La nouveauté est-elle toujours gage de succès?

Avez-vous suivi le lancement du dernier iPhone d’Apple? Pas moi.

Vu mon manque d’enthousiasme par rapport à ce rendez-vous légendaire, je me suis beaucoup questionnée sur l’innovation comme facteur décisif en marketing.

Après avoir révolutionné le monde de la mobilité intelligente à maintes reprises, Apple doit aujourd’hui faire face à des attentes énormes en matière de nouveauté, sous peine d’entacher sa marque. Le fait de proposer un processeur deux fois plus rapide ou une reconnaissance par empreinte digitale ne semble plus être suffisant pour remplir sa promesse…

Dans quel monde vit-on, je vous le demande!

Si vous vous intéressez au sujet de l’innovation en marketing, je vous propose de lire une étude fascinante de Nielsen, publiée plus tôt cette année.

Quelques faits sont révélateurs :

- 60 % des consommateurs attendent qu’une innovation soit « prouvée » avant d’acheter;
- 60 % des acheteurs consomment des nouveautés, à condition qu’elles soient lancées par des marques connues;
- 59 % des acheteurs de nouveaux produits aiment en parler aux autres;
- Ce sont les catégories traditionnelles comme la nourriture, les breuvages, les vêtements ou l’hygiène personnelle qui réussissent à vendre davantage la nouveauté;
- 77 % des consommateurs se fient d’abord à leurs amis et à leur famille quand vient le temps de s’informer sur un nouveau produit;

Pour faire suite à cette étude, Nielsen propose une recette en 5 points pour développer un concept vraiment distinctif pour vous aider à commercialiser vos innovations

1- Utilisez des bénéfices généralement associés à une autre catégorie de produits afin de créer une proposition de valeur distinctive pour votre nouveauté.
2- Éliminez la frustration « et/ou » souvent associée aux produits existants et développez une proposition de valeur « tout-en-un ».
3- Proposez vos nouveautés à un prix plus compétitif et plus accessible à un marché élargi.
4- Soyez innovateur dans votre packaging pour répondre à des besoins supplémentaires et non comblés.
5- Utilisez vos marques existantes et mieux connues pour percer de nouvelles catégories ou proposer de nouveaux usages.

STÉPHANIE KENNAN . 11-09-2013 (modifié le 11-09-2013 à 13:01)

http://www.lesaffaires.com/blogues/stephanie-kennan/la-nouveaute-est-elle-toujours-gage-de-succes/561339#.UjCjHtJLPSk

Writing A Business Plan: 5 Keys To Your Success

Over the past decade, I’ve helped tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and business owners write their business plans, either through my business plan template, or our business plan consulting services.

However you expect to write your business plan, keep these five points top of mind:

1. Put Your Audience First

Most business plans are written for an audience. The most common audience is investors and lenders. Another audience might be your employees.

Make sure you write your plan with your key audience in mind. For example, if you are writing for venture capitalists (VCs), make sure you cater to their needs. For instance, VCs are very time constrained. So, make sure the first paragraph of your plan clearly states what you do and gets them interested. Likewise, VCs generally only fund companies who have the ability to scale to revenues of $100 million or more in five years. As such, your business plan must show how your company can attain such as feat.

2. Keep Your Business Plan Brief

Your business plan can never, nor should ever, answer every question your reader might have. Such a plan would be too lengthy, and no one would want to read it.

Rather, your business plan should cover the main points of your business, interest the reader, and show you have fully thought through the opportunity. One of the key goals of your business plan is to create enough interest for the investor to schedule a meeting with you. During that meeting they’ll ask you all the specific questions they have, some of which will not be covered in your plan (which is fine).

3. Sell, But Don’t Oversell

When used as a tool to gain investor and lender interest, your business plan is essentially a sales or marketing document. As such, it should get the investor excited, much like a brochure for a new automobile gets the right consumer to want to learn more and/or purchase it.

Now, while your plan should excite the reader, be careful not to oversell and particularly not to load your business plan with superlatives. For example, saying we have the best technology, a world-class management team, incredible employees, etc., can often take away from the credibility of your plan. Unless of course, you can provide hard facts supporting each of these claims.

4. Don’t Downplay Your Competition

When entrepreneurs are launching new businesses, they often state they have no competition. Since they think what they are doing is completely unique.

However, most investors think that if you don’t have competition, you may not have a market. Specifically, if customers aren’t currently purchasing a product or service like yours, maybe there’s no demand for it.

In most cases, you at least have indirect competition, or other firms serving the customer need with a different solution than yours. And in many cases, you do have direct competition.

In either case, address who these competitors are in your business plan. And don’t dismiss your competitors as being poor or unworthy. Because if they are still in business, they must be doing at least something right. Also, putting down competition could hurt your credibility.

So, be sure to state what your competitors are doing well, and then highlight reasons why you think your organization can beat them.

5. Envision the Long-Term But Plan For the Short-Term

Your business plan should state your long-term vision for your company, which typically is five or more years in the future. But since it’s impossible to plan that far out, you should create more concrete plans to achieve your goals for the next year.

Specifically, determine what you must accomplish in the next year to put your organization on the right trajectory to hitting your five year goals. Then, in your business plan, break out the current year’s goals into smaller pieces. For example, show what your key goals are for each quarter of this year. If you have multiple goals that overlap time-wise, use a Gantt chart to best show them.

