Healthy Conversations
Imagining & Creating New Value For Health Brands & Consumers

Can you be the Apple of (fill-in your health segment here)?

There’s good learning here for marketers to take away from Fast Company’s July cover story – Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere.

After speaking with former employees, current partners, and others who have watched Apple for many years, the article’s author states the answers to Apple’s phenomenal success center around discipline, focus, long-term thinking, and a willingness to flout the rules that govern everybody else’s business.

Here’s Fast Company’s excerpted report on the Apple playbook:

1. Go Into Your Cave: translated as set your own agenda.
2. It’s Okay To Be King: Jobs and his team know exactly what they want, so everyone knows what the plan is. And from the likes of it, it’s working.
3. Transcend Orthodoxy: Despite all the noise about Apple’s closed ideology, the company adopts positions based on two simple conditions – whether they make for good products and good business.
4. Just Say No: Jobs’s primary role at Apple is to turn things down. Every day, he’s presented with ideas for new products and new features within existing ones. The default answer is no. “I’m as proud of the products that we have not done as the ones we have done,” Jobs told an interviewer in 2004.
5. Serve Your Customer: When Apple devised its retail strategy a decade ago, the company had a single overriding goal: to launch stores (and associated service) that were unlike anything that customers associated with the computer industry.
6. Everything Is Marketing: Apple’s most effective marketing is built into its products, i.e. iPod’s white earbuds, the Mac’s startup sound, the shape of the MacBook’s back panel. Apple understands the lasting power of sensory cues, and it goes out of its way to infuse everything it makes with memorable ideas that scream its brand.
7. Kill The Past: No other company reimagines the fundamental parts of its business as frequently, and with as much gusto, as Apple does.
8. Turn Feedback Into Inspiration: Apple believes that people can’t really envision what they want. So he uses customer ideas as inspiration, not direction; as a means, not an end.
9. Don’t Invent, Reinvent: To use a musical analogy, Apple’s specialty is the remix. It curates the best ideas bubbling up around the tech world and makes them its own. It’s also a great fixer, improving on everything that’s wrong with other similar products on the shelves.
10. Play By Your Own Clock: Jobs knows he’ll never be fired, so he can devote years, if that’s what it takes, to attain Apple’s high standards. Of all the points covered here (according to this author), Apple’s willingness to go long is perhaps its greatest strength.

After reading this article, I begin to think about innovative, game-changing health organizations like Mayo Clinic, PatientsLikeMe, Sermo, Walgreens (Take Care Clinics), Intuitive Surgical (da Vinci robotic system), 23andme…

What others would you add to this list?

What is the next generation of crowdsourcing (of customers and companies working together to create new value)?

Clinton Booner answers this question as the author of this guest post Crowdsourcing: Beyond the Basics, over at Jay Baer’s Convince and Convert Blog.

Clinton offers his 3c’s of next generation crowdsourcing: Co-Creation, Constant and Control:

1. Co-Creation. Allowing consumers to contribute in a number of ways to product and service enhancements.
2. Constant. Multiple initiatives happening in parallel and offering the user a constant stream of new involvement opportunities.
3. Control. Brands viewing open innovation strategies as not ‘giving up creative control’ but rather understanding what this really is – co-created market research that is more accurate – ultimately offering remarkable ways to help deliver happy, impassioned, and loyal consumers.

Would you add any C’s to this list?

According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, CEOs value “creativity” as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.

That’s creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude. Until now, creativity has generally been viewed as fuel for the engines of research or product development, not the essential leadership asset that must permeate an enterprise.

As they step back and reassess, CEOs have seized upon creativity as the necessary element for enterprises that must reinvent their customer relationships and achieve greater operational dexterity. In face-to-face interviews with IBM consultants, they said creative leaders do the following:

• Disrupt the status quo. Every company has legacy products that are both cash—and sacred—cows. Often the need to perpetuate the success of these products restricts innovation within the enterprise, creating a window for competitors to advance competing innovations. As CEOs tell us that fully one-fifth of revenues will have to come from new sources, they are recognizing the requirement to break with existing assumptions, methods, and best practices.

• Disrupt existing business models. CEOs who select creativity as a leading competency are far more likely to pursue innovation through business model change. In keeping with their view of accelerating complexity, they are breaking with traditional strategy-planning cycles in favor of continuous, rapid-fire shifts and adjustments to their business models.

• Disrupt organizational paralysis. Creative leaders fight the institutional urge to wait for completeness, clarity, and stability before making decisions. To do this takes a combination of deeply held values, vision, and conviction—combined with the application of such tools as analytics to the historic explosion of information. These drive decisionmaking that is faster, more precise, and even more predictable.

