Market Assessment - Navigating The Business Cycle

A Market Assessment can change the fortunes
 of your organization's future

Measuring progress on the consistent implementation of marketing and communication strategies allows organizations and companies to see beyond the numbers. Many make the mistake of allowing sales and/or revenue streams to crest and trough, coinciding with changing market forces. Allowing revue streams to ebb and margins to erode as a result of focusing on addressing current business issues and or the complex issues related to delivering jobs or projects can harm your business in the long term.

Gradual loss of focus on your marketing strategy will not be evident during an upswing in the market cycle but will have a dramatic impact on the fortunes of the company during a market cycle downturn or trough in sales. It can create a scenario where you are ill prepared to take on unforeseen or sudden changes in the marketplace; or it can make you unable to effectively fund investment in growth and/or product innovations properly when you need it most.

This issue has emerged over the past several years as one of the most telling - as companies strive to deal with the new reality; since the economic downturn across North America in 2008. The marketplace has changed and every company is being squeezed to offer more, do more and ….charge less of their products or services. As a result organizations and businesses are focused on the day to day issues in the life cycle of the business, such as human resources, project management, technology implementation, financial flexibility and more.

There are strategies that can be employed to help protect companies from troughs in the business cycle. We have developed a specialized process for conducting a “market assessment” to help reveal “opportunity gaps”. The assessment focuses on a bench-marked practice designed to better understand where you are in the business cycle and identify specific actions you can take to address those “opportunity gaps.” The market assessment reveals how your customers, employees, suppliers and key stakeholder perceive the company and its products or services and identifies gaps in your business development strategy.

The market Assessment is designed to be deployed relatively quickly and cost effectively – it provides you with a very clear snap shot of where your company currently sits in the business cycle and helps identify “opportunity gaps.” What is an “opportunity gap” ….well I am glad you asked? These are the potential growth opportunities that are currently being overlooked. A market assessment can reveal possible untapped markets, new partnerships, product development opportunities, unexplored customer loyalty programs, inconsistent value proposition, internal strife… and the list goes on. It’s different for each company depending on what the assessment reveals.

A marketing Assessment can also strengthen your company in preparation for its sale.  Most financial audits, in doing their due diligence will use these indicators to determine the longer term viability of your company. Most accounting practices who are informing the buy and sell process of a company understand that current sales and are not a strong predictor of future sales. Intangibles that give us insight into business issues beyond the numbers, such as new product pipeline, exploration of enhanced partnerships and future sales potential are a better indicators of long term viability.

In my next blog I will provide a specific list of intangibles to consider when conducting a market Assessment and offer readers an opportunity to test their Marketing IQ.

MOOCs & Corporate Training?

MOOCs have the capacity to
change the way we look at eLearning

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are beginning to make a splash in the corporate training world as organizations begin to adopt this technology for internal training and customer service and customer relationship building.  For those who may not be familiar with the term a MOOC is “massive “in that it allows thousands of learners to participate at any one time in a course or program, “open,” because anyone with an Internet connection can enroll in a course; and they are “courses” because they have a start and end date, learner testing and benchmark achievement levels and /or proctored exams.

The term free and verification are often used when describing MOOCs but again this is a misnomer. As with anything in the real world, you rarely get anything for free (courses often cost between $30 - $100) and few of the courses offer verification …especially the free ones. Forbes magazine suggests that only about 14% of the courses at one of the largest MOOCs in North America  are verified in some way.   

A MOOC is a concept that incorporates lateral learning and thinking process.  Typically a syllabus is created with the content such as online articles, web links, blogs, wikis, videos, etc., that offer important information on the topic being discovered during a given time frame of the program or course. The learners explore the content and engage in dialogue with other learners and external subject matter experts. Gradually the learning group establishes its own understanding and focuses of the content and can assess their progress against the entire group of learners. Dave Cormier the originator ofthe term MOOC ( no relation that I know of) offers a short and concise explanation.

Now that we have established the idea of a MOOC (which originated from the academic world) we need to gain some insight into how it is implemented at the corporate world. The difference between academic and corporate may seem subtle but nothing could be further from the truth. Academic settings are ideal in that funding for content is already in place and the learning can be extended to an audience outside of the paid program allowing them to learn along with program participants.  In a corporate setting there are three basic learning paths governed by the demands of business, compliance training to which the employer is legally bound, productivity & skills training and customer service learning. In these cases there is no corporate funding so the planning and strategy of a MOOC remains similar to a standard corporate training environment except that the training can be allowed to cross pollinate within the business and the same knowledge and format can be extended to customers outside the business.

While MOOCs are touted as a new and advanced frontier in learning – if there are to be effective they demand planning and lots of it. The “Garbage In…Garbage Out” rule applies here perhaps more than in traditional learning systems simply because of the increasingly sophisticated approach.  Multiple audiences lateral learning, expanded content, social networks all add to the effectiveness of learning and extend learning throughout the organization but they do demand increased strategic planning. Large organizations can employ this approach much more readily because of their already considerable investment in learning, the poor existing track record of learning within organizations and the benefits that can be harvested when they extend product and service learning opportunities to their customers. 

Smaller organizations can benefit from the unique learning opportunities of MOOCs but it is important to carefully consider a strategy and implementation plan that benefits them every step of the way.