1 00:00:00,300 --> 00:00:02,460 So thank you for coming this evening. 2 00:00:02,940 --> 00:00:09,660 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. 3 00:00:10,740 --> 00:00:15,720 Everything that I'm going to talk through now, I've tried to generalise it and simplify it as much as possible. 4 00:00:16,260 --> 00:00:23,190 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, 5 00:00:23,190 --> 00:00:29,460 but maybe certain things may not apply to any business idea that you have now that you have in the future. 6 00:00:29,700 --> 00:00:35,790 But I hope that it will give you a good sort of basis upon which to think about marketing and product development. 7 00:00:37,320 --> 00:00:45,059 So in terms of outcomes from this session, there's really three major things that I want to talk about. 8 00:00:45,060 --> 00:00:49,530 And I would like you to walk out of this lecture theatre with a pretty good understanding 9 00:00:49,530 --> 00:00:55,710 of and that is on first and foremost research how to you go about doing it, 10 00:00:55,800 --> 00:01:00,600 what you really need to do versus everything that you could possibly do. 11 00:01:01,080 --> 00:01:04,380 We're going to try and practically focus on essential research. 12 00:01:04,860 --> 00:01:11,700 Then once you've researched the markets or the products or the opportunity that you're looking to exploit, 13 00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:17,549 how do you then take that well-researched idea and actually deliver it into a 14 00:01:17,550 --> 00:01:21,750 tangible product or service that people are going to want to actually buy? 15 00:01:23,060 --> 00:01:29,050 So that's the delivery part. And then when I use the word markets, I mean marketing. 16 00:01:29,090 --> 00:01:37,040 How can you then take this this finished? Well, research products that functions correctly and that people want and that people want to buy. 17 00:01:37,250 --> 00:01:44,420 How can you actually let people know that it exists? How can you get people excited about it and actually want to buy it? 18 00:01:44,720 --> 00:01:48,560 Now, that sounds to me like quite a tall order for 45 minutes. 19 00:01:48,800 --> 00:01:52,880 So as you'll see, I will be pretty brief as we go through. 20 00:01:53,090 --> 00:01:57,080 So in a nutshell, we're going to look to grasp the basics of market research, 21 00:01:57,620 --> 00:02:06,560 to understand what the role of products is, to help you to have simple tools for focusing on the right ideas. 22 00:02:07,560 --> 00:02:11,250 Delivering them effectively and then marketing them successfully. 23 00:02:12,030 --> 00:02:16,380 So the first sort of part of this will be market research. 24 00:02:17,520 --> 00:02:21,870 I know we all know what market research is. Presumably all of you being stopped in the street. 25 00:02:22,800 --> 00:02:27,600 Or have avoided being stopped in the street and have walked straight past someone asking you questions. 26 00:02:27,840 --> 00:02:30,750 That's obviously one part of market research and there's many others. 27 00:02:31,140 --> 00:02:42,300 So in terms of an introduction, then it is quite simply the gathering and analysis of information in order to qualify or identify opportunities. 28 00:02:42,690 --> 00:02:48,840 So what that doesn't mean is that market research is something that you use to prove that your idea is is great. 29 00:02:49,180 --> 00:02:54,959 It could actually be something that shows you, well, in fact, maybe my idea isn't quite right. 30 00:02:54,960 --> 00:03:01,290 Maybe I need to adjust it. Maybe I should ditch the whole thing and go and find something new. 31 00:03:01,560 --> 00:03:08,610 So market research would very much be used as a kind of a gate post as you look to progress your your venture. 32 00:03:09,540 --> 00:03:14,430 But in other respects, it can also help you once you are fully up and running any product. 33 00:03:14,440 --> 00:03:17,610 Some of the products that I manage at the moment and have managed in my career, 34 00:03:18,630 --> 00:03:23,550 whether heavyweight research or just light touch analysis of what our customers are doing. 35 00:03:23,910 --> 00:03:31,680 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. 36 00:03:33,100 --> 00:03:40,899 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? 37 00:03:40,900 --> 00:03:45,130 What kind of they drive? What sports do they like? What football team do they support? 38 00:03:45,430 --> 00:03:51,330 You can market research can help you effectively build up a persona if who your customer is. 39 00:03:52,390 --> 00:03:59,020 It can also, depending on how you approach it, can help you understand what is their propensity to actually buy something you might. 40 00:03:59,560 --> 00:04:02,710 Many of us here could probably think of a hundred things that we would like to have, 41 00:04:03,340 --> 00:04:08,260 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. 42 00:04:09,340 --> 00:04:13,510 So part of your research needs to think about that very practically. 43 00:04:13,780 --> 00:04:22,480 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. 44 00:04:22,570 --> 00:04:26,260 So you've you've qualified your idea. You know how you're going to sell it, see? 45 00:04:27,190 --> 00:04:32,020 But you need to think, okay, well how am I going to price it relative to the competition, 46 00:04:32,950 --> 00:04:37,780 relative to the cost of my raw materials, relative to the cost of distribution and so on? 47 00:04:38,020 --> 00:04:44,110 So and then the last one obviously is just how can you benchmark with the competition so that you know where you fit in, 48 00:04:44,620 --> 00:04:47,620 whether your product is completely brand new and game changing, 49 00:04:47,860 --> 00:04:54,290 who you might be looking to go into what is already a competitive field so all of this can qualify your opportunity. 50 00:04:54,290 --> 00:04:57,609 Also, as I said, it could disqualify your opportunity. 51 00:04:57,610 --> 00:05:08,760 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. 52 00:05:08,770 --> 00:05:14,649 I think any of you or any of us who kind of work in it, if you've worked in business, 53 00:05:14,650 --> 00:05:21,129 if you've done a job for any sort of corporate organisation, you've probably unconsciously done market research. 54 00:05:21,130 --> 00:05:26,530 You might have had a conversation with a customer, you might have had a discussion with a sales person, 55 00:05:26,710 --> 00:05:30,850 you might have been involved in engineering the products of that company. 56 00:05:31,060 --> 00:05:36,370 And in so doing, you are actually involved to some extent in what you could call market research. 57 00:05:36,640 --> 00:05:44,290 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. 58 00:05:44,560 --> 00:05:48,790 One way of doing this, it's just these seven steps that are defined here. 59 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:53,110 Now, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm in the company of very experienced academics, 60 00:05:53,110 --> 00:05:59,380 and many of you are probably research professionals who who who know exactly what research is. 61 00:05:59,530 --> 00:06:04,300 But for those of you that are doing this, this is just designed to be a very quick introduction. 62 00:06:04,510 --> 00:06:10,139 So first off, define the opportunity or define what the problem is. 63 00:06:10,140 --> 00:06:17,620 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? 64 00:06:17,890 --> 00:06:23,410 Equally, if you already have a product that's powerful and live in the marketplace, 65 00:06:23,650 --> 00:06:30,190 you may be looking to improve its performance in some way, whatever it is that you're trying to achieve with this research. 66 00:06:30,460 --> 00:06:37,480 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. 67 00:06:37,480 --> 00:06:46,090 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 68 00:06:46,090 --> 00:06:49,740 you've had out there for some time that hasn't been performing as you ultimately want, 69 00:06:50,170 --> 00:06:57,930 want it to, or you may be looking to boost the usage or uptake of something that is well known and is well publicised. 70 00:06:57,940 --> 00:07:05,910 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. 71 00:07:06,300 --> 00:07:10,410 The next step really is to to set yourself some realistic objectives. 72 00:07:11,730 --> 00:07:14,219 Again, depending on what it is that you're trying to do, 73 00:07:14,220 --> 00:07:22,010 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, 74 00:07:22,320 --> 00:07:30,750 whatever it might be, look at that overall goal and and ensure that you have objectives that are going to help you achieve that. 75 00:07:31,050 --> 00:07:35,160 But that also crucially map to what your resources are. 76 00:07:36,060 --> 00:07:41,700 You can say to yourself, Well, I've got this new soft drink and I want to knock Coca Cola off the top spot. 77 00:07:42,630 --> 00:07:48,450 But you're going to need billions in advertising spend in order to achieve that which possibly you don't have. 78 00:07:48,930 --> 00:07:54,510 Equally, you should also think about Alright, well, if your objective is X, 79 00:07:54,520 --> 00:08:00,360 if your objective is to introduce a new product into the marketplace and be profitable within two or three years. 