Taken together, these recommendations describe a shift toward corporate cultures that are far more transparent and entrepreneurial. They are cultures imbued with the belief that complexity poses an opportunity, rather than a threat. They hold that risk is to be managed, not avoided, and that leaders will be rewarded for their ability to build creative enterprises with fluid business models, not absolute ones.

You can tell people all day long that they need to lose weight. That they need to be more active because it’s good for their health. And they’d expect these “one-way” messages from a healthcare provider like Mayo Clinic.

What you might not expect from Mayo is a fitness device that coaxes people into action. That adds real value to people’s lives – beyond Mayo’s core business of saving lives – and helps them do more than they could on their own.  And giving them the ability to do it alongside others.

Gruve (the first of other activity-based weight management products developed in cooperation with Mayo Clinic) keeps track of a user’s metabolic progress against his or her pre-measured metabolism. The information collected is then synced to the Gruve Online website, giving users the ability to view their daily calorie burn and weight loss progress.

Here are a few important things for marketers to take away about Mayo’s Gruve:

• identifying new products and services through a filter of real customer needs (rather than through what and how you do it today), will free you to see and think in new ways about your possibilities and extending your appeal to new audiences
• these ideas are win-win’s for both customer and organization, as both grow stronger as a result of these new products
• helping people do things alongside others (people can join the Gruve “muvement”) creates an even more powerful proposition

So how can you get your “gruve” on to be more important to more people than you are today?

Inspiration is often found where you least expect it. Looking at alternate categories far away from where you concentrate your sights each day often yields new ideas about how to create new and greater value for current customers, and how to create new demand among non-customers.

On this kind of search for another client (based on criteria of digital channel, destination site, big following, passionate participants), we found www.legoclick.com.

The meta description is “a little place on the Internet celebrating creativity and the everyday moments of inspiration that LEGO enthusiasts call CL!CK.”

Take a look. Enjoy. Be inspired. CL!CK here.

Imagining and creating new value requires seeing what others don’t. Which starts with the desire to do so. Yet people are either wired to venture into new territory or not. So how do you identify the innovators inside your organizations?

Here’s a great article from Saul Kaplan, founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory – 10 Ways To Recognize The Innovators In Your Organization.

Here are his top five (of ten) behavioral characteristics:

1) Innovators think there is a better way.
2) Innovators know that without passion there can be no innovation.
3) Innovators embrace change to a fault.
4) Innovators have a strong point of view but know that they are missing something.
5) Innovators know innovation is a team sport.

Are there other traits that you’d add to his list?

The more you know about your customers as real people – looking beyond their obvious needs to their hopes, dreams, fears and challenges – the more you can help them achieve.

In turn, the more value you give, the more you’ll receive in return. Ideally, this “return” will come in the form of customers who become enthusiastic fans of your organization. The ones who are more than happy to sing your praises.

Here are eight ways to make this happen through social media:

1. Internal Engagement. Give employees, the ones who power your brand, the chance to shine, e.g. Best Buy Connect
2. Collaboration. Create mechanisms for customers to influence your products and services, e.g. Dell’s IdeaStorm
3. Authenticity. Feature happy customers on video, e.g. Mayo Clinic’s atrium piano
4. Feedback. Create real-time feedback channels, e.g. ComcastCares
5. Participation. Create suggestion boxes and reward customers for their participation, e.g. My Starbucks Idea
6. Experiences. Create new ways of delivering experiences that fit with their lifestyles, e.g. healthierme
7. Conduit. Allowing customers to share with each other through you rather than driven by you, e.g. beinggirl.com
8. Sharing. Allow customers to share their ratings, e.g. revolutionhealth

Are there other good examples that come to mind?

Is someone, or some team in your organization, acting on this question? I hope so, because right now, as you’re reading this, your competitors are. Those you know about, and those who aren’t yet on your radar screen. Those you directly compete with today, and those you soon will.

• Are you looking past customers’ obvious needs – beyond the pills, the community outreach, the procedures, etc.?

• Are you imagining beyond your current “industry ” offerings to satisfy their desires in unconventional ways – looking to make new combinations and connections, and to outside industry role models and influencers for inspiration?

• Are you committed to reinventing your customers and your company – beyond new products to new business models, markets, ventures, experiences, services, partners, channels, conversations?

Who’se doing the dreaming, exploring, imagining, creating, prototyping? Do these words describe you, someone else, or some team in your organization? Hopefully, the answer is yes. Because if they don’t, irrelevancy is closer than it appears.