Creating New markets in unexplored and existing market place
by Elias Moses
Business can create powerful leaps in profit and standard, both for the company and the customer, if they can just focus on being value innovators in the post Covid era.
The unlock of life and activity post the pandemic has made business in India go topsy turvy. Mighty big firms are rethinking and revising their business prospectives and business models these days. With the economic engine of life limping back to normal, with the disruptive changes brought about by the pandemic in market, and with India taking a strong stand with China, the entire focus on Indian economy is taking an ad-intra effect.
India can truly set the trend ‘by India and buy India’ as mentioned by our prime minister, a mighty success, only if the business in india is truly innovative in its native sense, namely fitting into the eastern mind set of the world.
New Standards of Customer Engagement
The standards of customer engagements are shifting their goal posts with Covid-19.
Why do I say it? As I had mentioned in my earlier articles, business will have to cater to essential and existential requirements and needs of the customers, than simply push their created needs or wish-lists. With the liquidity crunch situation and with the economy taking long time for a resurgence in the market, the Indian business will soon have to make value innovation its number on priority for sustenance in market.
Real time engagement with the customers will be the need of the time post covid situation, in order to make innovation relevant to customers and to boost ROI on on longer run.
The current ad hoc customer engagement model often pushed via ads should give way to creating new standards of customer segments and engagements that are long term and easily measurable. The new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Internet of things should show a way towards this.
Empathic Marketing
People generally ask me the question, how to reconnect with the customer post the pandemic? My general answer is ‘Empathic Marketing’. This requires two things: first and foremost, a deeper understanding of customer requirement and secondly, a marketing based on empathic concern.
It is important that we go beyond our logic-based marketing means to understanding the real need of customers and their feelings. Rightly so, the well-known neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio stated, “We are not thinking machines that feel rather, we are feeling machines that think.” Damasio made this discovery in time that every human decision depends on emotion — every single one.
Damasio was right, when he said that we all make decisions somatically. I would go on a step further to add, we also make decision semantically too. Culture and language have a huge role to play in the way, humans make choices and decisions.
IDEO’s empathy on edge puts it this way, “When organisations allow a deep emotional understanding of people’s needs to inspire them—and transform their work, their teams and even their organisation at large—they unlock the creative capacity for innovation.”
Empathy helps innovation more person centric, native and holistic apart from mere customisation.
Technology in pursuit of Differentiation and simplification
Value innovation is a process in which a company introduces new technologies or upgrades that are designed to achieve both product differentiation and low costs.
Two standard approaches are needed to combat with the post Covid times for markets, companies and why even countries? The first strategic approach is differentiation which focusses on speciality of a product/service/solution and the second is low cost.
What it has to do with innovation?
With the depleted market scenario in the post Covid world, competition will soon be made irrelevant. Customers will no longer compare one product with another. They will simply focus on one requirement, namely, does this product fulfil my essential and existential need!
What the world requires in every aspect of life is entirely a new product or solution or service that is more differentiated and simplified with a relatively low price. This is where technology and innovation will have a huge role to play. This is what we call as value innovation.
Innovation mingled with technology will have to beat uncontested market space. The Old will have to pave way to the New, thus making competition, market and rising cost totally irrelevant, and life more affordable.
The customers’ empathic preference is not so much a product of choice but a product of need. This trend will stay for a decade or two.
Often we hear about digital and disruptive marketing means. Disruptive marketing creates more monopoly on a longer run. What we require is value innovation, that creates new demand, new market and new growth that are valuable, timely and pragmatic, and above all cost effective.
It is time for us to go back to Blue Ocean Strategy to create these new markets with our innovation.
There is no doubt that true value innovators will offer breakthrough products/ solutions that address humanity’s need or problem, seize an opportunity or at the least redefine the existing problem.
In order to be value innovators, Companies/business have to render all rivals obsolete and capture new demands. They need to focus on affordable space and means in project execution, in order, that they make their presence a vibrant focus in times to come.
Being value innovators, companies create uncontested market space, make competition irrelevant, create and capture new demands, travel in pursuit of differentiation and cost effective means. They touch upon every space that is unexplored in market space.
Value innovators are and will be blue ocean everyday and everywhere…
Elias Moses is a Senior Business Strategist, Consultant, Researcher, Corporate and Leadership Trainer, Orator, Columnist and an Entrepreneur. He is also the Founder and Managing Director of a growing reality firm in south India. He is also the founder of Managing Next, an Online portal for knowledge share and Management Consulting.
The author can be contacted@
email: elias@managingnext.in, linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/eliasmoses