Riding out the Recession with Lean Business Strategies

Businesses in the present economy are under pressure as the pace of revenue growth slows down to a crawl, compressing profit margins as revenues barely exceed fixed costs. Of course you can still drive growth through share gains and lower costs by targeting jobs for elimination, but when industry growth is nonexistent, your competitors will protect market-share fighting tooth and nail. Also there’s only so many jobs that can be eliminated without cutting into the core of the organization. Here are some measures that can be taken to tighten the organizational belt and drive austerity within the organization- some old ideas and some new.

Internal Impact: Reinforce your core and increase operational agility

Drive Operational Efficiency:
Leverage matrix relationships and pool resources across functional groups. Also evaluate the opportunity of creating smaller multifunctional “SWAT” teams that can rapidly deployed to tackle complex one-time assignments across the organization. Protect cash reserves to compensate for credit paucity during recessions- don’t over-leverage. Acquisitions may seem very attractive during recessions as valuations are low, but acquisitions add a lot of burden on the company in the integration process during a time when corporate energy needs to be conserved- bite only as much as you can chew!

Focus on competitive advantage:
Every firm at some point started with some competitive advantage that enabled them to enter a market effectively and when times get tough, it becomes critical to leverage this inherent expertise. This also offers the surest opportunity for growth- by simply taking your competitive advantage to newer markets, rather than trying to get into markets where you have peripheral or no expertise. Bring the game to where you have an advantage.

Streamline your Product Portfolio:
Innovation is critical to growth, but depending upon the industry, only about 30% of all innovations have the ability to drive incremental growth (without cannibalizing core business). New product trials to identify successful innovations consume precious resources that are critical to corporate health during tough economic times. Plants are masters at evolving through tough environmental conditions and provide us a valuable lesson in growth- you can only grow if you survive. In bad weather, plants conserve resources and do not produce flowers, fruits or seeds. These are critical for it’s proliferation, but consume precious energy in producing, which is better used in staying alive. Take a realistic look at your innovation portfolio, rank them by short-term probability of success and take the top 25% or fewer to trial.

Enhance existing product features:
Leverage customer data and market research to understand what product features are the most valuable to customers and enhance core portfolio. Remember when resources are scarce then innovation needs to be efficient.

External Impact
Maximize Customer Value Proposition
Understand what customer need your product serves and try to maximize the product’s ability to serve that need. This goal determines the focus of internal impacts 2, 3 and 4 above. For instance if functional benefits are the primary need your product serves then minimize packaging and other peripheral costs and increase the functional offering. If quality not quantity is the key benefit your customer derives out of your product, then quantity not quality is what needs to be adjusted to protect margins.

Retention rather than acquisition focus
In most industries, acquisition costs are very high and there is a net negative cash flow of replacing an existing customer with a new customer when factoring these acquisition costs. If there is a moderate to high degree of customer turnover, your marketing dollars are better spent on retention rather than acquisition.

Protect core market
Your core market segment and is what drives your main cash flow and your core customers are the most loyal. It is easy to take this for granted as corporate leaders focus on making their mark on newer areas of growth, but when faced with economically challenging times, the castle needs to be protected from competitive incursions. This is also your most familiar grounds from which to weather out economic storms.

Satisfy broader range of existing customer needs
This is probably the lowest hanging fruit and also the most important in all of your external opportunities available. During economic hardships every single of your customers are trying to stretch their dollars and if there are innovation opportunities available to fulfill multiple customer needs with fewer products, these should be capitalized.

"Wal-Mart-esq" Marketing Strategy at Hyundai Motors?

I just saw the Hyundai ad that offers to buy back your new Hyundai if within a year of purchase you lose your job- talk about making best out of the situation! They were already pushing the best value for your money line- but this is quite a bold move that for the time-being stands head and shoulders above the rest of the "economic downturn? we are here to rescue" pitches. If it doesn't burn a hole in their pockets, this should bode well for their brand equity. On the flip-side, Hyundai taking back my new car will ease the pressure of making payments, but now I will not only be jobless but also car-less.

Honda, Toyota: this is your opportunity to outdo those smarty-pants at Hyundai Marketing- make a counter-offer of also throwing in a free loaner for those job interviews (you can thank me in cash for this free tip).

KDnuggets: Analytic Outsourcing Review: Dude, Where's My Analysis?

