Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute your Company's Next Big Growth Strategy

Citation

Kuczmarski, T. (2008), "Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute your Company's Next Big Growth Strategy", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 17 No. 5, pp. 367-368. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpbm.2008.17.5.367.2

In the opening to his new book, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute your Company's Next Big Growth Strategy, Erich Joachimsthaler poses the simple, yet provocative question, “Why didn't we think of that?” After reading this insightful and engaging new book, it is the very question business leaders, academics, and consultants will be forced to ask themselves: why didn't we think about innovation like that?

Joachimsthaler begins with a premise that may itself be an obvious truth hidden in plain sight. That is, the very things companies do to make themselves more efficient and effective are exactly what prevent them from achieving growth through innovation. The structures, stage gates, processes, market segmentations, and research techniques that are typically implemented to drive innovation forward are actually a deterrent and a distraction from the one thing that actually makes innovation happen: a deep and thorough understanding of the customer. Importantly, this understanding is not about the customer's perceptions of a specific product. Instead, it is an understanding of the life the customer lives and of the different emotions, behaviors, needs, and desires that make their lives whole.

Chapters 1‐2: hidden opportunities to innovation and grow

Joachimsthaler positions his new approach to innovation that looks from the outside in at the customer. When companies achieve this perspective, allowing for a deeper understanding of the customer, they gain a customer advantage. As he notes:

The pursuit of customer advantage requires a company to rescind its focus on competitive advantage as the front‐and‐center motivator. In theory, this can be daunting; in practice, it frees the company to innovate much more creatively and meaningfully and see the big opportunities in plain sight (p. 19).

In moving past the fixation on one‐upping the closest competitor through product features, Joachimsthaler lays out a path that will allow companies to use customer advantage to break away the existing innovation framework, which is defined by:

• •

  current customers;

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  current brands;

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  current categories;

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  industries;

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  silos and functions;

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  strategic business units; and

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  habitual domains.

To move beyond this limiting framework, Joachimsthaler proposes capturing and understanding the ecosystem of demand, i.e. the needs and wants, pleasures, and pains of customers and how they define their lives and lifestyles. The specific process by which the ecosystem is captured is termed the “DIG Model,” or demand‐first innovation and growth. Three components are required for a company to DIG successfully and understand the customer: understanding how the customer lives, reframing and defining opportunity spaces from a customer‐oriented perspective, and creating a strategic blueprint that allows a company to pursue these opportunities efficiently and effectively. By employing a DIGging approach to innovation, customer needs and problems are not limited to specific products or brands. Instead, the customers are defined by the lifestyles they lead, and demand is identified within the numerous behaviors, emotions and activities customers perform throughout a day. The DIG Model reframes focus from product‐specific innovation to solutions that fit into the lives of customers, however and wherever they may exist.

Chapters 3‐6: the demand‐first innovation and growth model

Joachimsthaler devotes great attention to explaining how the DIG model works. The DIG model is comprised of three pieces:

1. 1.

   Creating a demand landscape.

2. 2.

   Reframing the opportunity space.

3. 3.

   Formulating a strategic blueprint for action.

For each of these critical steps, Joachimsthaler offers useful constructs and frameworks that can be employed to ensure that the DIG model will stay focused and on track. DIGging successfully and defining the broader demand landscape requires a fundamentally different approach to how and why you interact with your customers. Joachimsthaler proposes refined ethnographic‐ and observation‐based research techniques that capture customers living their lives naturally, rather than forcing manipulated and unrealistic product interactions.

Joachimsthaler then offers insight into how these learnings can be shaped and used. Key to this success of the DIGging process is the usage of unarticulated customer needs. As he states:

We also must not rely on what consumers tell us. Consumers cannot know what they have not experienced. If we want to see the hidden opportunities in plain sight, we must first cleanse the doors of perception and then some … We must explore the deep recesses of this ecosystem of consumer demand (p. 233).

By redefining and restructuring opportunities from a customer‐centric perspective, companies can more effectively develop the strategies and blueprints that will allow for the development of innovations to take place.

Chapters 7‐9: strategies for realizing customer advantage

In the final section of his book, Joachimsthaler turns away from the theoretical approach of DIGging to its practical application within companies. Key to realizing customer advantage is understanding the role that brand plays in innovation. All too often brands are an overlooked part of the innovation process. They are often tacked on to a new product at the end of a process, or, proposals for the development of new brands are rejected when the reality of cost and time are considered. Joachimsthaler convincingly argues that brands play a key role in creating and maintaining customer advantage. The key, however, is to move beyond the brand as simply a set of customer perceptions towards a brand that plays an integrated role in a customer's life. Brands have the capability to play this role as they often speak directly to key demand landscape features such as aspirations, personality, and values. Often, companies too tightly define their brands rather than explore how far, and in what areas, they can be extended as platforms for new ideas. As Joachim points out:

Should Crest simply be the best toothpaste brand, or should it position itself as an authority on oral care? Conceptualizing Crest as an authority on oral care requires this fundamental shift of looking at the brand from the outside in (167).

Joachimsthaler argues that it was precisely this refocusing of what the brand should mean that allowed P&G to develop Crest White Strips, along with other non‐toothpaste innovations.

The second key component for activating a demand‐landscape view is to internalize the DIG model throughout a company. This is easier said that done, yet Joachimsthaler points the reader in a useful direction. He argues that this internalization often begins at the top, with support from senior management. But, it must be supported from below with the right processes and focus. Gaining customer advantage must be made a priority within the culture of a company, but it can only be propelled into action with new practices and metrics that support the new mindset.

Overall, Erich Joachimsthaler's Hidden in Plain Sight is a forward‐thinking and engaging book that should redefine how companies approach innovation. Its effectiveness is its straightforward simplicity – both in the approaches and ideas that Joachimsthaler proposes, as well as in how they are presented and supported. Hidden in Plain Sight is a valuable resource for any organization looking to increase its value to customers and succeed at innovation. It is a resource that anyone throughout an organization – from brand managers to senior executives – will benefit from.