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Find the Best Local Markets to Drive Growth

Harvard Business Review

These super geos were local profit pools that were concentrated and big enough to offer big ROI upside for marketing and sales. Sometimes it’s not immediately obvious why some geographic markets are such big consumers of a particular product. Certain local markets have the right ingredients to ripen demand.

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How Do Consumers Choose in a World of Automated Ordering?

Harvard Business Review

Our 2017 survey of 170 top Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Retail CEOs, COOs, and CFOs revealed a conscious shift away from traditional mass production and mass marketing practices toward more personalized approaches. Traditionally, marketing’s most important task was to broadcast the company’s brands to consumers.

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Business Model Generation : Blog | Executive Coaching | CO2 Partners

CO2

These are: Customer Segments – An organization serves one or several customer segments.

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Instead of Optimizing Processes, Reimagine Them as Platforms

Harvard Business Review

Consequently, that applications outsourcer can now go beyond customer satisfaction to influence the developer side of the process-turned-platform. Similarly, organizations that manage marketing more as a platform than a process identify, segment, and service their customers dramatically differently than those that don’t.

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Beyond Mass Customization

Harvard Business Review

Rather, they focus on markets (anonymous agglomerations of customers) rather than on any real, living, breathing individual customer. Most recognize that there are no truly mass markets any more. But we must go beyond looking at market segments and niches to embracing the truism that every customer is his own market.

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Users Are the New Growth Engine

Harvard Business Review

Forrester Research predicts that by 2012 half of all consumer purchases will be either transacted online or digitally driven in some way — influenced by search, social media, or emerging digital platforms like location-based services and digitally augmented store environments. But the bigger shift is behavioral.

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To Stay Ahead of Disruption's Curve, Follow Lead Users

Harvard Business Review

Unfortunately, however, customers for firms serving the mass market, by definition, have largely of middle-of-the-road needs. They are not "lead users" — users who today want new solutions to leading-edge needs that will disrupt firms serving the middle of the market tomorrow. This is a pattern for Apple.