What happens when manufacturers apply their manufacturing and industrial engineering knowledge to the environment? They create a 100-year-old self-sustaining forest in 10 years. Shubhendu Sharma did just that. He applied his industrial engineering skills developed at Toyota to recreate little chunks of forest habitat in just ten years right in our own backyards, workplaces and public spaces. Cheers to Shubhendu and his company Afforestt.com.

Grow a 100-Year-Old Self-Sustainable Food Forest in Your Backyard in Just 10 Years

#giveback
#selfsustaining
#oneforestatatime
#goodisthenewcool
#getoutdoors
#sustainableplanet
#savetheplanet
#justdoit
#sheexplores
#betheforce
#outdoorretailer
#environment

The post Using Knowledge for Restoration first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.

Together we are a force for change and each generation group is bringing their own superpower to the table. Let’s see how each cluster individually helps to save the planet while purchasing their outfit for a climate of action party.

The Unbridled Baby Boomer

Bringing back the beatniks and the hippies, they are returning to the “don’t tread on me” movement from the 60s. They broke through previous generations with TV, Vietnam, and Disco. They are the fixed income now generation. Contradicting popular belief, over two-thirds of Baby Boomers are online and use Facebook and YouTube. Source: United States; Pew Research Center; January 3-10, 2018; total survey n = 2,002; 50 to 64 years. Baby Boomers perform a significant portion of volunteer work here in the USA, which means at the atomic level of environmental action—cleaning riverbanks, scrubbing bird feathers, rescuing sea turtles—is often in the hands of older adults, source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Leading Gen X-er

Gen X now accounts for 51 percent of leadership roles globally, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/generation-x–not-millennials–is-changing-the-nature-of-work.html. Gen X leaders’ strength for working with and through others is enabling them to shape the future of work and generate faster innovation by getting people working together to solve customers’ and their organization’s issues. They are brand loyalists and evangelists. They were the first wave of digital. Capitalizing on BlackRock Investments is the new cool! Gen X has more spending power than any other generation.

The Social Gen Y-er (millennials)

The first digital natives to adorn their social activism on mobile phones. They are the connected generation of curated influencers. With social media, they learned that they can connect and share information globally almost immediately. Gen Y still follows their friends on social media. They dress for a climate of recycling, reuse, and reclaim. Adorning the re-invention of hipster permaculture, farm to table, and globalization. Their dot coms are now building their homes to nest in. They venture out more for the experience and less for the extreme. They are born of the curated digital content generation and they have paved the way to action for Gen Z-ers. Sustainability and preservation were born from millennial mantras.

According to the Nielsen Foundation, millennials say sustainability is a shopping priority. With the rise of technology and social networks, Gen Z is the center of the sustainable party. Millennials continue to be most willing to pay extra for sustainable offerings. Gen Y-ers are brand agnostic and rely on digital brand reviews for the best performance for the value.

The Authentic and Unfiltered Gen Z-er

Gen Z is unfiltered and uncurated and they wear a climate now education later frock. Growing up in the world of influencers, Generation Z-ers have a direct social media line to how entrepreneurs and activists live their lives, and they want an immediate piece of it. With their tech-heavy skills and their burning platform to save the planet, they are petitioning their parents for a gap year or to use their college savings for business start-ups, and recently we’ve seen some of them winning on the support front.

Gen Z is leapfrogging ahead to the action. With young rising stars like Boyan Slat, who at 18 designed and has deployed the world’s largest ocean cleanup in history and along the way founded a $31.5 million dollar nonprofit organization called Ocean Cleanup. Or the pigtailed thirteen-year-old Greta Thurnberg who recently took on the #COP24 Climate Conference in Poland asking the United Nations assembly “why they did not do anything while there is still time to act” gen z’s peers are challenging traditions.

Gen Z-ers rely as much on the brand experience as they do brand quality and loyalty. From the IBM Institute of Business Value and the National Retail Federation – 44 percent saying they’d be interested in submitting ideas for product designs, 42 percent would participate in an online game for a brand campaign, 38 percent would attend an event sponsored by a brand, and 36 percent would create digital content for a brand. They are driven by short clip video feeds, augmented reality memes, and pet avatars and prefer experience over product.

A GAP On Sustainability

Source: Fast Company – Nearly 40% of millennials have chosen a job because of company sustainability. Less than a quarter of Gen X respondents said the same, and 17% of baby boomers.

The similarity of career goals

Source: IBM Institute for Business Value – 25% of Gen Y, 21% of gen X, and 23% of baby boomers said they want to make a positive impact on my organization. And, 22% of Gen Y, 20% of Gen X, and 24% of baby boomers indicated they would like to help solve social and/or environmental challenges.

