you can have, the better.
There's a second phase that will come on to shortly, which is actually prioritising them in some sort of methodical way.
And then the third one is actually delivering on the top priority ideas.
There's no much there's nothing more to it than that. It isn't as scientific as it might appear.
There is quite a bit of art in it as well. But starting with i.t generation, then every every day all of us can we can be inspired to have ideas.
And, and for you as an entrepreneur looking to build your own business, it could well be the case that a great idea could come from a customer,
from a prospective customer, from a salesperson who's actually now interacting with them, from an engineer, from a designer.
It could come from your own divine inspiration when you're stuck in a traffic jam or having a shower.
It could actually come from your observation of competitors as well.
So there's there's a whole host of different areas where ideas can come from, which is probably nothing new to any of you.
But going on to the next slide, the most important thing is that you actually capture all of them.
Try not to dismiss anything out of hand. It is a very healthy experience to actually write them all down.
All the ideas that relate to your business or your chosen field of expertise and don't be don't be kind of bashful or ashamed of them,
even if some of them sound a bit crazy. Make them invisible.
And when I say make them visible, I mean make them visible to the people who are going to support you in your business venture.
I'm sure all of you have family and friends and people who who you would lean on to help you deliver your own vision for a business.
And so if if you have ideas, if they have ideas, make sure that you socialise them with them and just use a simple tool.
It could be, you know, just like a wiki page or something very simple where you can just keep a track of them.
And then the next step is getting them criticised, getting them deconstructed and then reconstructed to be even better.
So lots of lots of ideas that you may have. You might yourself quash them very quickly.
You might think and figure, well, actually it isn't going to work. Or you talk to a friend or family member, they give you some new insight.
That didn't occur to you that that's exactly what you want to do,
that so much value in not trying to be kind of a lone voice and trying to just do everything yourself.
I think the more people you can involve in the generation of ideas and the refinement of them, the better.
Now, if you're doing this, just stay focussed on what it is that you're trying to achieve.
Try not to get too hung up on how you're going to go about achieving it.
It's very easy to talk yourself out of something when you think through the logistics.
Well, how would I actually get that in front of customer X? Try and just keep in mind what the end objective is.
It could just be a very simple need that a customer has.
So something extremely simple, like they don't want to get stuck in a traffic jam or they want to be able to buy their coffee quicker, whatever it is.
Try try to just zoom in on, on, on the idea initially and watch what it is that your idea is going to solve.
You can come on to how are you actually going to do it later? And actually actually at that point, you may decide to discard it.
So you've got you've got hundreds of ideas rushing around everywhere.
How do you actually make any sense of them? Ideas can come in very different guises.
They can come as suggestions, they can come as requests, they can actually come as a demand.
You know, a salesperson may come to you and say, Look, Patrick, we need this feature.
If we don't get it within three months, we lose one of our biggest accounts.
What are you going to do about it? Equally, one of your own customers, you may have just set up your business.
You've got two, three initial customers. They're going to have a huge influence over your product roadmap.
So if they if they give you a suggestion, you are going to take it seriously.
So when you when you take the sum total of all of these ideas that are flying around,
you need to take a step back for a second and think you you have finite resources.
You're never going to have enough resource to do absolutely everything that the market can potentially support you.
You also always going to be under pressure to get things out the door quickly.
Your own time is valuable. So if you're trying to chase absolutely every single idea all of the time,
you're you're going to do you're not going to do justice to the really important ideas.
You're not going to execute as well on them. You have to prioritise.
And also, you know, in any customer, in any business is always going to expect a certain level of quality.
They're not really going to be that forgiving. If you turn around and say, well, you know, there's this great new piece of software that I developed.
I'm sorry, it's really buggy and it doesn't really work that well.
It's because I was working on three other ideas at the same time that they'll just walk away.
So business is riding on this.
So what I like to talk about now and try and help me with is how you can actually go about prioritising ideas using a simple framework.
And one, one very easy way to do this is to just score every single idea.
So you've got a nice long list. You've been through it with your friends and family or your business colleagues or partners.
