Validating your idea

While on hollyday, i’ve been reading a book called the marketing guru’s by chris murray. It’s a summary of many important books in marketing.

One of these summaries is about the popcorn report by Faith Popcorn, which is a report about trends that are (going to) happen in the consumer world. I found this very interesting, because a new product and service should in most cases connect to a main trend to stand a chance in the marketplace. This could be a powerfull tool for validation of ideas.

This week i applied the trends to a new website and drew some conclusions on how to improve on it by adhering to more trends. A talk with the projectmanager showed that the second release will have most of the funtionalities i saw, just by using these trends!

On her businesses website she says the trends are not rocketscience. “The decisive force in every successful marketing effort, today and in the future, is cultural relevance”. Translating the trends into producs and services and communication is the real trick.

But to be able to do that you should know where the product or service hooks up with that culture, and there the trends are very usefull.

Just by checking what trends apply to your service, and which almost, you can adapt your idea to include more trends, which will make your potential for success bigger. There still has to be an underlying customer value proposition though.

As an example,some energy-companies use these trends blatantly: one sells “green energy” (save our society trend), the other one calls on our nationialistic sense and beliefs (clanning). Both started selling the same product basically. The green energy company though, has altered the product, separating it from the other, using a trend.

 

What is a mission?

One of the prerequisites for setting up a webscorecard is that the business has a clear understanding of its strategy. A strategy can be defined without a mission, but it helps to set the direction by defining a mission.

The mission tells everybody what you are trying to do. It’s something that is true today and may be true for ever (or not).

The position in society is not always the motive for creating the business. Businesses may be started because the entrepreneur wanted to make money or because he likes to run the kind of business he is going to create.

But inconsient or not, a business must have a market to serve, in order to survive. They must offer some kind of benefit to that market. Therefore, I think that any organization tries to fullfill some need a person, group or the whole society may have. 

The mission statement shows the purpose of the organization. You could say the mission statement is the description of how the organization will fullfill a need in society.

If business would be a battlefield, the mission would be the ideology for which you fight, the ultimate goal. It’s the outline for all the activities of the “army”

On my website www.webscorecard.nl I show how to write a  missionstatement.