The right business plan often means the difference between raising funding and not raising funding. And it’s often the difference between achieving and not achieving your business’ goals. So, be sure to keep these tips in mind when writing your business plan so you attain success in both these areas.

And, if you need help, a business plan template or business plan consulting services can reduce the time it takes to create your business plan, and help ensure it’s of the highest quality.

8/19/2013 @ 10:19AM

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davelavinsky/2013/08/19/writing-a-business-plan-5-keys-to-your-success/

Daily Quote: Success is the Ability to Go from One Failure to Another

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

Gina Amaro Rudan is a genius. That is, she wrote a very well-received book called Practical Genius that was endorsed by Seth Godin. But Gina wasn’t always a genius. She wasn’t even considered smart.

More Lifehacks: Why You Should Celebrate Your Failures

One day when Gina was in third grade at her Catholic grammar school, some children were pulled out of the classroom and taken to a much nicer room with beautiful windows and potted flowers. This new and improved room had been designed for the gifted students in the class, and Gina waited for her name to be called. It never was.

One of the nuns explained to Gina’s hardworking single mother that although she was a sweet child, academically she was just average. Gina’s mom, whose high hopes for her extraordinary child had just been dashed, told Gina that she would just have to try harder. So – trying harder – and getting attention for the abilities she knew she possessed, became Gina’s challenge, as well as the theme of her educational and professional experiences, for years to come.

Failure Makes You Who You Are

AUGUST 10 BY BRIAN LEE

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/daily-quote-success-the-ability-from-one-failure-another.html

A Manager’s 7 Tips for a Successful Project

I’m Simon and I’m an Account Executive at Higher Click. Previously, I worked for one of the biggest insurance companies in the world. My current position is between a purely managerial role and that of an executive, so I’m involved in quite a lot of project management. This article will summarize all that I’ve learned over the years.

A project manager’s main job is to bring a particular project to completion, both on time and within budget. There are all kinds of factors that can cause a project to veer off its tracks, both internal and external, but steps can be taken to ensure that your project experiences as little disruption as possible.

With planning and preparation, you can put your project into the best shape even before you begin, and hopefully minimize the types of interruptions that can derail the best-laid plans. Proper work before beginning a project can also ensure that any unexpected occurrences can be dealt with swiftly and efficiently.

1. Ensure that you have full project detail up front

A completely detailed project scope, with approval from all stakeholders, is a necessity. Be sure the scope includes interim milestones, a detailed timeline, and a budget that is sufficient to cover all required work.
If you get everything in writing at the beginning of the project, you have an excellent foundation to build upon. Change is inevitable, but you have to maintain control and point out when the project begins to resemble something completely different from what was originally outlined. This is critical to avert disaster if your client tends toward “scope creep,” which is when someone asks for “just one more little thing” repeatedly, until the endeavor has become a lot more or different from when it began.

2. Set realistic expectations

A PM I once knew was fond of saying, “You can have two of the three: good, fast, cheap. You CANNOT have all three.”

Make sure everyone on the team, including the client, understands the limitations of the project. You can finish a task successfully on time and within budget, as long as expectations are reasonable. You most likely cannot work miracles if expectations are not reasonable, and would only setting yourself up for project failure. Don’t begin your project with failure nearly predestined.

3. Establish measurable and reportable criteria for success

How can you know if your project is going to be successful if you don’t have any way of measuring success? You will need interim milestones, especially for an endeavor that will span a long time, so that you can determine if you are staying on track or straying from the project’s goals.

You must have both internal checkpoints and client checkpoints. Never leave incorporating a client’s feedback until the very end of the project, unless you want to risk having to re-work substantial components if the client is not happy.

4. Select team members, and assign responsibilities carefully

Gather your human resources, and make sure that skill-sets align with required roles. This is an important first step: If you assign the wrong person to a task, you are reducing your chances of success before the project even begins.

Make sure each team member is clear on what is expected from them and when. Encourage them to ask questions to clarify anything that may uncertain, and to come to you whenever something seems to be out of place or going awry. Clear and open communication is mission-critical.

5. Embrace your role as leader

You are the director of this project, so be sure to act the part and do not let any other team member assert dominance over your position. It’s your job to draw the best work out of your team members, so you are coach, mentor, and motivator. You may need to cultivate a team atmosphere among people who have not worked together before, so be sure to include team-building exercises if necessary. You also are the liaison with the client, so be accurate in your communications both internally and externally.

Be sure to provide strong and calm leadership to your team if your project encounters turbulence. It’s far more difficult to be a great leader in times of stress, but that’s exactly when your team needs you the most.

6. Manage project risks

Hopefully you have defined the more likely risks up front during the project preparation, so you will already have contingency plans in place for certain occurrences. If you can see when a risk is imminent, you can take preventive action to avoid it, or you can quickly step in with corrective measures if necessary.
Be ready to halt a project if the risk becomes unacceptable. Part of your role as leader is to know when things have begun moving inexorably toward a failure point.

7. Evaluate the project when complete

Once a project has been completed, it’s important to do a “post-mortem” report, even if it is only for internal purposes. You can pinpoint what went right and what went wrong, determine what could or should have been done differently, and establish the best practices for use in future undertakings.

JULY 19 BY SIMON ANDRAS

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/managers-7-tips-for-successful-project.html