Embracing UX Design

Growing and maintaining a product now requires recognition of User Experience or UX Design. Even service oriented companies should pay attention to UX Design because the world is so digital and connected – your online presence requires great UX design.  Regrettably, many companies have yet to embrace the concepts of UX design. 

In Pursuit of the Micro Moment

For the last few years Google has been spending a lot of time trying to understand something called the micro-moment. The micro-moment is the time between researching a product or service and the time a person makes the buy decision. It is during this slice of time that the brain tells the person; yes you should (or should not) buy this product or service. Understanding the brain and a person’s emotional response during these micro-moments has become very important for marketers. This behavioral approach to marketing is often referred to as Neuro-Marketing.   

A Better Way to Grow

The consensus amongst most is that bigger is better. With increased pressure on our natural capital (soil, water, oceans, etc.) and an ever increasing gap between rich and poor, it’s time for all businesses to re-think what growth is really about. Take for example inequality - the United States has the fourth-highest income inequality among the world’s developed countries; only Chile, Mexico and Turkey rank higher with trailing countries represented by Russia, Ukraine and Lebanon.

In their book The Big Enough Company, authors Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams make the argument that owners should be true to themselves and grow a company to a size where they can still enjoy running the company. You should not grow just for growth’s sake. A “big enough” company delivers benefits to a broad audience and continues to have a positive impact as the owners originally envisioned.   

How to Capture Useful Feedback

Capturing feedback is important to the success of every business. Feedback represents a conversation with your employees and your customers. These conversations keep you within a zone of reality and best of all, these conversations create relationships. And in the world of business, relationships matter.

How to Use the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Over the last few years, successful entrepreneurs have pointed to the Minimum Viable Product or MVP as a roadmap for creating long-term success. MVP is about creating a product or service with just enough value to make it attractive to a small group of customers. In some cases, the product or service is released on a test basis. This allows you to move incrementally without committing huge resources. A strong development team will be needed to capture feedback and turn out new releases. If you are releasing something very unique, you should validate the offering with a private or internal group well in advance of going to a larger test market.

Understanding Your Value Proposition

Getting your value proposition right and knowing when and how to tweak it is extremely important. Intense competition and change are forcing many companies to re-visit their original value propositions. The best value propositions are those that solve major pain points for lots of people. Start by looking at how your customers spend their time – what frustrations do they encounter?