Product Description

Companies must innovate to grow, but they often forget to look beyond their own brands. Take Sony, for example. Its success with consumer innovations like the Walkman blinded it to obvious changes in how, when, and where people wanted their music. Apple capitalized on those changes in demand with the iPod, providing a new way of listening to music and of managing one’s entire music library.

This book explains how you can spot these opportunities that are hidden in plain sight. It introduces the demand-first innovation and growth model that will show you how to become an unbiased observer of people’s consumption and usage behaviors. Refining this skill helps companies generate organic growth through new products, services, solutions, and experiences that truly enhance peoples’ lives. Revealing the innovative processes of such organizations as BMW, Proctor and Gamble, GE Healthcare, and Frito-Lay, Hidden in Plain Sight offers you a new approach to identifying and executing your company’s growth strategy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #362908 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Booklist
Joachimsthaler offers another book that promotes use of reinvented basic marketing principles to assist highly innovative companies. The author describes his DIG model (Demand-First Innovation & Growth), which consists of three interlinked parts: explore the demand for their products and services through an in-depth understanding of how people behave and live their lives and how they consume; apply an innovative routine of structured thinking to identify opportunities that customers cannot articulate; and formulate a strategy for effectively pursuing new opportunities. We learn that although most companies conduct some type of market research, they may fail to look for real opportunities and quantify them or fail to develop viable action plans that lead to results. This model illustrates how to become an unbiased observer of people's consumption and usage behaviors and offers a new approach to identifying and executing a company's growth strategy. Joachimsthaler, a consultant, reports that "successful opportunities for innovation and growth are right here, in front of us, and we often can't see them or don't act on them." Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Erich Joachimsthaler is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vivaldi Partners, a strategy and marketing consulting company with headquarters in New York City and offices in Munich, London, and Amsterdam. The firm focuses on developing breakthrough growth strategies for its clients by leveraging its expertise in brands, new products, and customer research. Over the last 20 years, Dr. Joachimsthaler has held faculty positions at the University of Southern California, University of Houston, Institutes Estudios Superiores de la Empresa (IESE) in Barcelona, Spain and The Darden School, University of Virginia. Currently, he is a Visiting Professor of Business Administration at IESE. In the year 2004-2005, he lectured at the Harvard Business School, Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich, University of Toronto, and Helsinki Institute of Technology. He has published nearly 60 articles in such respected academic journals as the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal Consumer Research, and Sloan Management Review. He holds degrees in economics, statistics and business administration from both German and U.S. universities, having received a Master of Science degree (1981) and a Ph.D. in Business Administration with an emphasis in marketing and quantitative methods (1985) from the University of Kansas. Subsequently, he completed a Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Harvard Business School in 1988.

Customer Reviews

The Invisibility of the Obvious

Erich Joachimsthaler offers what he claims is a "new model of strategic innovation for achieving profitable business growth" by abandoning "some of the tried and proven conventions of innovation, marketing, and strategy formulation" and by discarding "some of today's common assumptions and management practices and adopt a fresh way of planning an executing your strategies today and your innovation and growth strategies of tomorrow." The key word is "some" as he explains how.

After discussing "hidden opportunities to innovate and grow" in Part I, he focuses in Part II on several companies which exemplify a demand-first innovation and growth model (e.g. Frito-Lay, Allianz, GE Healthcare, and State Street) and then shifts his attention, in Part III, to various strategies by which to realize customer advantage.

As the title of this book suggests, Joachimsthaler asserts - and I agree - that many senior-level executives lack the ability to see - really see - "the opportunities presented by the changing consumption or usage behaviors of people [their organizations are] trying to serve. [They] cannot spot or recognize and pursue the abundant opportunities that exist in plain sight." Why? Joachimsthaler suggests several reasons which include routine but disparate processes which fragment a company's view of its customers, perpetuation of the status quo which limits a company's perspective on its competitive marketplace, a mistaken belief that "the key to growth lies in identifying customers' needs and wants [and/or] providing solutions for the tasks or jobs it knows customers must take on and get done," and an "inside-out" perspective which results in what Theodore Levitt once characterized as "marketing myopia."

Joachimsthaler suggests three lessons that can be learned from companies such as NetFlix, Sony, and Starbucks:

1. Position existing or new products or services at natural intersections of customers' consumption and use behaviors;

2. Change or enhance customers' daily routines and create transformative experiences around activities, projects, and tasks in new and welcome ways; and

3. Deliver on previously unleashed or unarticulated desires, dreams, fantasies, and urges in the social-cultural context of people's lives.

The demand-first innovation (DIG) model can be of substantial benefit to any organization (regardless of size or nature) but it would be a fool's errand to attempt to apply all of the ideas that Joachimsthaler presents. Rather, It would be a fool's errand for anyone who reads this book to attempt to apply all of the ideas that Joachimsthaler presents. Rather, he suggests that those who read this book clearly identify their organization's key demand-relevant assets and make full use of them, rigorously evaluate and develop their organization's distinctive capabilities deployed to manage those assets, choose only those major strategic initiatives that force the integration of all demand-facing processes, and "build the culture" with innovation initiatives at all levels and within all areas throughout what should be a demand-driven enterprise.

Joachimsthaler calls for nothing less than "the activation of demand-first growth platforms by whatever means [to] help customers absorb or assimilate an innovation, or retool old ways of doing things, into their daily life or work experiences." Only then can an organization find and execute its next big growth strategy.