80 00:08:00,360 --> 00:08:05,579 And I think you guys have already done good, solid lectures on, on certain aspects of that. 81 00:08:05,580 --> 00:08:10,100 The financial side of this, then you might say to yourself, well what therefore working out, 82 00:08:10,110 --> 00:08:15,930 what do I actually need, what do I need to achieve in terms of gross sales or gross profit margin? 83 00:08:16,140 --> 00:08:23,520 And then working back from that, you might be able to use that to establish a budget that is sensible. 84 00:08:23,700 --> 00:08:28,110 Many businesses and this is a statistic that I Googled only three days ago, 85 00:08:28,350 --> 00:08:36,690 but many small to medium sized businesses tend to on average, invest about 2% of their gross sales in research. 86 00:08:36,930 --> 00:08:40,979 Now, of course, if you were in a business that was extremely research intensive, 87 00:08:40,980 --> 00:08:47,970 it would be a lot more equally if if formal formalised research wasn't really that necessary, it would be a lot less. 88 00:08:48,150 --> 00:08:55,560 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, 89 00:08:55,950 --> 00:09:00,510 don't be afraid to put your hand up and I will endeavour to answer your question. 90 00:09:00,720 --> 00:09:09,030 So moving on to the third step in market research, this is really to select what research approach you need to take. 91 00:09:09,900 --> 00:09:16,440 Effectively, there are two types that there is primary original research that you would undertake yourself. 92 00:09:16,440 --> 00:09:22,620 It's completely greenfield and new, and you can do that exactly according to your requirements. 93 00:09:23,250 --> 00:09:27,510 Or you can use secondary research where someone else or some other organisation 94 00:09:27,810 --> 00:09:33,390 has already gone out and explored the topic that you are interested in. 95 00:09:33,600 --> 00:09:37,610 Now, usually secondary research isn't going to give you exactly what you want. 96 00:09:37,980 --> 00:09:41,459 Usually, if it does give you exactly what you want, 97 00:09:41,460 --> 00:09:45,600 then you would be mad not to use that secondary research because someone else has done it 98 00:09:45,600 --> 00:09:50,670 is likely to be a lot cheaper than then going and employing a market research company. 99 00:09:51,630 --> 00:09:55,050 Often you may want to do a little bit, a little bit of both. 100 00:09:55,620 --> 00:09:58,080 And again, this will depend on your choice. 101 00:09:59,430 --> 00:10:04,920 You know, you will base your choice on what your objectives actually were in the first place and what your budget is. 102 00:10:05,220 --> 00:10:09,180 For my own part, I when I set up a translation, Start-Up, 103 00:10:09,480 --> 00:10:20,340 which was based on giving initially French people an English CV that was completely audited and checked by a native English speaker, 104 00:10:20,340 --> 00:10:26,790 so that when they applied for jobs in the UK that they presented themselves well without silly grammatical errors. 105 00:10:27,880 --> 00:10:31,880 I could have gone to Paris and stopped people in the street and said, Hey, do you need. 106 00:10:32,670 --> 00:10:39,149 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, 107 00:10:39,150 --> 00:10:46,290 I would have come to the same conclusion as simply going on to Google onto that back end search tool. 108 00:10:46,320 --> 00:10:53,040 And actually just look how many people are actually searching for English correct CV or equivalent phrases in French. 109 00:10:53,310 --> 00:10:57,680 And then from that I was able to say, Well, yeah, there's definitely a market here that was good enough for me. 110 00:10:57,690 --> 00:11:04,499 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. 111 00:11:04,500 --> 00:11:11,190 How could you get the information that you need in order to determine whether your opportunity is actually going to succeed? 112 00:11:11,430 --> 00:11:17,820 How could you get it cheaply and quickly without necessarily having to bring in a marketing company to do it for you? 113 00:11:20,700 --> 00:11:27,540 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. 114 00:11:27,930 --> 00:11:31,260 Your next step then would be to design a questionnaire. 115 00:11:31,300 --> 00:11:39,030 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. 116 00:11:39,540 --> 00:11:43,890 Now, a question to all. All of us have done questionnaires before. 117 00:11:44,520 --> 00:11:47,790 I've done some good ones. I've done some pretty average ones. 118 00:11:47,790 --> 00:11:52,140 And I've completed a bunch of I don't mean done. I mean I've completed other people have done them. 119 00:11:52,440 --> 00:11:55,920 I have also completed ones that are pretty cool. 120 00:11:56,250 --> 00:12:03,329 I will never forget a questionnaire that I was asked to complete about four years ago where one of the questions asked me. 121 00:12:03,330 --> 00:12:10,920 It said, You know, if you are blind, click here. And for the life of me I can't work out what it was. 122 00:12:10,920 --> 00:12:15,930 Someone then subsequently did tell me that their answer and this is a web based survey. 123 00:12:15,930 --> 00:12:17,880 Somebody did tell me there are certain browsers, 124 00:12:18,120 --> 00:12:26,429 obviously for visually impaired people that can enable you to sort of be prompted with an audible statement that says, 125 00:12:26,430 --> 00:12:31,710 click here, and it will actually just describe the words in the browser to hopefully that that's what it was. 126 00:12:32,010 --> 00:12:35,730 But in any case, what a questionnaire must be is clear and simple. 127 00:12:37,230 --> 00:12:40,830 You need to give obvious instructions for completing it. 128 00:12:41,520 --> 00:12:47,280 Whenever any of us do a questionnaire. I would take a guess that most of you try to do it as quickly as possible. 129 00:12:47,430 --> 00:12:52,920 Unless it's a matter of really dear to your heart, then you might actually sit down and really carefully think about it. 130 00:12:53,220 --> 00:12:58,350 But generally, if you're walking down the street on a Saturday afternoon, particularly at this time of year, 131 00:12:58,620 --> 00:13:03,120 somebody comes up and asks you to fill out a questionnaire and you feel obliged to do so. 132 00:13:03,370 --> 00:13:06,420 You're going to want to be pretty quick and you going to want to get on your way. 133 00:13:06,570 --> 00:13:10,350 So bear that in mind, particularly if you're thinking of some sort of consumer products. 134 00:13:11,310 --> 00:13:14,400 Keep it keep it simple and give clear instructions. 135 00:13:14,790 --> 00:13:18,750 Also start general and then get really specific. 136 00:13:19,440 --> 00:13:26,340 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. 137 00:13:26,610 --> 00:13:32,550 I think you need to warm people up before you actually get to the really specific questions, 138 00:13:32,820 --> 00:13:36,690 the wording of the questions, try and keep them as concise and to the point as possible. 139 00:13:37,590 --> 00:13:46,920 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. 140 00:13:48,930 --> 00:13:53,880 Try to use a mix of open ended, multiple choice and close questions. 141 00:13:54,660 --> 00:14:00,540 You'll find that that gives you a good balance of both qualitative and quantitative feedback. 142 00:14:00,570 --> 00:14:06,180 Now, again, depending on what it is that you're trying to achieve with your business and your products, 143 00:14:06,480 --> 00:14:16,260 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. 144 00:14:16,440 --> 00:14:20,969 And a statistical anomaly will come on to the analysis part in a second. 145 00:14:20,970 --> 00:14:25,260 But when you do actually come to crunch all of the data that comes back from something like this, 146 00:14:25,560 --> 00:14:32,610 if you've only got quantitative multiple choice answers and you get some oddball responses that just don't seem to add up, 147 00:14:33,990 --> 00:14:37,410 that can be quite frustrating if you haven't got anything qualitative to fall back on, 148 00:14:37,530 --> 00:14:44,220 which might actually be someone actually writing an explanation as to why they've they've answered that multiple choice in a different way. 149 00:14:44,430 --> 00:14:48,390 And often those sort of insights are absolutely crucial. They're like gold dust. 150 00:14:49,860 --> 00:14:55,050 Rather than just relying purely on on their radio button choices. 