A force for change, a new type of brand:

• Loge Camps – Hotels that get you outdoors, experience over the brand.
• Toad and Co. – Sustainable, organic, and eco-friendly clothing with a conscience.
• Tentree – Clothing designed for a healthy, sustainable world.
• Sole – Improving health and wellness and giving back 1% to the planet.

Differences in consumption attitudes

Seventy-five percent of Generation X respondents reported behaviors of selective collection of paper waste, 71% separately collect plastic waste, 59% bring used batteries to special collection centers, 34% take used light bulbs at a special recycling centers and 32% share the car with other colleagues when going to work.

Generation Y is behind Generation X with regard to ecologic activities, but we expect a more pronounced ecologic behavior once they become older. This trend is not in accordance with the behavior of Ys in the West, where Ys are more expected to establish the trend and adopt ecological behaviors.

The people in Generation Z score the most at commuting to school or work with public transport, but this behavior is most probably due to the lack of financial resources required for buying a personal car, rather than an ecological reason. Source: MDPI Sustainability

Bottom line – digital ad spending at 88 Billion just overtook television ad spending and everyone who is cool is looking for an experience, not a product.

The post Segmented Reality first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.

If sustainability and preservation were born from Generation X, unbridled restoration and uncurated action are the growing rights of passage on Generation Z’s shoulders. They are the generation of authentic and uncurated. They cheered as the REI Co-op turned its back on Black Friday and chose the anti-consumer pathway to overconsumption. Their call is the world’s biggest problem and many of them are not looking towards the halls of education to find their solutions.

While Generation X and Millennials are still out there talking about reduced footprints, permaculture, and becoming locavore hunters and gatherers. Generation Z is leapfrogging ahead to the action. With young rising stars like Boyan Slat, who at 18 designed and has deployed the world’s largest ocean clean up and along the way founded a $31.5 million dollar nonprofit organization called Ocean Cleanup. Or the pigtailed thirteen-year-old Greta Thurnberg who recently took on the #COP24 Climate Conference in Poland asking the United Nations assembly “why they did not do anything while there is still time to act” Gen Z’s peers are challenging traditions.

Growing up in the world of influencers, Generation Z has a direct social media line to how entrepreneurs and activists live their lives, and they want an immediate piece of it. With their tech-heavy skills and their burning platform to save the planet, they are petitioning their parents for a gap year or to use their college savings for business start-ups, and recently we’ve seen some of them winning on the support front.

Generation Z is different, they are the climate now homework later generation. Sure, their parent’s stomachs are churning with concerns that college might take a back seat. But the ‘do it now’ generation is taking those college funds and designing solutions to problems that are global. If Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff, philanthropist Peter Thiel, Julius Baer Foundation, and Royal DSM all see the light, we as an outdoor industry should put our concerns in our pockets and embrace this new and becoming segment with welcoming support.

#GenerationZ
#ContentMarathon
#OptOutside
#LeaveNoTrace
#SegmentitBaby

The post GEN Z – The Unfiltered and Uncurated first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.

Ponderings from Outdoor Retailer 2019 – Is Generation Z the new hippie movement or are we all journeying back to a ‘don’t tread on me’ future? Outdoor Retailer 2019 left me pondering commerce, conscience, and authenticity.

After a stellar opening session of introspection and inspiration from guest speaker Afhdel Aziz, the author of ‘Good is the New Cool’ to the powerful education session at the Ranger Station covering from past to future of social media with Jeanine Pesce and Lisa Doughtery from the Range. I left OR with a sense that things are more connected, the community is growing, and we in the outdoor industry are moving into a refreshing age of citizen influence.

The early morning OIA Breakfast crowd was summoned by Executive Director Amy Roberts with “Together We Are A Force” and “We All Thrive Outside”. Aziz quickly followed up and challenged us early birds, those up to get the first worm, or in this case, an aluminum refillable coffee mug, to stop thinking in terms of consumers and start thinking in terms of designing experiences with citizens and a community who cares deeply about their environment, their parks, and their play.

Dougherty and Pesce dared us to consider how to incorporate product click sales on Pinterest pages (coming soon) and place our product concepts in TikTok video creations. Near the end, they both had us all contemplating the future of augmented reality where memes replace influencers (Colonel Sanders) and GPS biking point-to-points scavenger hunts to explore with new products while hitting us with the social backlash from Generation Z on mainstream social media. Now there is no time to curate, it should be authentic, a bit DIY, with user-generated content, and, well, why go to college when one can save the environment with TikTok videos being their Northstar.

