There’s a concept in Blue Ocean Strategy, one of my favorite books, called value innovation. To create value innovation, companies must orient themselves to deliver a “leap in value” for both themselves and their customers. 

 

Most organizations are satisfied to compete in a red ocean stained with the blood of those who came before them and swim there now. They are ensnared by the structures of the way things have always been done. 

 

Value innovation is about breaking free of those restraints, taking a fresh look at the needs of people and constructing something new that transcends current offerings. To accomplish this, you have to challenge everything about the way you do business today…including your marketing.  

 

We have a lot of small business clients, and they were getting pretty scared and depressed following the financial crisis last October. It occurred to us here at DIG that they were almost paralyzed by that fear, unable to move forward, only to hunker down to wait it out. So we came up with our little slice of optimism, the DIG Marketing Minute. It was designed to get people thinking about something other than impending disaster and focus on the opportunities that still exist today. Brevity was a necessity because we knew we couldn’t achieve our objective if the length scared people when they opened it. We try to keep it to less than 150 words so it can be read in less than a minute. This is no small trick. A lot of editing is required to get something powerful about customer service, social media, competitive advantages, strategic planning or brand management into 150 words or less. The open rates are great compared to newsletters, and we have received tons of anecdotal comments extolling its virtues. Other companies liked it so much that we developed a product so it could be rebranded for those who wanted to offer the same strategic thinking to their clients. http://www.digcreative.com/index.php/dig-marketing-minute.html 

 

One of our differentiators is our focus on results, and we practice what we preach. Watching the statistics, I noticed recently that the open rate had declined slightly. Someone within our group hypothesized that it was stale and needed to be revamped. I looked at the data and came up with another hypothesis. We have a lot of printing companies in our database and this industry has been particularly hard hit by the recession. Perhaps, I wondered, they were stretched too far due to staff cutbacks and didn’t have time to read. Or maybe, some of the large number of sales people in our database had lost their positions with only an open and now full email box as the last vestige of their former glory.

I developed a strategy. If people didn’t think the Marketing Minute was valuable, they probably weren’t a good fit for us anyway, so why not mutually disconnect? They get rid of clutter in their email inbox and we rid ourselves of recipients who don’t fit our profile. Win/Win. So I sent an email inviting those who hadn’t been opening to let us know if they want to continue. Action was only required if you wanted to stay on the distribution list. With no action, we would remove them and make their lives a tad less cluttered.