151 00:14:55,320 --> 00:14:59,940 Equally close questions are good as well, where you actually force the respondents to say yes or no. 152 00:15:00,390 --> 00:15:04,709 You know, do you think train fare increases are good? 153 00:15:04,710 --> 00:15:08,760 Yes or no? I can imagine what the answer to that one is going to be generally. 154 00:15:09,060 --> 00:15:17,010 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. 155 00:15:17,010 --> 00:15:19,710 You've used this balance of different kinds of question. 156 00:15:20,640 --> 00:15:30,450 I would strongly recommend that you actually test it before committing your time or your money or both in a significant proportion. 157 00:15:30,690 --> 00:15:34,830 And what that could be is something as simple as you get the questionnaire and you run it by 158 00:15:35,220 --> 00:15:41,130 six family members or five friends who who know absolutely nothing about your business at all, 159 00:15:41,460 --> 00:15:46,530 put it in front of them and see whether they can navigate this questionnaire, see if they get stuck. 160 00:15:46,620 --> 00:15:51,899 Actually, watch them sit over their shoulder and see if they sort of have to reread certain 161 00:15:51,900 --> 00:15:56,580 questions that will help you understand whether actually you need to tweak a few things. 162 00:15:56,790 --> 00:16:02,280 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. 163 00:16:02,550 --> 00:16:09,300 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, 164 00:16:10,520 --> 00:16:14,310 a minor and not major. And then lastly, 165 00:16:14,520 --> 00:16:22,860 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. 166 00:16:23,070 --> 00:16:28,260 I mean, a leading question is something that unconsciously rules susceptible susceptibility. 167 00:16:28,530 --> 00:16:34,890 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. 168 00:16:35,250 --> 00:16:39,360 Now you may be thinking to yourself, I'm going to make this succeed at all costs. 169 00:16:39,690 --> 00:16:44,430 And you might actually write questions that actually give you the answers that you want to hear. 170 00:16:45,670 --> 00:16:48,760 Rather than giving you the answers that you need to hear. 171 00:16:49,360 --> 00:16:57,550 So I think you need to be very, very conscious of your own ability to put bias into questions to generate favourable answers. 172 00:16:58,210 --> 00:17:06,460 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. 173 00:17:07,150 --> 00:17:09,940 If it's unanswerable, then obviously it's a waste of time. 174 00:17:10,180 --> 00:17:15,760 Two questions in one could be something like, you know, do you like chocolate and vanilla ice cream? 175 00:17:15,820 --> 00:17:21,670 Well, what if you only like one? If the answer is only yes or no, then, then, then you're stuck. 176 00:17:23,390 --> 00:17:28,200 Okay. Going on to the next step back one. Collecting the data. 177 00:17:29,180 --> 00:17:36,770 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, 178 00:17:36,800 --> 00:17:42,230 not only in the writing of the question, but in the asking of that, is to actually use professional researchers. 179 00:17:43,410 --> 00:17:48,360 Goes back to the point I made just now, and they have no emotional attachment to your product or your business. 180 00:17:48,930 --> 00:17:53,490 So they're more likely to ask the questions in an objective way. 181 00:17:54,250 --> 00:18:05,489 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. 182 00:18:05,490 --> 00:18:09,330 That costs money and an alternative way of doing it. 183 00:18:09,420 --> 00:18:13,920 Again, depending on the product or service that you're trying to use would be an online survey. 184 00:18:14,730 --> 00:18:20,760 Now it's a lot cheaper. You don't have to worry about sort of flagging someone down in the street. 185 00:18:21,180 --> 00:18:25,830 However, you generally are going to need to put that survey in front of a lot more people 186 00:18:26,100 --> 00:18:29,820 in order to encourage people to actually bother to click through and complete it. 187 00:18:29,940 --> 00:18:31,710 Now, of course, you can incentivise. 188 00:18:33,380 --> 00:18:39,740 People to complete that survey, but that it is generally a cheaper method now if you are going to do an online survey. 189 00:18:41,180 --> 00:18:45,200 This is a shameless plug. It's only because I've used them and I find it quite, quite simple. 190 00:18:45,410 --> 00:18:51,650 There's something called SurveyMonkey. They have a free version, so you can actually do a free online survey right now. 191 00:18:51,680 --> 00:18:55,280 Won't cost you anything. I think it will limit you, I believe, 192 00:18:55,280 --> 00:18:58,870 to the number of responses that you can get anything more than 200 and they'll 193 00:18:58,880 --> 00:19:03,950 charge you that that's something right off the shelf now that you could use. 194 00:19:05,770 --> 00:19:09,759 So you've you've executed the survey, you've done it yourself. 195 00:19:09,760 --> 00:19:13,390 You've used a market research firm or you've executed it online. 196 00:19:14,620 --> 00:19:19,420 You then need to analyse the data and try and draw conclusions from it. 197 00:19:19,990 --> 00:19:26,559 So firstly, you may need to sort of edit there could be some obvious cases where someone's kind of half filled it in 198 00:19:26,560 --> 00:19:30,310 or they've just filled it in in a way that they haven't actually given any thought to the questions. 199 00:19:30,670 --> 00:19:34,420 And you'll probably be able to observe that somebody has just done. Yes, yes, yes. 200 00:19:34,420 --> 00:19:39,610 All the way down, no qualitative input at all. You might feel and this would be your choice, 201 00:19:39,610 --> 00:19:46,630 that you might want to remove them from the respondent pool because they're clearly not not really adding any insights. 202 00:19:47,560 --> 00:19:53,320 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. 203 00:19:54,370 --> 00:19:57,939 Then with those answers that were quantifiable. 204 00:19:57,940 --> 00:20:02,110 So ones that were possibly multiple choice, you know, strongly agree, strongly disagree. 205 00:20:02,530 --> 00:20:09,550 Somewhere in the middle, you can you can easily crunch that information in Excel and come up with some interesting statistics. 206 00:20:10,770 --> 00:20:16,770 You can then separate out the subjective information. So this is the stuff that people have actually written that's unstructured. 207 00:20:17,790 --> 00:20:21,840 But crucially, the third is what does all of this really mean? 208 00:20:22,500 --> 00:20:24,360 And that only you can do that. 209 00:20:24,390 --> 00:20:30,330 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? 210 00:20:30,690 --> 00:20:35,820 Now, if you're very lucky, it tells you, great. This is a this is a fantastic opportunity. 211 00:20:35,940 --> 00:20:39,120 And there's even more interest out there than I originally thought possible. 212 00:20:39,480 --> 00:20:45,630 Or it might say to you, Well, why is it that there isn't quite as much interest as I originally thought? 213 00:20:45,990 --> 00:20:51,930 So you really need to probe and read between the lines on that information. 214 00:20:53,390 --> 00:21:01,190 Which brings us onto the last step, which is once you have established the conclusions to achieve that research. 215 00:21:01,640 --> 00:21:08,690 Well, great, that's nice. But you've actually got to do something with it and apply these findings to your business. 216 00:21:08,990 --> 00:21:12,559 So this this could encourage you to do a number of things. 217 00:21:12,560 --> 00:21:21,710 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. 218 00:21:22,250 --> 00:21:25,310 This needs to be changed in order for me to be successful. 219 00:21:25,820 --> 00:21:31,250 That's one. Another one. It might actually make you think I need to discount this products. 220 00:21:31,460 --> 00:21:32,630 And it could well have been. 221 00:21:32,680 --> 00:21:40,530 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. 222 00:21:40,550 --> 00:21:44,210 Was it the price? Was it the way that you were distributing it? 223 00:21:44,540 --> 00:21:50,780 It may well be that after that research, you come to the conclusion that it's no longer viable to continue with that product. 224 00:21:51,440 --> 00:21:57,139 Either way, you need to make a decision. The third one might just be that you need to change your marketing activities. 225 00:21:57,140 --> 00:22:03,860 Your research might show you that most of your customers are actually in Oxford, but all of your marketing spend has been in London. 226 00:22:04,730 --> 00:22:13,340 If that was the case, then it would be hopefully a relatively straightforward case of therefore changing the focus of your marketing activities. 