This week’s top 3 growth articles

This week’s growth articles help you to:

• Build an army of loyal customers without paying a fortune to acquire them
• Improve customer retention by rethinking your acquisition strategy
• Find ways to get your new ideas to spread (without spoiling the surprise its all about people!)

Building an army of loyal customers

Huge customer loyalty doesn’t need big budgets, just a genuine commitment to create something customers want to be part of. Community site Gentlemint demonstrates that you can swiftly build an insanely loyal community simply by putting your customers first.

How Gentlemint Built a Loyal Customer Base on a $0 Marketing Budget – Glen Stansberry, OpenForum.com

Improving customer retention

Customer acquisition and customer retention are intrinsically linked, and hence customer loyalty is developed or destroyed from the very first interaction. So to improve customer retention, organisations need to ensure their marketing sets expectations that match the typical customer experience, and that the marketing only targets those consumers who will value these experiences.

Customer loyalty should never be your only goal – Don Peppers, LinkedIn blog

Finding ways to spread ideas

Changing people’s behaviour requires more than logic or a good idea. New solutions need to solve visible problems, and need to provide a direct benefit to the people who’s behaviours you’re seeking to change. This is a long but fascinating article about how medical breakthroughs have spread at very different speeds.

Slow ideas – Atul Gawande, newyorker.com

Price v Value

And the quote for the week reflects the role of pricing in the customer value proposition…

“If you tell me that price is the only thing that matters to customers, I’ll respond that nothing about this product matters to them” Seth Godin, Purple Cows & Commodities

Business model reinvention – opportunities for the sports sector

With the latest round of funding for NGBs now confirmed, many are taking the opportunity to review not just the offers they make to their target customers but also the underlying business model they use to deliver those offers. To support those conversations, and introduce some of the key ideas, I’ve summarised a few recent articles that have been part of those discussions. This is subject I’ll build upon over the next few weeks, as while only one of the articles is about the sports sector, all the lessons are relevant for NGBs and other sports organisations.

Core competencies – Nike CEO Mark Parker On His Company’s Digital Future
(Austin Carr, fast company)
Nike is undergoing a digital revolution writes Austin Carr. It started with the Nike+ partnership with apple that tracked and changed people’s running behaviour. More recently the Nike Fuelbands are using “visual feedback” to change people’s wider lifestyle into something more energetic. But the story is more than these data-based innovations, impressive though they are. It’s the fact that Nike’s core competences that once were limited to trainer design, now extend to digital software and behaviour change science – to help achieve the same strategic goal of selling more shoes.
Business model question for sports organisations – what are the core competencies/capabilities your organisation needs to deliver on your strategic objectives, and how will you go about filling any gaps?

Key activities – Invest to innovate: Coke’s 70/20/10 rule
(Josh Leibowitz, McKinsey)
McKinsey partner Josh Leibowitz puts forward the argument that companies need to innovate to grow and that innovation is an investment mindset not all companies have. Amazon for example are restless innovators, achieving year on year growth through constantly introducing, testing and adapting new capabilities. Similarly Coca-Cola have a clear mindset based on investing 70% of marketing into “now” programmes, 20% into “new” or emerging trends and 10% into “next” ideas. Then they follow a systematic process of “start small and scale fast”, because they know growth comes from the scale of execution not the quantity of ideas.
Business model question for sports organisations – what key processes does your organisation need to be very good at to deliver its value proposition to target customers?

Channel strategy – Apple CEO likens retail experience to Prozac
(Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch)
Apple’s 400-ish stores serve over 10 million people a week, but Tim Cook isn’t even sure that ‘store’ is the right word anymore. “They’re so much more than that” he says, referring to the fact that their delivery channel continues to create a customer experience that its competitors find hard to match. In becoming the face of apple, the stores have gone from a sales hub to a gathering place for the local community (a strategy also used by Sir Richard Branson to launch Virgin Records many years ago). But despite this changing role, they’ve not lost sight of the sales objective – as they’re having to close stores so they can build bigger ones!
Business model question for sports organisations – what is the experience you want your target customers to get as part of your value proposition, and how consistently is it currently being delivered across all your delivery channels?

Core purpose – Kill Your Business Model Before It Kills You
(Ron Ashkenas, HBR blogs)
One from the archives (last October) to finish with, as this nicely summarises the point of the previous articles. Ron Ashkenas asks why leaders wait too long to modify or abandon their business model. Kodak is a good example, hanging on to a core belief that film was part of the photography future even as the market (they invented) went digital.
Business model question for sports organisations – what assumptions are currently held about the purpose of your organisation that no longer reflect the value proposition you are planing to deliver to your target customers?