Bottom line – digital ad spending at 88 Billion just overtook television ad spending and everyone who is cool is looking for the experience, not a product.

#OIA
#OutdoorRetailer2019
#ExpandingtheNarrative
#GoOutside
#OptOutside
#SheExplores
#ContentMarathon

The post Think Citizens Not Consumers first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.

How do manufacturers keep product management evangelists engaged after product launch? 

If we consider Concurrent’s recent survey results, cultivated from over 70 outdoor and specialty companies, the typical product management team size is between 1-5 members and they take 12-24 months to get a new product concept to market. Over 20% reported internal processes as their most difficult daily challenge and 25% reported having too much to do.

Another survey of 600 companies and over 1,000 respondents from productfocus.com suggests that just under half of a product manager’s time is spent on unplanned fire-fighting activities. That survey also reported that a person stays in their product management role an average of 3 years and that businesses spread resources so thinly that many initiatives fail.

People in product development report spending 47% of time spent on unplanned fire-fighting activities!

In other words, just after the company launches a product into the market, it will lose several experienced and valued team players. Those knowledge sources won’t be around for the next product cycle. These stats leave one to wonder if product manufacturers are achieving full value out of their product management teams or are they burning their human resource energy on continuous hiring, onboarding, and training.

‘Isn’t it time to address your product development process?’

What are your next steps? 

Support the growing knowledge base of product development in specialty markets and take the PM in Specialty Markets Survey and share this link with your product management friends.

Updated survey results that span comparable product management team structure, responsibilities, and challenges will be emailed to all Concurrent survey participants in April 2018.

Then, send us a contact request to have Concurrent create a customized survey that captures your internal team’s feedback, and:

• Clarifies your NPD process and makes it understandable to all participants
• Fine tunes the level of process detail you need to track
• Identifies gate or milestone expectations
• Identifies team roles and accountabilities
• Improves the overall value of team participants
• Optimizes the team composition
• Identifies challenges and their solutions to your current product process
• Simplifies onboarding for new team players
• Improves downstream handoffs

The post Curating your product management process first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.

Download your PDF copy of our presentation on consumer segmentation and market research tools, “Outside-In Planning: Tools and Techniques for Strategic Product Line Planning” presentation made by Concurrent Strategies in January. This information was shared at both the Outdoor Industries Association (OIA) Outdoor University, #ORWM15, and SnowSports Industries America (SIA), #SIA15, in January, 2015.

In addition to the core concepts, these slides also include early 2015 market intelligence gems reaped from key presenters during the seminars at both the #ORWM15 and #SIA15 retail markets.

Items of interest from #ORWM15

Are you segmenting your consumers?

OIA’s new Consumer Vue provides seven distinct segments of outdoor consumers. From their website: “Consumer Vue is an interactive tool developed to translate the segmentation findings for our members, and help them utilize the research and data to guide product development and assortment strategy, marketing, sales, customer service, and go-to-market plans. How to best implement the findings will vary from company to company.”

Are you still using the Good/Better/Best strategy for product positioning?

Matt Powell, Vice President for Sports Industry Analysis at NPD, challenged participants to question the traditional Good/Better/Best approach and presented his research observations that the new norm may be migrating from three-tiered positioning to two-tiered: Good Enough/Exceptional. For a quick gut check, put yourself in the mindset of the consumer and reflect on your own product purchasing behavior.

Items of interest from #SIA15 seminars

Are you measuring your ambassador athletes’ active fan engagement?

Empowering athletes to drive change with brand recognition is a traditional marketing strategy. See how the new analytics-based firm Hookit is capturing social media analytics to value your ambassadors’ fan reach.

What will a two-year three-phase study on downhill consumers teach us?

The preliminary findings from phase I of SIA’s Downhill Consumer Intelligence Project (DCIP) include:

• The USA snow sports market peaked at 13 million estimated participants in 2003.
• Currently, with just under 11 million participants, the USA market has remained relatively stable since 1998.
• Participants are young, between 57–76 percent of all participants are in Gen Y and Gen Z.
• Most participants are not core users, they participate casually 1–2 times per year.
• More participants are exploring the alternative terrains of both resort accessed and non-resort accessed backcountry, golf courses, terrain parks, and other urban areas.
• Freeski and snowboard sports garner more ethnic diversity than alpine or cross country sports.

SIA Director of Research Kelly Davis said “The purpose of DCIP is to get an accurate, in-depth understanding of our current and former customers, as well as the best prospects for future customers and what would attract them.”