227 00:22:13,860 --> 00:22:17,090 Well, last but not least, you may need to alter your prices. 228 00:22:17,120 --> 00:22:23,960 Now, it may sound counterintuitive, but that actually may mean increasing your prices, not necessarily decreasing them. 229 00:22:24,260 --> 00:22:29,780 It just depends on on your analysis of that research and obviously your overall financial management of the company. 230 00:22:30,440 --> 00:22:35,870 But whatever you do when you do get to this point, I should have said this right at the beginning of this particular chapter. 231 00:22:36,110 --> 00:22:39,530 Be careful. Research is research is not perfect. 232 00:22:39,800 --> 00:22:47,150 You're simply taking a very small sample of the world and you're extrapolating quite important conclusions off the back of it. 233 00:22:47,390 --> 00:22:54,050 So if if you feel that you need to adjust the product, discard, change your marketing activities, change your prices. 234 00:22:55,290 --> 00:23:04,640 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. 235 00:23:04,650 --> 00:23:10,690 Just just think before you you leap. Any questions are told on market research. 236 00:23:13,170 --> 00:23:18,930 Yes. Yeah. I want to be able to speak to other types of corporate executives and questionnaires. 237 00:23:25,710 --> 00:23:29,530 Other types. Mm hmm. 238 00:23:30,130 --> 00:23:34,360 Well, I suppose I'll be testing more in a software development sort of context. 239 00:23:34,360 --> 00:23:38,110 Or. Could you. Can you give an example of what you were, what you were thinking? 240 00:23:38,650 --> 00:23:42,340 Okay, so you've written a book. Mm hmm. You want to know how it's going to sell? 241 00:23:42,340 --> 00:23:46,870 Best it could be based on. Because of the colour of the cover. 242 00:23:50,660 --> 00:23:56,630 3500 people would sell or you market the book at £30 in one store. 243 00:23:58,360 --> 00:24:04,430 Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't have to be a software application, but very basic testing. 244 00:24:08,410 --> 00:24:11,590 Yeah, I think I think you're quite right to bring that up. 245 00:24:11,590 --> 00:24:15,729 And I mean, possibly at various steps in this, you can find that useful. 246 00:24:15,730 --> 00:24:21,310 I mean, this, that right now, that could actually be a good way to validate a given course of action. 247 00:24:21,580 --> 00:24:28,989 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, 248 00:24:28,990 --> 00:24:36,760 that that would be a great method of actually determining whether or not you should roll out the £20 or £50 price increase. 249 00:24:36,760 --> 00:24:43,180 If you could have done a pilot in 50 shops where you tried both and then you crunched the data. 250 00:24:43,540 --> 00:24:47,160 I think going back to. If we go back. 251 00:24:48,090 --> 00:24:53,909 So to go back to this stat. Yes, I mean, HIV testing could could absolutely be an approach. 252 00:24:53,910 --> 00:24:59,370 But I think what that implies is that you have a sort of a bipolar choice in front of you. 253 00:25:00,150 --> 00:25:05,910 So, you know, kind of as you said yourself, it could be that you you're considering either yellow or red packaging. 254 00:25:06,270 --> 00:25:09,540 And, of course, it doesn't necessarily have to just be two choices. It could be three. 255 00:25:10,890 --> 00:25:16,680 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, 256 00:25:17,010 --> 00:25:22,170 I have noticed that yeah, it's usually only effective up until three variables. 257 00:25:23,290 --> 00:25:27,030 But yeah, that's that's definitely a good a good one to consider. 258 00:25:27,870 --> 00:25:31,030 Any other questions at all on research? 259 00:25:31,050 --> 00:25:35,340 Any aspects of it? Okay. 260 00:25:40,080 --> 00:25:43,390 So. How are we for time, by the way? 261 00:25:43,540 --> 00:25:47,360 First check. Great. I've done half an hour. 262 00:25:48,080 --> 00:25:51,440 Yeah. Correct. Okay. We'll speed up a bit. Product development. 263 00:25:51,950 --> 00:25:57,379 This is effectively the third part. So assuming that your the research that you've conducted, 264 00:25:57,380 --> 00:26:01,700 the findings that you have gleaned from that and the changes that you have made have 265 00:26:01,700 --> 00:26:05,810 given you confidence in the actual sort of product that you're looking to take to market. 266 00:26:06,080 --> 00:26:12,460 Now, of course, this, this whole lecture is focussed on sort of empowering you to take something to market. 267 00:26:12,470 --> 00:26:15,500 A lot of this is equally important if you've already got a business that's up 268 00:26:15,500 --> 00:26:20,360 and running and that you you already have a range of of different products. 269 00:26:20,720 --> 00:26:29,780 But to focus on on actually getting new things out the door, there's really three phases to product development that I would describe. 270 00:26:30,230 --> 00:26:37,040 The first one is the generation of ideas. We all have ideas all at the time, and that's fantastic. 271 00:26:37,250 --> 00:26:39,410 The more ideas you can have, the better. 272 00:26:40,700 --> 00:26:45,680 There's a second phase that will come on to shortly, which is actually prioritising them in some sort of methodical way. 273 00:26:46,190 --> 00:26:51,140 And then the third one is actually delivering on the top priority ideas. 274 00:26:51,800 --> 00:26:57,530 There's no much there's nothing more to it than that. It isn't as scientific as it might appear. 275 00:26:57,770 --> 00:27:07,909 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. 276 00:27:07,910 --> 00:27:15,650 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, 277 00:27:15,980 --> 00:27:24,800 from a prospective customer, from a salesperson who's actually now interacting with them, from an engineer, from a designer. 278 00:27:25,460 --> 00:27:31,250 It could come from your own divine inspiration when you're stuck in a traffic jam or having a shower. 279 00:27:32,090 --> 00:27:36,670 It could actually come from your observation of competitors as well. 280 00:27:36,680 --> 00:27:43,220 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. 281 00:27:44,060 --> 00:27:48,380 But going on to the next slide, the most important thing is that you actually capture all of them. 282 00:27:48,830 --> 00:27:55,550 Try not to dismiss anything out of hand. It is a very healthy experience to actually write them all down. 283 00:27:55,940 --> 00:28:04,729 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, 284 00:28:04,730 --> 00:28:07,700 even if some of them sound a bit crazy. Make them invisible. 285 00:28:08,180 --> 00:28:14,560 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. 286 00:28:14,570 --> 00:28:24,290 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. 287 00:28:24,590 --> 00:28:33,260 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. 288 00:28:33,560 --> 00:28:38,570 It could be, you know, just like a wiki page or something very simple where you can just keep a track of them. 289 00:28:39,110 --> 00:28:46,400 And then the next step is getting them criticised, getting them deconstructed and then reconstructed to be even better. 290 00:28:46,730 --> 00:28:52,700 So lots of lots of ideas that you may have. You might yourself quash them very quickly. 291 00:28:52,700 --> 00:28:59,370 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. 292 00:28:59,370 --> 00:29:02,959 That didn't occur to you that that's exactly what you want to do, 293 00:29:02,960 --> 00:29:12,470 that so much value in not trying to be kind of a lone voice and trying to just do everything yourself. 294 00:29:12,470 --> 00:29:18,350 I think the more people you can involve in the generation of ideas and the refinement of them, the better. 295 00:29:18,650 --> 00:29:24,020 Now, if you're doing this, just stay focussed on what it is that you're trying to achieve. 296 00:29:24,410 --> 00:29:27,650 Try not to get too hung up on how you're going to go about achieving it. 297 00:29:27,890 --> 00:29:32,209 It's very easy to talk yourself out of something when you think through the logistics. 298 00:29:32,210 --> 00:29:38,780 Well, how would I actually get that in front of customer X? Try and just keep in mind what the end objective is. 299 00:29:38,780 --> 00:29:43,430 It could just be a very simple need that a customer has. 300 00:29:43,640 --> 00:29:51,770 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. 301 00:29:51,950 --> 00:29:59,420 Try try to just zoom in on, on, on the idea initially and watch what it is that your idea is going to solve. 302 00:30:00,050 --> 00:30:06,260 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. 303 00:30:08,460 --> 00:30:13,830 So you've got you've got hundreds of ideas rushing around everywhere. 304 00:30:14,070 --> 00:30:19,250 How do you actually make any sense of them? Ideas can come in very different guises. 