You now can just go through each of these ideas and score them.
Now there are there are various different criteria that you could use, and that would depend on what your business is and what is important to you.
So, for instance, you could look at a given idea in terms of how much new revenue it's going to generate or how much revenue it's going to protect.
So if you already have five customers and all of them are asking for a given feature to make their lives easier, you might put a lot of stock in that.
Thirdly, if you haven't got any customers at all and you're looking to actually build, by the way,
you'll probably see a bit of a theme in a lot of this, which is kind of software related, and that's just my background, unfortunately.
So I'll try and give other practical examples as we go. But it's option is a key principle.
You may be looking not necessarily to be able to generate revenue initially,
but to simply foster wide adoption of whatever it is that you're trying to put out there.
Or fourthly, you might put a lot of stock in user experience.
How do people interact with this? To the point being that if if they have a very positive user experience,
they find it very easy to use that they're going to stick with your products, which is going to be a family.
So if you take all of these ideas and just assign them all a score, one being the lowest and five being the highest.
So I'll give you an example from my own world, a desktop search widget that you might want to integrate into a browser.
You might ask yourself, Does it generate new revenue? No.
I mean, would you pay money to to conduct a search?
I wouldn't. It's a completely ubiquitous tool.
But if it was really easy to use and and just presented itself in just the right place, where I tend to execute searches in my daily job then.
Then actually, yeah, I might, I might adopt that and use it quite widely.
So if I scored this new revenue score, was there a revenue protection score three?
Because it might keep me a bit closer to two to the product's adoption score five you know, if it was really usable, that that would rank highly.
So overall, you might just give an aggregate score to this idea of eight.
Going on to the next step, you then would look to school.
Okay, well, you've looked at the opportunity will next loan look at the cost and I would call that cost sort of complexity.
So you would tailor these criteria to your own business.
But it could be things like how much infrastructure is going to be involved in producing this thing,
how much time, whether your time or the time of the people in your business,
and how much resources are going to be required, how much of your production line or or your i.t infrastructure is going to be needed.
And again, just give it a low score one or a high score of five.
So in this desktop search widget, I could go and have a chat with Fred,
the guy in the technical group, and I could say to Fred, okay, what's the crap?
How difficult do you think it's going to be to produce this desktop widget?
He might say, Well, Patrick, pretty straightforward.
Of course, take about three weeks of development, but I'm the only one that can actually build this.
You should be aware of that. And pretty much all of my time at the moment is going into another product over there.
Okay. So if you want me to do this, I'm the only person that can do it,
then I'm going to have to stop something else, which could already be a very important piece of work.
So if we were then in this hypothetical example, trying to school, this would say, well, the infrastructure of school is pretty negligible.
Yeah, it would take a fair bit of French time, but nothing major.
But crucially, the opportunity cost of not doing something else would be quite significant.
So the school there would be nine. So how is this of any use?
You put nice little numbers into your spreadsheet.
If if if your business is characterised by a lot of ideas flying around lots of features and possible things that you might like to do,
I couldn't recommend this more because it will help you very quickly visualise where most of your focus should be going.
Now you can probably guess what you should be doing with stuff here in this bottom left hand corner, or rather starting over here.
Pretty much anything that you would put here, which is of a very high complexity, but have a very low value.
You should just immediately kill, stop. Don't spend any more time on it whatsoever.
It's a waste of your time equally over here.
Okay. These are the things to be quite concerned about because the things where you think is, well, you know, it's pretty easy.
I'm only spending, you know, 15 minutes a day on it.
It's not particularly complicated, but fundamentally it's not of any value.
So what you're trying to do with your business, it's not generating any extra income.
You should be very wary of of spotting these and stopping them as well.
Now, the things that are very high value and low complexity, obviously,
they're the things that you should be doing that hopefully the other things that you're already doing.
But you'll probably find I certainly find my job and see if this laser works now.
Okay. Now function. Most of my job is spent on that middle quadrant and in the top right trying to work out where something sits.
How valuable is it really? How complex is it?