From the SIA website:

“Phase 2 and Phase 3 will involve researching consumer types, on-hill interviews, and developing a strategic downhill participation plan to explore and promote what draws a person into an active snow sport lifestyle… Watch for updates on the discovery phase of DCIP in the SIA newsletter and by following #SIAdata and #DCIP on SIA’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.”

The post Consumer segmentation, market research tools, staff engagement, and product line planning first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.

Asking respondents to predict the success of an idea or option may provide a more accurate market response than asking them what they prefer. In my experience, incorporating this new question style into your next customer survey can lead to better response differentiation and reduced overstatement.

“Purchase intent is notoriously overstated in survey responses, showing little correlation with actual sales performance,” Julie Wittes Schlack writes in the Jan. 5 issue of the Harvard Business Review. “Perhaps it’s because we tend to be rationally driven in survey responses and emotionally driven in the heat of the shopping moment. Whatever the reason, as consumers we are lousy predictors of our own future behavior.”

If you are interested in ways to improve the quality of the data from your customer research, I recommend that you check out the full article on the growing popularity of prediction markets.

The post Why you should ask people what they predict rather than what they prefer first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the importance of two methods—Web Analytics and Product Views—for tapping the voice of the customer for product design. In this post, I’ll continue down the list with a look at three more ways of building your awareness of customers’ interests and needs.

3. Relationship-Building and Engagement

Now that you have a little background intelligence to work from, it’s time to engage your customers. Product promotion or social media engagement on the web creates an ideal environment to directly include your customers in a dialogue that furthers your knowledge of their interests and their unmet needs. Ask them about their experience with your product. What types of terrains or environments are they using your product in? How often do they use your product and how often do they need to replace it?

The most common tool to do this is a customer survey (mentioned in more detail in the next section below) but you can also engage customers by inviting Facebook comments about a need topic, tweeting about interests, or sponsoring an Instagram share. All of these tools provide information about who your customers are, and what interests them. Again you are looking for comment echoing—what environments or characteristics are echoed in this information.

4. Customer Research

If comment echoes, engagement and web analytics are not enough and you need further validation, it’s time to look into statistically reliable results. Primary market research that employs customer segmentation is not a difficult as you might initially think. Tools like Survey Monkey, Qualitrics, and other online survey software are easily accessible. They will provide you with a URL link to your survey. With this URL link you can send the survey out using multiple avenues. The URLs can be directly embedded on your website. They can also be posted on your Facebook page or sent out in an email broadcast. You can tweet the URL survey link or be daring and ask a few of the web review bloggers to post the survey for you. Web review site posting usually broadens the respondent pool and adds new customer markets for your new product or design considerations.

In writing your survey questions, make sure you cover the basic segmentation areas including:

• socioeconomic demographics
• behaviors
• interests
• product usage
• media sources

When analyzing the information from your survey, create filters on survey elements such as age, gender, region and activities. This will enable you to group customer responses into useful interest segments for design consideration. I have found that a good rule of thumb is to have at least 250 respondents included in each segmentation group. Clustering, classification analysis, and decision trees are all useful statistical tools that help validate your segmentation analysis.

5. Product Testing

As soon as you’ve got a new concept or two worked out, go back to your Audience Segments to get their input. Let them test elements of your product design.

For example: Identify the elementary design changes under consideration in visual formats that don’t give away the strategic magic. Ask about the strong points or the appeal of new features or colors you are considering.

Once you have this input, you can use the voice of the customer segment to help steer your designs. The voice of the customer can also help you convince your leadership team that there are sizeable markets of interest for the taking.

The Benefits of the Customer Voice

Listening to the customer voice has many benefits. It helps you clearly state a design problem to be tackled and helps you identify missing product opportunities and uncrowded product space. It also provides valuable data about the breadth and depth of market interest and access. The information you collect through these five approaches can help you communicate with leadership and other operational departments about the audiences and markets you are targeting and the design elements you have chosen.

The post 5 ways to get the voice of the customer into your design process, Part 2 first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.

For some of you the start of the New Year means the launch of new concepts and design ideas for the upcoming year. Others of you may already be midcourse in your product development cycle. Whether you are at the beginning or mid-stage in the new product development, it is critically important to build your awareness of customer interests and consumers’ unmet needs.

In this two-part blog post, I talk about 5 ways you can incorporate the voice of the customer into your design process.

1. Web Analytics

Data captured from page clicks and mobile device access portals helps you understand your customer interests. Web analytics can answer access questions such as:

• Do your clients engage with you in Facebook journeys or product quests?
• Where do customers click for product reviews?
• What web avenues lead them to your webpage and what devices did they use to get there?

