Knowledge Is Power

SCIP Boston Meeting Features Disruptive Technology

The SCIP Boston chapter is very fortunate to have Arik Johnson, founder and CEO of leading CI firm Aurora WDC, and Alex Graham, Director of SCIP for a meeting on Thursday January 26, 2006 beginning at 6 PM. Arik will present a primer on Disruptive Innovation Theory and the relationship between this revolutionary approach to understanding competing technologies, anticipate industry changes and predict the outcomes of competitive product battles in advance. First written about by Clayton Christensen of Harvard in his ground breaking 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, disruptive technologies are new technologies adopted by entrepreneurial firms which gain acceptance in the marketplace while established industry participants ignore the products/services as niche, unprofitable, or unneeded. These large companies, which are well managed by traditional standards, are too focused on the needs of current customers to notice the growth of disruptive technologies until they have gained traction. For more information on this meeting, please visit www.scip.org.

Please Buy Chocolate, Not Gum

As a researcher, I must remain unbiased, but this is my blog and I’m a chocoholic. I was dismayed to read in the Wall Street Journal today that “As Chocolate Sags, Cadbury Gambles on a Piece of Gum.” Sales of gum, especially sugarless gum, is growing at twice the rate of chocolate sales so Cadbury Schweppes has spent two years and millions of dollars to develop a new gum product named Trident Splash.

The uniqueness of Trident Splash comes from the combination of a liquid center and two separately flavored hard outside layers. The proprietary technology to manufacture this new gum format was part of the candy and gum assets acquired from Pfizer in 2002. At the time, industry observers questioned the move since the gum market differed significantly from Cadbury Schweppes’ candy markets.

No one is laughing now. Trident Splash has excited retailers including giant Wal-Mart who plans to place the product in high visibility end of aisle displays. “Cadbury’s goal is to create what its marketers call a gum with ‘mouth-entertainment,’ or one so indulgent that weight-conscious consumers would choose it instead of reaching for a chocolate bar or a bag of chips.” From a competitive viewpoint, Cadbury accepts that Trident Splash will cannibalize the sales of its chocolate products, but will more than make up for that in gaining market share from competitors. And these competitors are not just gum makers—they are all snack foods manufacturers. So PepsiCo and Hershey beware!

On second thought, go ahead and buy Trident Splash. You’ll leave more chocolate for me to eat.

Truth vs. Facts

William Faulkner wryly commented, “Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.” Unfortunately, he was often correct. Different truths can be divined from a single set of facts. Or as I have seen many times in my career business, truth can be divined from a single fact or set of facts. We believe facts are facts, that is, they are concrete, measurable, consistent, and confirmable. But remember the phrase, “Lying with Statistics” or hearing that the wording of questions on a survey slanted the answers? As a CI professional, you have to obtain agreement on the facts before you and your organization can even begin to derive the truth from them. As researchers, we always attempt to obtain confirmation from multiple sources for important data to insure its factual validity. We also check our data points from different sources for consistency. Only then can we analysis the facts for truths or conclusions about a competitive situation. Only when agreement is reached on the facts, can truth be established. And only with an agreed upon truth, can action be taken to improve your competitive standing in your marketplace.

January 2006 EastSight InSight

Your New Year’s resolution should be to create a win/loss data base. Accumulating and analyzing the information from multiple successful and failed sales will help you understand better your customers’ priorities, your (and your competitors’) value in their eyes, how you stack up against these competitors, and trends in your marketplace during 2006.