And then and then looking to deliver on that. But hopefully you'll find this quite a simple tool to help guide your your thinking.
So we're now going to move on to sort of the next aspects of product development, which are called delivery.
Now, in everything I've said here, we've got nice, neat chunks like, you know,
you do you your idea generation, you come onto a delivery and you've already done your research beforehand.
Now, obviously, in the real world, you're probably doing all three of them at the same time.
But in any case, as you do move on to delivery, particularly in the world of not just software, but I suppose anything manufacturing related.
One could argue that there's two key sort of delivery methods, if you will, of development methods,
one being agile and the other one being more sort of predictive or waterfall.
All this means and there's a huge body of material on this. Many of you have probably already heard these terms before.
Basically, what agile as it is, is evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
What it means is that rather than going and sitting in a room on your own for two years,
trying to build the perfect machine that's going to take over the world, you actually say,
well, hold on, why don't I chop it up into into easy,
manageable deliverables and step by step release those those improvements to my customers in an incremental way.
There's various reasons why that is a sensible thing to do.
The first one is that you don't take a huge risk if it takes you two years to build something and get it in front of a customer.
The whole market might have moved on. The whole world might have moved on.
People sometimes are saying that about BlackBerry, for instance, at the moment, about some of the devices that they've been building.
They they haven't quite got that highly tuned sort of agile deployment methodology.
Some commentators argue at this point, whereas Apple have.
So it's first of all, it enables you to keep validating that you're in touch with your customers.
Also, it de-risk the whole project. But, you know, as the word suggests,
natural means that you could be three steps the way and you could completely
change direction and respond to to some change or trend in the marketplace.
So generally, agile is good. Lots of people would tell you that Agile is the only way, and for many, many things it is the only way.
However, I wouldn't ignore what I would refer to as predictive or waterfall delivery,
because for certain kinds of projects or tools, you actually need to do it this way.
I suppose one example would be something like the Channel Tunnel. I think that took about 15 years from start to finish.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, maybe it was more than that, but I think if you were to imagine the people who planned,
designed and started building the tunnel, imagine if they got halfway to France and then they suddenly decided,
Whoa, hold on, people don't need trains anymore. Maybe they just want to fly.
And then they just stopped and went off and built an airport. You might argue that that would have been a really stupid way to to behave.
And so what they would have done before they even put a shovel into the ground, as they would have planned every single stage of that entire project,
so that when they executed it,
they they minimised the scope for error and they were committed to it from the first moment that they actually started digging.
So the reason why I break this one out here is that certainly in the businesses that I've worked in,
in the news business and currently in the software and media business,
there's certain sort of foundations that you sometimes need to build before you can then be iterative and agile.
And it's worth bearing in mind. So those are the pros and cons on the on trial approach.
You can adapt to market changes very swiftly. The waterfall approach often is suited better suited to delivering sort of major step changes.
Any questions on on any of that? 15 laughs.
Okay. Is that a speed it up? Okay. Stakeholder engagement.
This is as you sort of embark on the actual nuts and bolts work of delivering whatever your product is.
Make sure that you you engage with the right people at the right steps in that process.
It may sound a bit formulaic and bureaucratic,
and it's actually great to just sit down with a prospective customer and say, Hey, this is what you asked for.
This is what you're going to get. And they're like, Yeah, great.
You know, that's that's a successful interaction to have a really horrible interaction to have as you have a conversation with a customer,
you go off and build something. You come back to them a year later and go to dinner and they're like, No, I don't want that.
I actually meant red. And you've delivered green.
So always checking at every step is always a good thing to do and being really measured about when you actually put something in front of customers.
You know, you may be well sort of advised to come up with a test panel before you actually do a much wider launch.
You only get one chance to make a first impression. So you might want to think very carefully about doing a huge sort of launch without
having validated it maybe on just 100 sample users just to kind of kick the tires,
so to speak. Okay. So to summarise product development, you've got the three phases of idea generation prioritisation delivery.
You're going to be doing all of them at the same time, but just trying every now and then,
just take a step back and try and recognise which bits of work.
