Don't be castaway: survival of the fittest

Watching  Bear Grylls’ The Island last night with the husband shouting ‘use the spectacles and the sun’s rays to make fire’ at the group of castaways made me think about survival. 

Sometimes it does feel like you've spent an eternity adjusting this and improving that and still you can’t make it spark. You know it’s possible, you know the theory, you listen to the advice and rebuttals from your critics and supporters but you just can’t get it to work.

Survival in marketing is often about difficult decisions that need to be made about our combination of products / services that we provide for customers. We might need to make some adjustments. We might need to pass them onto someone else to see if they can create that spark. We might need to throw it all away and start again, or just give up (as hard as that might be).

We call this portfolio analysis and it helps us to understand what stage our products or services are at in their life cycle – can we stop declining sales and rejuvenate the offering? Should we be launching new products? Should we be selling them at all? We also need to understand where growth is coming from, how we can manage fluctuations or seasonality in demand, and where there is risk and opportunity – such as a gap in the market or in our portfolio.

There are a variety of tools available to help us with this process (links to tutorial sites I like are provided for your info):

The Product Life Cycle - examines where your product is in its life stage and whether you need to act to stop it falling into decline (compare to other products in your portfolio to understand its implications).

Ansoff’s Matrix – helps you examine the way your business can grow through its products / services and markets.

The Boston Box – helps you to identify where to invest time and money to support a product / service based on market growth and share.

The McKinsey and General Electric Matrix – looks at the level of market attractiveness and competitive strength in a 9 cell matrix for an organisation’s business units.

Positioning Maps – establishing the positioning of a brand based on key characteristics of your choice. These should be based on research with the axis representing a scale for best indicative results, however, they are also looked at on a more subjective set of dimensions when data is not available.

So, don’t be castaway gazing at the dying embers of your leading product, or constantly on the back foot struggling to survive and keep your product alive, the fittest survive because they know the strengths and weaknesses of their portfolio, how and where to adapt, and how to keep on moving forward by constantly learning, gathering data, and reassessing the combination of products / services they provide to their customers.