305 00:30:19,260 --> 00:30:24,810 They can come as suggestions, they can come as requests, they can actually come as a demand. 306 00:30:24,960 --> 00:30:29,670 You know, a salesperson may come to you and say, Look, Patrick, we need this feature. 307 00:30:29,670 --> 00:30:33,600 If we don't get it within three months, we lose one of our biggest accounts. 308 00:30:33,930 --> 00:30:39,209 What are you going to do about it? Equally, one of your own customers, you may have just set up your business. 309 00:30:39,210 --> 00:30:44,820 You've got two, three initial customers. They're going to have a huge influence over your product roadmap. 310 00:30:45,120 --> 00:30:50,250 So if they if they give you a suggestion, you are going to take it seriously. 311 00:30:50,580 --> 00:30:55,320 So when you when you take the sum total of all of these ideas that are flying around, 312 00:30:55,710 --> 00:31:01,770 you need to take a step back for a second and think you you have finite resources. 313 00:31:03,750 --> 00:31:10,350 You're never going to have enough resource to do absolutely everything that the market can potentially support you. 314 00:31:11,160 --> 00:31:14,850 You also always going to be under pressure to get things out the door quickly. 315 00:31:15,990 --> 00:31:23,070 Your own time is valuable. So if you're trying to chase absolutely every single idea all of the time, 316 00:31:23,760 --> 00:31:28,589 you're you're going to do you're not going to do justice to the really important ideas. 317 00:31:28,590 --> 00:31:32,160 You're not going to execute as well on them. You have to prioritise. 318 00:31:33,060 --> 00:31:39,240 And also, you know, in any customer, in any business is always going to expect a certain level of quality. 319 00:31:39,750 --> 00:31:45,750 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. 320 00:31:45,960 --> 00:31:48,660 I'm sorry, it's really buggy and it doesn't really work that well. 321 00:31:48,930 --> 00:31:54,300 It's because I was working on three other ideas at the same time that they'll just walk away. 322 00:31:54,930 --> 00:31:56,310 So business is riding on this. 323 00:31:56,340 --> 00:32:03,930 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. 324 00:32:04,320 --> 00:32:09,930 And one, one very easy way to do this is to just score every single idea. 325 00:32:10,350 --> 00:32:16,770 So you've got a nice long list. You've been through it with your friends and family or your business colleagues or partners. 326 00:32:17,640 --> 00:32:20,940 You now can just go through each of these ideas and score them. 327 00:32:21,540 --> 00:32:32,190 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. 328 00:32:32,550 --> 00:32:40,740 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. 329 00:32:40,800 --> 00:32:50,160 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. 330 00:32:51,360 --> 00:32:56,610 Thirdly, if you haven't got any customers at all and you're looking to actually build, by the way, 331 00:32:56,610 --> 00:33:03,959 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. 332 00:33:03,960 --> 00:33:08,720 So I'll try and give other practical examples as we go. But it's option is a key principle. 333 00:33:08,730 --> 00:33:13,170 You may be looking not necessarily to be able to generate revenue initially, 334 00:33:13,740 --> 00:33:19,590 but to simply foster wide adoption of whatever it is that you're trying to put out there. 335 00:33:20,340 --> 00:33:23,670 Or fourthly, you might put a lot of stock in user experience. 336 00:33:23,850 --> 00:33:29,339 How do people interact with this? To the point being that if if they have a very positive user experience, 337 00:33:29,340 --> 00:33:34,350 they find it very easy to use that they're going to stick with your products, which is going to be a family. 338 00:33:34,710 --> 00:33:41,010 So if you take all of these ideas and just assign them all a score, one being the lowest and five being the highest. 339 00:33:43,220 --> 00:33:50,300 So I'll give you an example from my own world, a desktop search widget that you might want to integrate into a browser. 340 00:33:50,870 --> 00:33:54,050 You might ask yourself, Does it generate new revenue? No. 341 00:33:54,230 --> 00:33:57,740 I mean, would you pay money to to conduct a search? 342 00:33:58,100 --> 00:34:01,160 I wouldn't. It's a completely ubiquitous tool. 343 00:34:02,210 --> 00:34:11,540 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. 344 00:34:11,540 --> 00:34:15,590 Then actually, yeah, I might, I might adopt that and use it quite widely. 345 00:34:15,860 --> 00:34:20,520 So if I scored this new revenue score, was there a revenue protection score three? 346 00:34:20,540 --> 00:34:30,410 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. 347 00:34:30,590 --> 00:34:34,220 So overall, you might just give an aggregate score to this idea of eight. 348 00:34:35,850 --> 00:34:40,580 Going on to the next step, you then would look to school. 349 00:34:40,590 --> 00:34:48,030 Okay, well, you've looked at the opportunity will next loan look at the cost and I would call that cost sort of complexity. 350 00:34:48,690 --> 00:34:52,380 So you would tailor these criteria to your own business. 351 00:34:52,650 --> 00:34:56,970 But it could be things like how much infrastructure is going to be involved in producing this thing, 352 00:34:57,870 --> 00:35:02,700 how much time, whether your time or the time of the people in your business, 353 00:35:03,060 --> 00:35:09,540 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. 354 00:35:09,750 --> 00:35:13,890 And again, just give it a low score one or a high score of five. 355 00:35:14,130 --> 00:35:18,330 So in this desktop search widget, I could go and have a chat with Fred, 356 00:35:18,720 --> 00:35:24,000 the guy in the technical group, and I could say to Fred, okay, what's the crap? 357 00:35:24,300 --> 00:35:27,510 How difficult do you think it's going to be to produce this desktop widget? 358 00:35:27,900 --> 00:35:29,970 He might say, Well, Patrick, pretty straightforward. 359 00:35:30,690 --> 00:35:35,700 Of course, take about three weeks of development, but I'm the only one that can actually build this. 360 00:35:35,910 --> 00:35:42,030 You should be aware of that. And pretty much all of my time at the moment is going into another product over there. 361 00:35:42,810 --> 00:35:46,170 Okay. So if you want me to do this, I'm the only person that can do it, 362 00:35:46,470 --> 00:35:52,080 then I'm going to have to stop something else, which could already be a very important piece of work. 363 00:35:53,000 --> 00:35:59,870 So if we were then in this hypothetical example, trying to school, this would say, well, the infrastructure of school is pretty negligible. 364 00:36:00,260 --> 00:36:03,500 Yeah, it would take a fair bit of French time, but nothing major. 365 00:36:03,650 --> 00:36:08,900 But crucially, the opportunity cost of not doing something else would be quite significant. 366 00:36:08,930 --> 00:36:13,520 So the school there would be nine. So how is this of any use? 367 00:36:13,520 --> 00:36:16,250 You put nice little numbers into your spreadsheet. 368 00:36:17,420 --> 00:36:26,240 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, 369 00:36:26,630 --> 00:36:32,550 I couldn't recommend this more because it will help you very quickly visualise where most of your focus should be going. 370 00:36:33,050 --> 00:36:41,690 Now you can probably guess what you should be doing with stuff here in this bottom left hand corner, or rather starting over here. 371 00:36:42,740 --> 00:36:49,220 Pretty much anything that you would put here, which is of a very high complexity, but have a very low value. 372 00:36:49,490 --> 00:36:54,400 You should just immediately kill, stop. Don't spend any more time on it whatsoever. 373 00:36:54,720 --> 00:36:58,390 It's a waste of your time equally over here. 374 00:36:59,670 --> 00:37:05,459 Okay. These are the things to be quite concerned about because the things where you think is, well, you know, it's pretty easy. 375 00:37:05,460 --> 00:37:08,930 I'm only spending, you know, 15 minutes a day on it. 376 00:37:08,940 --> 00:37:14,280 It's not particularly complicated, but fundamentally it's not of any value. 377 00:37:14,400 --> 00:37:17,910 So what you're trying to do with your business, it's not generating any extra income. 378 00:37:18,240 --> 00:37:23,040 You should be very wary of of spotting these and stopping them as well. 379 00:37:23,490 --> 00:37:27,090 Now, the things that are very high value and low complexity, obviously, 380 00:37:27,090 --> 00:37:31,440 they're the things that you should be doing that hopefully the other things that you're already doing. 381 00:37:32,220 --> 00:37:37,720 But you'll probably find I certainly find my job and see if this laser works now. 382 00:37:38,150 --> 00:37:46,980 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. 