Force yourself to make decisions,
try not leave things to later unless you absolutely have to and share those decisions and the reasoning behind them with your stakeholders.
Now that that could again be your friends or family,
it could be your bank manager or whoever is whoever's actually got a significant interest in your business, such as your customer.
Doing this will create a virtuous circle it really well.
And rather than you being a business that has one great product and then disappears,
you might actually become a business that constantly innovates and stays in touch with its customers as a result.
Okay. Marketing communications, we're going to be quite quick. I think we've got 10 minutes.
So this is a huge topic, a massive topic.
You could do a whole seven lecture course purely on this alone.
So I'm going to try and be as simplistic as I possibly can.
What is marketing communication? It's the promotion bits of marketing.
Well, what is marketing?
The the most simplistic way of describing it is, I suppose the the the old adage of the four PS of price place promotion and products.
This is effectively the promotion pitch in that very classical definition.
So how is it done? I think most of you probably know this.
You have something called direct marketing to begin with, which is targeted, trackable and measurable.
Okay. What that means is that if you spend £10 on some direct marketing, you stand a pretty good chance of understanding.
Well, what actually happened with that? £10, like any sales, how many people saw it?
Where did it go? These are things that that you would find useful, mass appetising.
Generally, the focus is on building and maintaining brand awareness.
So for instance, take someone like Coca Cola, you know,
the economics of their business is that they're trying to serve pretty much billions of people.
They're not going to necessarily try and have a 1 to 1 dialogue with you through a direct marketing campaign,
although obviously they do do direct marketing. At the same time,
a huge amount of their budget goes into banner ads on the side of motorways adverts at peak time on TV to just keep that brand awareness going.
So they're not able at this point to track that usage.
And then thirdly, you've got public relations. Now, in a nutshell, I often look at it and other people might disagree, but what is PR?
PR is basically generating a maximising free editorial coverage for your business.
So so that could be that could be anything that could be you appearing on a radio show talking about your business as a subject matter expert.
If you had a, for instance, a product that dealt with helping people find jobs, you might be well minded to contact local radio stations and say,
hey, would you find it useful if I came on to your radio show as a as a talking head to talk on your overall economics morning programme?
And what that would do is the way they would get editorial value out of you coming in because presumably, you know, your sector,
you would get value out of it because people would just hear the name of your business,
the name of your products, and they would get familiar with you as an individual.
You'd come across as an expert. So, you know, you're at a very simple level.
That's what PR us.
So in terms of the tools that that you can actually use then to to market your your products, you should be aware of all of these social media,
search marketing, TV advertising, outdoor display prints, advertising,
telesales mailings and get face to face selling, which should never be underestimated.
So given the constraints of time, I thought it might be of use.
Just to talk very briefly about the top two. On the assumption that most of you are probably relatively familiar with the others,
and also that I assume as a start up, you're going to be pretty unlikely to want to invest in television advertising.
In fact, I would go as far as to discourage you very strongly from from doing that.
And actually where most of your money could be wisely spent would be in search marketing.
And I'll explain why in a moment. Before before I come on to that, though, it could be worth also focusing a bit on PR,
because this is another cost effective way of getting your name out there, getting your product known and getting you as an individual well name.
That's really what it's all about. Now, you can obviously employ a PR agency to do all of this for you.
There are some extremely capable agencies around, but obviously they expect to get paid.
And so another way of approaching this, in the early days of your business,
they should just focus on your first few customers and just treat them extremely well.
This will actually lead to referrals. They will talk about the good experience they had with you to other people that they know.
And those people will hopefully come to you and you treat them well.
And it goes and that's that's the nice image that you really want to sort of create.
So treating them well could be as simple as just turning up on time, you know, returning their calls promptly.
Or just giving them more than they were originally expecting.
Now that that,
you know in business you often find you can you deal with people some people though you know they'll quote your price so deliver that do a good job.
And you know, if you ask for a few changes here and there, they want lots more money to deal with that.
And you can someone who that's not very flexible occasionally you deal with people who will
just they will always just go that extra step and you remember that and you value that.