Knowing your social media stops and being able to identify your percentage of “dark social” sharing (done by email and private social networks) is just the beginning of understanding the personalities that are showing interest in your products or programs.

In the web analytics world, things began evolving a little over a year ago when Google announced new customer insight analytics at their GASummit2013. Here’s an example of using the segmentation tools with a Google Analytics platform from the In-App Analytics and Segmentation for Mobile using Google Analytics presentation. The segmentation discussion starts at 4:41.

Google calls these new analytic tools Audience Reporting. According to Google’s Audience Reporting launch:

“One of the biggest challenges for online marketers is the lack of information about the people visiting their properties and buying their products. Unlike in physical stores where a manager can tell a lot about the sorts of people coming and going — What age are they? What’s their gender? What are they interested in? — online merchandisers and marketers are often flying blind. Audience Reporting solves this problem by providing age, gender, and interest categories as dimensions in Google Analytics. Find out who your site visitors are and gain a better understanding of who your most valuable (highest converting) audiences are…Taking into account demographics and interests, you can efficiently target, bid, and optimize your creative to improve your campaign’s performance.”

This information is derived from the third-party DoubleClick cookie and device identifiers. The customer data reports the user profile in terms of demographics and Interests. Interest elements include both affinity and in-market categories. The tool also allows you to identify core customer segments you are interested in observing and then creates separate tracking reports about their activities. Here’s an explanation of how this web information is currently being deployed.

2. Product Reviews

To capitalize on your research from web analytics, look at what customers are saying about your products and your competitors’ products. It’s not easy to read through comments that criticize your product or praise your competitors’ strengths, but this is how you’ll uncover important information about customer needs.

Search engines can assist you in locating product reviews on the web and in print. When customers write comments about product highlights and shortfalls it can lead to new avenues of concept ideation for product improvement, product redesign, or new technologies. Comments in product sales pages, buying guides, magazine reviews and expert blog reviews are some of the more common types of reviews.

When you look at reviewer comments, what you want to look for is “comment echoing”—the same unmet need being voiced repeatedly about multiple products in an in-market product group. You can quickly identify comment echoing by capturing the text from 20 to 40 comments and reviews, compiling the text and running it through a “word cloud” generator. If you reduce this analysis to the top ten or 15 most frequently mentioned descriptive words, the core of unmet needs typically begins to emerge.

Beyond Web Analytics and Product Reviews

In my next post, I’ll talk about three more ways that you can engage with the customer:

• Relationship-Building and Engagement
• Customer Research
• Product Testing

The post 5 ways to get the voice of the customer into your design process, Part 1 first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.

Are you new to product-line planning? Or are you an established professional who thinks your organization could be doing a better job of it?

Pete Frickland, Principal of Concurrent Product Development, and I do an hour-long presentation titled Outside-In Planning: Tools and Techniques for Strategic Product Line Planning, that can help. It covers the key questions that product-line managers, designers, directors of product development, and sales and marketing managers should consider before jumping into next season’s planning process. These questions include:

• Who needs to be involved in strategic line planning and does it require a team?
• What options or tools are available to collect data about market competition and consumer segments?
• How do you use this information to spot openings in the market for new products or product enhancements?
• How can this information be used to directly guide design and development decisions?
• How much should you rely on external data about customers, competitors, and the market to identify internal strengths?
• How do you factor in internal perspectives about the data and the organization?
• How do you take all of this data and create a condensed guide for exploring new product line options?

Three keys to pre-development work

Conducting your pre-development process can be accomplished using three platforms:

• Competitive & Consumer Research
• Management Engagement
• Preliminary Line Planning document creation

The combination of these three provides you an intersecting environment enabling you to learn your customer voice, understand your internal strengths and assess your competition.

Concurrent Strategies teaches techniques that use both market research and institutional knowledge as the basis for next-steps ideation. This distinctive approach integrates competitive insights like missing product or uncrowded space along with web-based consumer research to help identify latent needs and provide design guidance from various consumer and market segments.

Management perceptions are then gathered to assess the ability of various key players to build on these opportunities and create new venues that inspire product development efforts. At its core, this is a team-based approach that uses research to focus internal perceptions for next year’s product line deliverables.

Our goal is to help you get a sense of the value of strategic product-line planning and the difference it can make in your actual product development work.

Find out more

Pete and I will be delving into these issues in much greater detail at one of two presentations coming later this month. Check out our events page for a presentation near you.

The post How strategic planning improves your product development process first appeared on Concurrent Strategies.