[Published on KDNuggets on Dec 6, 2008: https://www.kdnuggets.com/news/2008/n23/21i.html]

Analytic outsourcing has come into prominence in recent years with the growing independence of the KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) segment of the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) market as an independent sector of its own right. The multi-billion dollar KPO market in India is dominated by both established names in consulting and outsourcing as well as some newer players. Firms like Evalueserve (www.evalueserve.com), Genpact (www.genpact.com), McKinsey & Co (mckinsey.com) and Accenture (accenture.com) are leading the pack in this sector, while traditional BPO companies like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, WNS and EXL are also making a push into this sector, driven by the higher margins in KPO projects. Other countries such as China, Russia, Poland, the Philippines and Hungary are also ambitiously pursuing KPO opportunities, but India still has the lion's share of the global KPO market.

With the prolific outsourcing of more and more analytic functions to external vendors, it becomes important to understand the ramifications of the decision to outsource analytics to onshore or offshore units (either captive or independent) for companies vs. conducting it in-house. Let's first of all understand why this decision is very different from other types of outsourcing.

Differentiating a Business Process vs. Knowledge Process from an Outsourcing Perspective

Business Process Outsourcing entails taking a routine business process that is consistently repeatable, follows standard industry procedures and doesn't require client-vendor interaction on a regular basis and outsourcing it to an external entity. Knowledge Process Outsourcing on the other hand entails processes that are not consistently repeatable, do not necessarily have standard industry norms of execution, require more frequent client-vendor interaction and require a high degree of custom expertise that doesn't necessarily form the curriculum of standard business education. An additional point of difference is that BPO projects contain modules that can be separated and assigned to different entities with much more ease than KPO projects, especially analytic projects where modules are exponentially more integrated. KPO projects also have higher visibility within C-level stakeholders at end-clients than BPO projects.

Is Analytic Outsourcing For You?

There are several factors to be considered in evaluating the decision to outsource analytics vs. retaining it in-house:

• Access to or ability to assimilate analytic talent in-house
• Ability to constantly update in-house talent with latest analytic developments and techniques
• Availability of necessary data in-house and capability to organize it
• Financial Cost vs. benefit of conducting analytic research in-house
• Risks from outsourcing research function
• Advantage of third-party unbiased opinion and access to industry best-practices available to external vendors

With all the opportunities for efficiency, there are a few strategic disadvantages being overlooked by several business organizations that have outsourced a significant amount of their analytics to offshore entities. For instance, analytic projects often have the tendency to yield corollary business insights that may not have been the original goal of the analysis. The persons and entities within the organization may be the most qualified to identify and leverage such opportunities, compared to external vendors. This is especially important to firms where innovation is a critical part of the business model.

Long-term Outlook

The proliferation of analytic outsourcing is inevitable in the long-term, as firms try to focus on their core competitive advantage and leverage comparable yet cheaper talent in offshore markets. At the same time active firms that do not outsource the entire analytic process but manage to retain insight generation at a strategic level should prove to have somewhat of an edge over passive firms that outsource the entire analytic insight generation process. This will especially be an advantage during turning-points in industry and shifts in economic cycles and trends, which will require a deep understanding of all facets of the business and a rapid development and execution of appropriate strategic changes. Also the best KPO firms to partner with will be the ones that do not follow a "black-box" approach to analytics, but are willing to allow some level of scrutiny to their process (of course within the limits of Intellectual Property protection constraints)

Media, A Wharton Professor and Marketing Research - I

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to actually attend a lecture by a Wharton professor - Peter Fader - at the Marketing Modelers meeting down at the ARF in NYC. The topic of conversation was "The Paradoxes of Interactive Media". Peter Fader is a professor at the Wharton school of business and is actually on the board of A-list journals such as Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing Research. He has built his reputation on his research on trial and repeat in the CPG industry, while also doing some mean research in the field of electronic commerce. Most notable was his testimony during the Napster trial. Based on that testimony it was clear that the man is a rebel and revels in lateral thinking. The talk just confirmed it.

Even though I - or most other people in the room - didn't agree with everything he said, but his approach prompted me and everyone in the room to question our beliefs and conventional thinking. In today's blog I am presenting one of the points made in the session.

Professor Fader iterated that cross-group differences across different demographics like ethnicity are often meaningless. Now this may be true from a total category point of view (he used the example of DVD purchaes by hispanic vs. non-hispanic consumers). But if you get down to the brand or attribute level, this actually leads to way different consumer behavior - and since marketing is brand-driven rather than category driven, I would have to say that distinct differences do exist and can be leveraged by marketers to drive sales differently among different demographic groups. However, his essential theory that people are the same (or distributed similarly/ normally, if you want to be statistical) everywhere is pretty solid. However, as soon as you start breaking down a category by its attributes (brand, size, flavor, feel etc.) ethnic differences come into play. I would love to hear other points of view on this. I will deal with a couple of other interesting points made by professor Fader in my next posting....