And I think all of you know what I mean. You've probably had interactions in your daily life and in a shop or, you know,
someone fixing your car and they actually bothered to just go that extra step and then try and sort of penalise you for it.
That's the kind of image that you really want to cultivate.
Also, just make sure that you have a clear and consistent brand identity. People really do.
And I was guilty of this when I set my own sort of translation business up.
I spent hours and days and weeks trying to come up with this brand, and I was designing it and trying to come up with a perfect colour and everything.
I mean, just just come up with something that's pretty good. It doesn't have to be perfect.
You can always like you can just change your brand in the future, but whatever it is,
make sure it's clear and it's consistent and it's actually appropriate to the business that you were in.
You know, lots of bright, crazy colours might not be appropriate for a financial services product.
The opposite might be true for something in the sporting world. You don't want something dour and uninteresting, so have that clear identity.
Then build up your reputation as an expert in your field and then think of doing
something attention grabbing to attract positive media attention to your business.
Now it would be quite easy to come up with a really cool idea to attract attention that would be negative.
It goes without saying that you don't want to do that, but just thinking think laterally.
How could how kids, how could you create a newsworthy event or a bit of local interest in your business and then just do it?
Yeah, that's really what PR agencies come in and do for you.
If you've got a bit of imagination, you can do it yourself.
Going on to social media, probably.
I'm already beginning to feel a bit old, but probably looking at many of you in this room, you're probably much more debt that using it than I am.
But in a nutshell, where where I have personally and professionally seeing sort of social media actually help build a business is is I mean,
just looking at some of the main sites certainly linked to and it's a fantastic way of establishing a reputation if that's important in your business,
if you as an individual actually are the business, I don't know if you're looking to set up some sort of consultancy or if if you know,
the your core product is is quite sort of intellectual in nature and you actually
need to establish a reputation link in is a really good way to do that get on there,
connect with people, answer questions as a feature in it where you can go in and answer questions.
It's a great way to show how clever you are, how much of a growth you have on your industry.
Twitter can be used for a whole plethora of things,
but one of the most interesting case studies I ever saw was it being used as a kind of a customer service tool.
I think they'll use it quite, quite significantly, just the you know,
the short form keeping people updated about a dynamic, dynamically changing service.
There was some case study about these guys that set up a hot dog business in l.a.
And the way they were pitching it was people coming out of nightclubs at like two or three in the morning.
They say, these guys, you set this business up,
they they actually wanted to come up with nutritional feed that people actually want to eat that isn't going to give them a heart attack.
And so the way that they came up with marketing this was actually through Twitter
because they would always be they'd be in a van and then go driving around l.a.
And they could be anywhere at any given time. So they'd just keep tweeting what their location was and crucially where they were going to go next.
And what they would find is that every car part that they turned up to after a month or two doing this,
it was just thousands of people who were queuing up, trying to buy, buy their hot dogs.
So I think, you know, looking at the nuances of how these different social media products work,
you might actually think, oh, hold on, that that could actually be quite useful for my business and obviously Facebook,
that the sort of engagement that are engendered in the fact that far and away more than any other network more people are on,
it can be used to leverage referrals to drive sales.
And you can do all of this, broadly speaking, next to no cost.
Now, of course, if you want to start developing a Facebook app to promote your product, well, you need to get a developer in to do that.
That is going to cost money, but the other two have has cost you any money.
So and if you're not already signed up, I would just get signed up and start interacting with people and get out there with your audience.
5 minutes. Great. Feels like it's actually going to be on time.
Okay, so this this is the last piece that I wanted to talk you guys through is a slightly kind of convoluted slide,
but we've talked a bit about social media,
which talks about PR and coming back to this central point of giving you
hopefully cost effective practical ideas that you can actually go out and use.
I you know, it probably goes without saying that you need a website because that website is at the centre of everything that I've just described.
So if you're on your radio station talking about your products, if you know,
if people then kind of get great, I want to find out about Patrick Moore's product.