383 00:37:47,100 --> 00:37:50,400 How valuable is it really? How complex is it? 384 00:37:51,030 --> 00:37:58,740 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. 385 00:38:00,010 --> 00:38:05,710 So we're now going to move on to sort of the next aspects of product development, which are called delivery. 386 00:38:06,070 --> 00:38:09,879 Now, in everything I've said here, we've got nice, neat chunks like, you know, 387 00:38:09,880 --> 00:38:15,760 you do you your idea generation, you come onto a delivery and you've already done your research beforehand. 388 00:38:16,070 --> 00:38:19,330 Now, obviously, in the real world, you're probably doing all three of them at the same time. 389 00:38:20,140 --> 00:38:29,350 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. 390 00:38:30,010 --> 00:38:35,770 One could argue that there's two key sort of delivery methods, if you will, of development methods, 391 00:38:36,070 --> 00:38:40,570 one being agile and the other one being more sort of predictive or waterfall. 392 00:38:41,050 --> 00:38:45,880 All this means and there's a huge body of material on this. Many of you have probably already heard these terms before. 393 00:38:46,240 --> 00:38:51,510 Basically, what agile as it is, is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. 394 00:38:51,520 --> 00:38:55,569 What it means is that rather than going and sitting in a room on your own for two years, 395 00:38:55,570 --> 00:39:00,280 trying to build the perfect machine that's going to take over the world, you actually say, 396 00:39:00,310 --> 00:39:04,570 well, hold on, why don't I chop it up into into easy, 397 00:39:04,570 --> 00:39:13,990 manageable deliverables and step by step release those those improvements to my customers in an incremental way. 398 00:39:14,740 --> 00:39:17,430 There's various reasons why that is a sensible thing to do. 399 00:39:17,440 --> 00:39:23,860 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. 400 00:39:24,070 --> 00:39:27,640 The whole market might have moved on. The whole world might have moved on. 401 00:39:27,970 --> 00:39:33,190 People sometimes are saying that about BlackBerry, for instance, at the moment, about some of the devices that they've been building. 402 00:39:33,970 --> 00:39:39,610 They they haven't quite got that highly tuned sort of agile deployment methodology. 403 00:39:39,640 --> 00:39:43,000 Some commentators argue at this point, whereas Apple have. 404 00:39:44,350 --> 00:39:50,110 So it's first of all, it enables you to keep validating that you're in touch with your customers. 405 00:39:50,380 --> 00:39:55,209 Also, it de-risk the whole project. But, you know, as the word suggests, 406 00:39:55,210 --> 00:39:58,660 natural means that you could be three steps the way and you could completely 407 00:39:58,660 --> 00:40:03,460 change direction and respond to to some change or trend in the marketplace. 408 00:40:04,000 --> 00:40:10,780 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. 409 00:40:11,050 --> 00:40:16,660 However, I wouldn't ignore what I would refer to as predictive or waterfall delivery, 410 00:40:17,020 --> 00:40:21,490 because for certain kinds of projects or tools, you actually need to do it this way. 411 00:40:22,060 --> 00:40:28,840 I suppose one example would be something like the Channel Tunnel. I think that took about 15 years from start to finish. 412 00:40:28,870 --> 00:40:34,959 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, 413 00:40:34,960 --> 00:40:40,110 designed and started building the tunnel, imagine if they got halfway to France and then they suddenly decided, 414 00:40:40,120 --> 00:40:43,270 Whoa, hold on, people don't need trains anymore. Maybe they just want to fly. 415 00:40:43,600 --> 00:40:50,350 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. 416 00:40:50,620 --> 00:40:58,330 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, 417 00:40:58,930 --> 00:41:00,690 so that when they executed it, 418 00:41:00,700 --> 00:41:08,380 they they minimised the scope for error and they were committed to it from the first moment that they actually started digging. 419 00:41:08,740 --> 00:41:13,930 So the reason why I break this one out here is that certainly in the businesses that I've worked in, 420 00:41:13,930 --> 00:41:17,890 in the news business and currently in the software and media business, 421 00:41:18,430 --> 00:41:25,120 there's certain sort of foundations that you sometimes need to build before you can then be iterative and agile. 422 00:41:25,930 --> 00:41:31,899 And it's worth bearing in mind. So those are the pros and cons on the on trial approach. 423 00:41:31,900 --> 00:41:39,490 You can adapt to market changes very swiftly. The waterfall approach often is suited better suited to delivering sort of major step changes. 424 00:41:40,300 --> 00:41:46,540 Any questions on on any of that? 15 laughs. 425 00:41:46,540 --> 00:41:50,560 Okay. Is that a speed it up? Okay. Stakeholder engagement. 426 00:41:51,790 --> 00:41:58,550 This is as you sort of embark on the actual nuts and bolts work of delivering whatever your product is. 427 00:41:59,110 --> 00:42:05,260 Make sure that you you engage with the right people at the right steps in that process. 428 00:42:05,470 --> 00:42:08,020 It may sound a bit formulaic and bureaucratic, 429 00:42:08,710 --> 00:42:13,540 and it's actually great to just sit down with a prospective customer and say, Hey, this is what you asked for. 430 00:42:13,570 --> 00:42:16,030 This is what you're going to get. And they're like, Yeah, great. 431 00:42:16,480 --> 00:42:24,450 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, 432 00:42:24,460 --> 00:42:29,470 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. 433 00:42:30,040 --> 00:42:32,620 I actually meant red. And you've delivered green. 434 00:42:33,010 --> 00:42:41,830 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. 435 00:42:42,760 --> 00:42:50,470 You know, you may be well sort of advised to come up with a test panel before you actually do a much wider launch. 436 00:42:50,680 --> 00:42:58,149 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 437 00:42:58,150 --> 00:43:03,130 having validated it maybe on just 100 sample users just to kind of kick the tires, 438 00:43:03,490 --> 00:43:13,120 so to speak. Okay. So to summarise product development, you've got the three phases of idea generation prioritisation delivery. 439 00:43:13,510 --> 00:43:17,620 You're going to be doing all of them at the same time, but just trying every now and then, 440 00:43:17,620 --> 00:43:20,680 just take a step back and try and recognise which bits of work. 441 00:43:21,520 --> 00:43:23,260 Force yourself to make decisions, 442 00:43:24,040 --> 00:43:33,160 try not leave things to later unless you absolutely have to and share those decisions and the reasoning behind them with your stakeholders. 443 00:43:33,460 --> 00:43:36,040 Now that that could again be your friends or family, 444 00:43:36,310 --> 00:43:43,660 it could be your bank manager or whoever is whoever's actually got a significant interest in your business, such as your customer. 445 00:43:44,290 --> 00:43:48,280 Doing this will create a virtuous circle it really well. 446 00:43:49,000 --> 00:43:54,010 And rather than you being a business that has one great product and then disappears, 447 00:43:54,310 --> 00:44:01,060 you might actually become a business that constantly innovates and stays in touch with its customers as a result. 448 00:44:02,010 --> 00:44:06,060 Okay. Marketing communications, we're going to be quite quick. I think we've got 10 minutes. 449 00:44:07,170 --> 00:44:10,980 So this is a huge topic, a massive topic. 450 00:44:11,010 --> 00:44:14,670 You could do a whole seven lecture course purely on this alone. 451 00:44:14,970 --> 00:44:19,290 So I'm going to try and be as simplistic as I possibly can. 452 00:44:19,770 --> 00:44:23,489 What is marketing communication? It's the promotion bits of marketing. 453 00:44:23,490 --> 00:44:24,930 Well, what is marketing? 454 00:44:25,800 --> 00:44:35,730 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. 455 00:44:35,970 --> 00:44:40,650 This is effectively the promotion pitch in that very classical definition. 456 00:44:40,950 --> 00:44:44,250 So how is it done? I think most of you probably know this. 457 00:44:44,460 --> 00:44:51,360 You have something called direct marketing to begin with, which is targeted, trackable and measurable. 458 00:44:51,990 --> 00:44:58,319 Okay. What that means is that if you spend £10 on some direct marketing, you stand a pretty good chance of understanding. 459 00:44:58,320 --> 00:45:03,420 Well, what actually happened with that? £10, like any sales, how many people saw it? 460 00:45:04,200 --> 00:45:10,169 Where did it go? These are things that that you would find useful, mass appetising. 