So the Recession is finally official- Now What?

On Friday, November 28, 2008 the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research announced a peak in economic activity in December 2007. Since it is the NBER's sacred and ordained task to announce recession beginings and end, finally everyone including the government can admit that we are in an official recession until the NBER announces a 'trough', signalling the end of the recession. Interestingly, neither the GDP or the GDI (Gross Domestic Income) showed an extremely clear pattern in the two consecutive quarters of decline rule to identify a peak, only the payroll employment seems to have declined every month since December '07 and the NBER seems to have weighed heavily on this metric to dtermine that we reached a peak in economic activity in December '07. Interestingly, I had posted previously in Is GDP a Consistent Measure? No, GDP is actually a Deceptive Measure... that relying purely on the GDP to determine the state of the economy is not a good idea since this measure may no longer be as reliable as it used to be in the past. Even if the financial markets and the economic production begins to stabilize, employment may continue to decline (economists are expecting Friday's employment report to be abysmal at a 325,000 decline- ADP has reported a 250,000 decline in the private sector). What probably is also driving private sector declines is the fact that stock prices are down in the dumps and management will continue to leverage every opportunity to be efficient by cutting costs to appease shareholders, until revenue growth returns to a point where it offsets the need to improve profit margins through cost-cutting. After the 2001 recession, jobs took 4 years to return to peak levels according to the Economic Policy Institute and if that is any indicator, we are looking at late 2011 early 2012 for a full recovery. With the dramatic decline in House Prices and the bleak performance of retirement accounts, households are increasing their savings rate in "safer" securities (typically bonds), as they can no longer rely on their real estate equity as a retirement cushion. In any case we are a long way from getting out of the woods.

Ghilarducci's Guaranteed Retirement Account Plan & The Macroeconomy

The last couple of weeks there's this rumor that's been floating around that the Government plans to do away with 401K and replace them with what is being called Guaranteed Retirement Account. The idea apparently originates from an economist, Teresa Ghilarducci, who put forward a paper "Guaranteed Retirement Accounts Toward retirement income security" in November 2007. A year after the paper was published, in the wake of one of the worst financial crises in the history of the US, the author was apparently called to testify before Congress as the paper caught the government's eye. The paper proposes that workers "not enrolled in an equivalent or better defined-benefit pension" be enrolled in a "GRA" plan that combines the best features of defined-benefit and defined-contribution plans, offering workers guaranteed (?) retirement benefits- contributions will earn a rate of return guaranteed by the federal government. Upon retirement these funds will convert into annuities. Ghilarducci claims that combined with Social Security, these annuities will replace 70% of pre-retirement earnings (I thought most of the folks who entered the workforce within the past decade had given up ever seeing their Social Security benefits?). Participants would be guaranteed a fixed rate of return that exceeds inflation by 3 percent (but remember you are foregoing the opportunity to generate market returns on your investment- not amounting much today, which is why we are even entertaining this discussion I guess). Assuming this thing works and the Feds will be able to deliver on their promise, what will be the fallout from pulling that kind of capital out of the investment markets? Of the total $17.1 Trillion in U.S. retirement assets, mutual funds managed $2.2 Trillion, while IRAs accounted for $4.5 Trillion (data as of March 31, 2008 from Investment Company Institute). If a $0.75 Trillion bailout was going to pull us out of the financial crisis, what will be the outcome of withdrawing $6.9 Trillion out of capital markets? Or am I missing the math completely?

P&G Giving Up on Facebook Marketing?

I was just reading an article by Jack Neff of AdAge covering P&G "Digital Guru" Ted McConnell. Ted believes that Social Networks like Facebook may never be able to show the ROI on Ad dollars marketers spend on their websites. The article quotes Ted as saying about consumer-generated Media "Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren't trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. ... We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it." I am not sure if someone rewrote the English language dictionary but last time I checked Media is defined as "means of mass communication" and with a Reach of 12% of global internet users according to Alexa, Facebook certainly fits that bill. Now is it a good medium for advertising, that's a whole another thing. Ted also raises concerns about the type of targeting afforded by Facebook, but that's a fallout of the Information Age. There was a lot of hue and cry about using Credit Bureau data for marketing, a few regulations later that is still an industry. Ted makes a good point about reach fragmentation though- there's just way too much people do online to effectively reach them with any decent amount of banner ads. On the other hand as technology advances the ability of online advertisers to track a target through their internet trail and persevering until a conversion is obtained isn't that difficult. Already re-targeters are identifying unique users and repeatedly hitting them with ads- check this article.