They go on to the Internet and they can't find anything to do with that.
Then you're you know, you've really lost an opportunity there, so you just need a website.
It goes without saying, a shop window. So get one.
I want one simple check. If, if, if coding isn't your forte, if you don't want to spend money on bringing in and develop it for you.
And if you feel that your business doesn't need to have a perfectly designed, distinctive website for that, you just need a web presence.
I would suggest people like one and one. So one ampersand, one hosting.
There's other companies that do this, not just one and one, but they have.
So these are templates very actually very easy to customise if you don't have any sort of technical understanding.
And they're pretty cheap as well. If you put them up, you could be up and running.
So get the website. Then once you've got the website, you actually need to build a presence around that website.
And what that basically means is it needs people needs to be able to find it when they search for it.
So if you're the this hot dog business in L.A., you could call your website whatever you want.
But if someone searches for nutritional hot dogs after a nightclub, you want your website to appear at the top of the list.
You don't want to be sort of two pages back. So how do you do that?
How do you get up in the rankings? Well, that's one way thing.
It's the good old fashioned classic way. How do I get my natural search engine ranking off?
And it's something that can become sort of a bit of a kind of a fetish, if you will.
I found that when I say my business every day, I'll check like, oh, it's gone up, it's gone up too.
And and that made me excited because what that actually translates into is, in effect, free traffic,
the high up you are, the more likely someone's going to click on that and go through.
However, it is actually quite painstaking and time consuming, and Google's algorithm and other search engines algorithms are constantly changing.
So if you do get to the number one spot, you've got to work really hard to stay there.
So another way of doing it by the traffic in and what I mean by that,
if you look at the left hand screen print the section that I put the green box around,
most of you are probably perfectly aware of this already, but if anyone is. These are actually paid adverts.
When you're on any search engine, either on the right hand side or along the top,
you have sponsored links and basically you pay Google whatever you bid.
According to how popular these links are, it could cost one PIA Click five P template.
But you can you can ensure that you get traffic to your website and that people
match with the search terms are looking for and you can pay for that now.
Yes, it costs money that you can control that spend.
So you can say, look, I, I only want to spend £10 a day or £10 a week or £100 a month, no more.
And Google will not charge you any more. What that will mean is that you'll get less presentations of that, but you can very easily control a budget.
And I think, you know someone who is embarking on a new business.
Budgeting is obviously extremely important.
So that's that's one very practical tool I would give to you is just use something like AdWords, MSN, how much similar to Yahoo!
Or all of them do and make sure that you control that budget carefully.
Don't forget that, because I once went into it, went absolutely crazy and spent like about £700 in one day before realising what I'd done.
And so you need to be careful with that. Another way, again, just being cost effective.
So you got your site on the right hand side.
So I feel like I'm selling Google, which isn't actually my my job, but they have something called AdSense.
Does anyone know what that is in here? Yeah.
Yeah. I think a lot of people probably may not have heard of it then.
AdSense is basically if you've got your own website, you could say that you're a publisher, okay,
you have your hot dog website and you can actually put other people's adverts on your website.
So in addition to paying to put them on the Google search results to get the people to your site,
you could put other people's ads on your own site and then they go off somewhere else.
Now, in the world of online traffic observation, you're never going to keep happy when it comes to your site.
I mean, you know, it's like. You jump around, you go to 100 different sites in a given day.
So why don't you monetise some of that traffic?
So if you're already paying for people to come to your your website that you've paid good money to Google for,
a certain proportion of those people are going to be interested in your product they might actually buy.
But for those people who who either aren't interested aren't going to buy immediately,
why not put relevant adverts to other people's products on your site?
Why do that? Well, you you generate cash from that.
If someone clicks on one of those adverts or you're on your site,
you might get a penny that or half a to people and you can use that to offset the actual traffic that you're buying in.
It won't you know, it may not make a huge difference, but it could just make that little contribution to your bottom line.
Okay. So that is search and online marketing.
So that kind of brings to bring to a close the marketing communications and that's all.
So thank you for your time and good luck and Merry Christmas.