461 00:45:10,170 --> 00:45:14,459 Generally, the focus is on building and maintaining brand awareness. 462 00:45:14,460 --> 00:45:17,910 So for instance, take someone like Coca Cola, you know, 463 00:45:17,910 --> 00:45:22,680 the economics of their business is that they're trying to serve pretty much billions of people. 464 00:45:22,830 --> 00:45:28,920 They're not going to necessarily try and have a 1 to 1 dialogue with you through a direct marketing campaign, 465 00:45:28,920 --> 00:45:31,770 although obviously they do do direct marketing. At the same time, 466 00:45:31,770 --> 00:45:41,489 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. 467 00:45:41,490 --> 00:45:46,830 So they're not able at this point to track that usage. 468 00:45:47,310 --> 00:45:55,560 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? 469 00:45:55,770 --> 00:46:00,930 PR is basically generating a maximising free editorial coverage for your business. 470 00:46:01,860 --> 00:46:11,040 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. 471 00:46:11,340 --> 00:46:23,129 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, 472 00:46:23,130 --> 00:46:32,940 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? 473 00:46:33,120 --> 00:46:38,310 And what that would do is the way they would get editorial value out of you coming in because presumably, you know, your sector, 474 00:46:38,520 --> 00:46:41,999 you would get value out of it because people would just hear the name of your business, 475 00:46:42,000 --> 00:46:45,690 the name of your products, and they would get familiar with you as an individual. 476 00:46:45,690 --> 00:46:48,690 You'd come across as an expert. So, you know, you're at a very simple level. 477 00:46:48,690 --> 00:46:49,800 That's what PR us. 478 00:46:52,250 --> 00:47:01,819 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, 479 00:47:01,820 --> 00:47:06,620 search marketing, TV advertising, outdoor display prints, advertising, 480 00:47:06,620 --> 00:47:13,100 telesales mailings and get face to face selling, which should never be underestimated. 481 00:47:14,390 --> 00:47:17,570 So given the constraints of time, I thought it might be of use. 482 00:47:17,570 --> 00:47:24,170 Just to talk very briefly about the top two. On the assumption that most of you are probably relatively familiar with the others, 483 00:47:24,380 --> 00:47:31,730 and also that I assume as a start up, you're going to be pretty unlikely to want to invest in television advertising. 484 00:47:32,000 --> 00:47:37,070 In fact, I would go as far as to discourage you very strongly from from doing that. 485 00:47:37,880 --> 00:47:42,230 And actually where most of your money could be wisely spent would be in search marketing. 486 00:47:42,740 --> 00:47:50,629 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, 487 00:47:50,630 --> 00:47:58,460 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. 488 00:47:58,940 --> 00:48:03,860 That's really what it's all about. Now, you can obviously employ a PR agency to do all of this for you. 489 00:48:04,100 --> 00:48:08,240 There are some extremely capable agencies around, but obviously they expect to get paid. 490 00:48:09,260 --> 00:48:13,910 And so another way of approaching this, in the early days of your business, 491 00:48:14,420 --> 00:48:19,190 they should just focus on your first few customers and just treat them extremely well. 492 00:48:20,570 --> 00:48:27,890 This will actually lead to referrals. They will talk about the good experience they had with you to other people that they know. 493 00:48:28,940 --> 00:48:32,269 And those people will hopefully come to you and you treat them well. 494 00:48:32,270 --> 00:48:37,280 And it goes and that's that's the nice image that you really want to sort of create. 495 00:48:37,670 --> 00:48:44,570 So treating them well could be as simple as just turning up on time, you know, returning their calls promptly. 496 00:48:45,870 --> 00:48:49,050 Or just giving them more than they were originally expecting. 497 00:48:50,580 --> 00:48:51,420 Now that that, 498 00:48:51,690 --> 00:48:57,989 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. 499 00:48:57,990 --> 00:49:02,340 And you know, if you ask for a few changes here and there, they want lots more money to deal with that. 500 00:49:03,270 --> 00:49:08,040 And you can someone who that's not very flexible occasionally you deal with people who will 501 00:49:08,040 --> 00:49:12,840 just they will always just go that extra step and you remember that and you value that. 502 00:49:13,170 --> 00:49:18,989 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, 503 00:49:18,990 --> 00:49:25,140 someone fixing your car and they actually bothered to just go that extra step and then try and sort of penalise you for it. 504 00:49:25,470 --> 00:49:29,310 That's the kind of image that you really want to cultivate. 505 00:49:30,300 --> 00:49:34,320 Also, just make sure that you have a clear and consistent brand identity. People really do. 506 00:49:34,320 --> 00:49:39,060 And I was guilty of this when I set my own sort of translation business up. 507 00:49:39,270 --> 00:49:45,870 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. 508 00:49:46,230 --> 00:49:49,080 I mean, just just come up with something that's pretty good. It doesn't have to be perfect. 509 00:49:49,320 --> 00:49:53,129 You can always like you can just change your brand in the future, but whatever it is, 510 00:49:53,130 --> 00:49:57,600 make sure it's clear and it's consistent and it's actually appropriate to the business that you were in. 511 00:49:57,900 --> 00:50:02,820 You know, lots of bright, crazy colours might not be appropriate for a financial services product. 512 00:50:03,600 --> 00:50:11,909 The opposite might be true for something in the sporting world. You don't want something dour and uninteresting, so have that clear identity. 513 00:50:11,910 --> 00:50:15,959 Then build up your reputation as an expert in your field and then think of doing 514 00:50:15,960 --> 00:50:21,630 something attention grabbing to attract positive media attention to your business. 515 00:50:22,050 --> 00:50:27,360 Now it would be quite easy to come up with a really cool idea to attract attention that would be negative. 516 00:50:29,130 --> 00:50:32,970 It goes without saying that you don't want to do that, but just thinking think laterally. 517 00:50:32,970 --> 00:50:42,420 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? 518 00:50:42,840 --> 00:50:45,900 Yeah, that's really what PR agencies come in and do for you. 519 00:50:46,170 --> 00:50:50,160 If you've got a bit of imagination, you can do it yourself. 520 00:50:51,120 --> 00:50:54,479 Going on to social media, probably. 521 00:50:54,480 --> 00:51:00,960 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. 522 00:51:01,170 --> 00:51:10,319 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, 523 00:51:10,320 --> 00:51:18,690 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, 524 00:51:18,690 --> 00:51:25,919 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, 525 00:51:25,920 --> 00:51:30,659 the your core product is is quite sort of intellectual in nature and you actually 526 00:51:30,660 --> 00:51:35,760 need to establish a reputation link in is a really good way to do that get on there, 527 00:51:35,760 --> 00:51:40,889 connect with people, answer questions as a feature in it where you can go in and answer questions. 528 00:51:40,890 --> 00:51:46,380 It's a great way to show how clever you are, how much of a growth you have on your industry. 529 00:51:47,250 --> 00:51:50,190 Twitter can be used for a whole plethora of things, 530 00:51:50,190 --> 00:51:56,070 but one of the most interesting case studies I ever saw was it being used as a kind of a customer service tool. 531 00:51:56,250 --> 00:52:00,120 I think they'll use it quite, quite significantly, just the you know, 532 00:52:00,120 --> 00:52:06,480 the short form keeping people updated about a dynamic, dynamically changing service. 533 00:52:06,750 --> 00:52:12,000 There was some case study about these guys that set up a hot dog business in l.a. 534 00:52:12,360 --> 00:52:16,860 And the way they were pitching it was people coming out of nightclubs at like two or three in the morning. 535 00:52:18,180 --> 00:52:20,969 They say, these guys, you set this business up, 536 00:52:20,970 --> 00:52:26,400 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. 537 00:52:26,820 --> 00:52:30,840 And so the way that they came up with marketing this was actually through Twitter 538 00:52:30,840 --> 00:52:34,590 because they would always be they'd be in a van and then go driving around l.a. 539 00:52:34,830 --> 00:52:41,130 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. 