Case 1: Online retail
Standing in the Customer's Shoes
Need: Whilst most clients want to be more customer centric, never is this more important than with "challenger brands" – you need a much more attractive mouse trap to steal share from established brands. This client, an MBO of a long established online and offline food and wine gift business, has a superlative low cost process, excellent MI and a recognition that they weren’t sure what a superior customer journey would look like.
Workshop: This workshop started with a couple of eye-opening games I use that engage teams – (they stimulate more open dialogue that immediately leads to more rewarding discussions – generating and exploring new possibilities). Using videoed customer usability sessions as stimuli we dissected what worked or didn’t and why. This led to new plans for the website, which led to clarifying the positioning, refining the proposition, enhancing customer service and transforming promotions. We started a new energy, which a year later is still growing.
"We had developed, enlarged and enhanced our website over many years but this had primarily been from a basis of functionality and inter-relation with our operational databases. We knew the site too well and it was therefore highly illuminating and of great benefit when Mark Sinclair and his team illustrated and applied their extensive knowledge of online customer behaviour together with videoed usability sessions. The number of 'easy to use' comments posted to our site increased as a result and regular reviews of the potential customer journey carried out by experts outside the business have great value."
Ian Longworth, CEO, hamper.com
Case 2: Major bank
Innovation
Need: A major UK bank was looking for creative solutions to bring their ideas to life and produce a compelling way for top management to feel the consumer potential in order to commit to investment.
Workshop: A one day workshop with the team forensically reviewed the evidence and WIP from many different contexts, and in so doing challenged and distilled the “pitch” rationale to reveal a number of insights which had been overlooked. With this deeper customer focus the concepts were refined, researched brilliantly, and gained management sponsorship.
"Creative blockages are a fact of life for any-one in innovation, and it was really useful to get a second opinion from experts who totally understood what we were trying to achieve.
I thoroughly recommend Mark and his team to anyone innovating, especially where it involves a paradigm shift."
Pete Evans
Case 3: Russia
Mediation
Need: President of a Russian bank group asked me to mediate a 3 day workshop in Moscow for his five top executives to resolve a stand off. The company wished to introduce a shared services infrastructure across the five bank chains it owned in Russia, and yet after having had one of Europe’s top consultancies engaged for over a year, the management team were unable to reach enough agreement to proceed.
Intervention: I created a non linear game for the team to play on the first morning: each CEO was given a car brand within Ford (Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin etc) along with a cost model for building a new car (engine, chassis etc) and given the task of launching a new model at a market beating price.
Negotiations were smooth and swift and a matrix was rapidly created, the essence of which was an elegant strategy based on investment in elements which differentiated in consumer eyes and sharing costs in everything which didn’t differentiate.
Having cracked the Car Trade in the morning, Banking was negotiated in good humour in the afternoon. Day 2 drilled the detail and day 3 a charter for implementation, signed on a football.
