Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

336 BRAND RELEVANCE
systems need to encourage the pursuit of current, relevant market
information and then facilitate processing and acting on it.
Strategy development needs to be outside in and market driven
rather than based on leveraging existing assets, competencies,
and strategies.
Supported by an externally oriented culture, the management
team should be curious about what is going on in the market
in regard to not only customers but also competitors and the
distribution chain. What is working and what are the problems?
The team needs to be talking to customers and others about
changing customer tastes, attitudes, and needs. This does not
happen automatically, in part because managers tend to focus on
and sometimes get overwhelmed by day - to - day crises.
An opportunistic organization, to be close to trends and
developments driving opportunities, should have an effective,
silo - spanning information system, a system that will not only store
and organize information but will facilitate turning it into timely
strategic insights. The system, often based on an intranet, can
enable the sharing of market information pertaining to customer
insights, trends, competitor actions, technological developments,
and best practices. Developing a system that avoids information
gaps and information overload is very difficult. It depends on
the cooperation and support of both information generators and
information users. Not easy at all.
Breaking the Silo Trap
A opportunistic fi rm needs to break out of the silo trap.
Managers of silo business units have a bias toward incremental
innovation to improve their own offerings. Breakthrough new
offerings that will be game changers are more likely to emerge
when two other sources of innovation are accessed.
The fi rst is cross - silo innovation whereby a strength or asset
of one silo is combined with one of another. The result can be
an offering that not only represents an important advance but