540 00:52:41,370 --> 00:52:46,040 And what they would find is that every car part that they turned up to after a month or two doing this, 541 00:52:46,050 --> 00:52:50,340 it was just thousands of people who were queuing up, trying to buy, buy their hot dogs. 542 00:52:50,520 --> 00:52:56,100 So I think, you know, looking at the nuances of how these different social media products work, 543 00:52:57,120 --> 00:53:02,850 you might actually think, oh, hold on, that that could actually be quite useful for my business and obviously Facebook, 544 00:53:03,570 --> 00:53:09,030 that the sort of engagement that are engendered in the fact that far and away more than any other network more people are on, 545 00:53:09,030 --> 00:53:12,450 it can be used to leverage referrals to drive sales. 546 00:53:13,650 --> 00:53:17,340 And you can do all of this, broadly speaking, next to no cost. 547 00:53:17,340 --> 00:53:23,129 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. 548 00:53:23,130 --> 00:53:26,820 That is going to cost money, but the other two have has cost you any money. 549 00:53:26,820 --> 00:53:34,440 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. 550 00:53:36,390 --> 00:53:39,450 5 minutes. Great. Feels like it's actually going to be on time. 551 00:53:40,170 --> 00:53:47,670 Okay, so this this is the last piece that I wanted to talk you guys through is a slightly kind of convoluted slide, 552 00:53:48,000 --> 00:53:51,270 but we've talked a bit about social media, 553 00:53:52,050 --> 00:53:56,700 which talks about PR and coming back to this central point of giving you 554 00:53:56,700 --> 00:54:00,930 hopefully cost effective practical ideas that you can actually go out and use. 555 00:54:02,340 --> 00:54:09,780 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. 556 00:54:09,780 --> 00:54:14,759 So if you're on your radio station talking about your products, if you know, 557 00:54:14,760 --> 00:54:17,999 if people then kind of get great, I want to find out about Patrick Moore's product. 558 00:54:18,000 --> 00:54:21,480 They go on to the Internet and they can't find anything to do with that. 559 00:54:22,290 --> 00:54:26,050 Then you're you know, you've really lost an opportunity there, so you just need a website. 560 00:54:26,100 --> 00:54:29,280 It goes without saying, a shop window. So get one. 561 00:54:29,610 --> 00:54:37,950 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. 562 00:54:38,280 --> 00:54:45,180 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. 563 00:54:45,450 --> 00:54:50,010 I would suggest people like one and one. So one ampersand, one hosting. 564 00:54:50,250 --> 00:54:53,340 There's other companies that do this, not just one and one, but they have. 565 00:54:53,520 --> 00:55:00,060 So these are templates very actually very easy to customise if you don't have any sort of technical understanding. 566 00:55:00,300 --> 00:55:03,750 And they're pretty cheap as well. If you put them up, you could be up and running. 567 00:55:04,050 --> 00:55:09,120 So get the website. Then once you've got the website, you actually need to build a presence around that website. 568 00:55:09,390 --> 00:55:15,300 And what that basically means is it needs people needs to be able to find it when they search for it. 569 00:55:15,510 --> 00:55:19,950 So if you're the this hot dog business in L.A., you could call your website whatever you want. 570 00:55:19,950 --> 00:55:26,580 But if someone searches for nutritional hot dogs after a nightclub, you want your website to appear at the top of the list. 571 00:55:26,610 --> 00:55:30,150 You don't want to be sort of two pages back. So how do you do that? 572 00:55:30,180 --> 00:55:34,110 How do you get up in the rankings? Well, that's one way thing. 573 00:55:34,200 --> 00:55:38,969 It's the good old fashioned classic way. How do I get my natural search engine ranking off? 574 00:55:38,970 --> 00:55:42,810 And it's something that can become sort of a bit of a kind of a fetish, if you will. 575 00:55:43,050 --> 00:55:47,550 I found that when I say my business every day, I'll check like, oh, it's gone up, it's gone up too. 576 00:55:47,850 --> 00:55:53,700 And and that made me excited because what that actually translates into is, in effect, free traffic, 577 00:55:53,700 --> 00:55:57,450 the high up you are, the more likely someone's going to click on that and go through. 578 00:55:57,900 --> 00:56:06,480 However, it is actually quite painstaking and time consuming, and Google's algorithm and other search engines algorithms are constantly changing. 579 00:56:06,660 --> 00:56:10,410 So if you do get to the number one spot, you've got to work really hard to stay there. 580 00:56:11,310 --> 00:56:14,969 So another way of doing it by the traffic in and what I mean by that, 581 00:56:14,970 --> 00:56:21,330 if you look at the left hand screen print the section that I put the green box around, 582 00:56:22,500 --> 00:56:27,149 most of you are probably perfectly aware of this already, but if anyone is. These are actually paid adverts. 583 00:56:27,150 --> 00:56:32,280 When you're on any search engine, either on the right hand side or along the top, 584 00:56:33,150 --> 00:56:38,940 you have sponsored links and basically you pay Google whatever you bid. 585 00:56:39,570 --> 00:56:44,040 According to how popular these links are, it could cost one PIA Click five P template. 586 00:56:45,060 --> 00:56:49,650 But you can you can ensure that you get traffic to your website and that people 587 00:56:49,650 --> 00:56:53,730 match with the search terms are looking for and you can pay for that now. 588 00:56:53,850 --> 00:56:56,850 Yes, it costs money that you can control that spend. 589 00:56:56,850 --> 00:57:05,850 So you can say, look, I, I only want to spend £10 a day or £10 a week or £100 a month, no more. 590 00:57:06,150 --> 00:57:13,950 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. 591 00:57:14,220 --> 00:57:17,760 And I think, you know someone who is embarking on a new business. 592 00:57:18,030 --> 00:57:20,040 Budgeting is obviously extremely important. 593 00:57:20,280 --> 00:57:26,220 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! 594 00:57:26,460 --> 00:57:31,020 Or all of them do and make sure that you control that budget carefully. 595 00:57:31,320 --> 00:57:40,020 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. 596 00:57:40,860 --> 00:57:46,079 And so you need to be careful with that. Another way, again, just being cost effective. 597 00:57:46,080 --> 00:57:47,880 So you got your site on the right hand side. 598 00:57:48,790 --> 00:57:55,920 So I feel like I'm selling Google, which isn't actually my my job, but they have something called AdSense. 599 00:57:56,010 --> 00:57:59,420 Does anyone know what that is in here? Yeah. 600 00:57:59,600 --> 00:58:02,760 Yeah. I think a lot of people probably may not have heard of it then. 601 00:58:03,030 --> 00:58:08,600 AdSense is basically if you've got your own website, you could say that you're a publisher, okay, 602 00:58:08,610 --> 00:58:15,300 you have your hot dog website and you can actually put other people's adverts on your website. 603 00:58:16,050 --> 00:58:21,870 So in addition to paying to put them on the Google search results to get the people to your site, 604 00:58:22,260 --> 00:58:26,130 you could put other people's ads on your own site and then they go off somewhere else. 605 00:58:26,580 --> 00:58:35,219 Now, in the world of online traffic observation, you're never going to keep happy when it comes to your site. 606 00:58:35,220 --> 00:58:38,770 I mean, you know, it's like. You jump around, you go to 100 different sites in a given day. 607 00:58:39,130 --> 00:58:41,290 So why don't you monetise some of that traffic? 608 00:58:41,320 --> 00:58:46,720 So if you're already paying for people to come to your your website that you've paid good money to Google for, 609 00:58:46,960 --> 00:58:51,100 a certain proportion of those people are going to be interested in your product they might actually buy. 610 00:58:51,580 --> 00:58:55,540 But for those people who who either aren't interested aren't going to buy immediately, 611 00:58:56,740 --> 00:59:00,310 why not put relevant adverts to other people's products on your site? 612 00:59:00,580 --> 00:59:04,540 Why do that? Well, you you generate cash from that. 613 00:59:04,560 --> 00:59:08,080 If someone clicks on one of those adverts or you're on your site, 614 00:59:08,410 --> 00:59:17,800 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. 615 00:59:18,190 --> 00:59:24,820 It won't you know, it may not make a huge difference, but it could just make that little contribution to your bottom line. 616 00:59:26,600 --> 00:59:30,290 Okay. So that is search and online marketing. 617 00:59:30,560 --> 00:59:36,170 So that kind of brings to bring to a close the marketing communications and that's all. 618 00:59:36,200 --> 00:59:40,190 So thank you for your time and good luck and Merry Christmas.