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: for managers to write in long-hand instead of using a keyboard, and their notes are digitalised.
* Environmental: A company fights the high cost of energy by building windmills to generate electricity.
Companies can also use group or individual creativity techniques to stimulate new ideas. Group techniques include brainstorming, synectics, and several other techniques.
Most companies search for new ideas by starting with their current product and varying it in some way. For example, a cereal company will think of adding raisins or nuts or more sugar or less sugar, or moving to wheat, or oats, or barley, or changing the package size or the brand name, and so on. This results in line extensions or brand extensions added to the cereal aisle in the supermarket. Their competitors do the same. The cereal aisle gets longer but not more profitable. Each product variant draws a smaller number of customers who defect from the larger-selling brands, with the result that the new products earn little and the old ones earn less.
We call this vertical marketing and the techniques are numerous:
* Modulation: The juice manufacturer varies the sugar content, fruit concentrate, with or without vitamins...
* Sizing: Potato chips are offered in sizes 35 gms, 50 gms, 75 gms, 125 gms, 200 gms, multipacks...
* Packaging: Nestle’s Red Box chocolates come in different containers: cheap paper box for the grocery trade, premium metal box for the gift trade...
* Design: BMW designs cars with different styling and features...
* Complements: Biscuits with sugar spread on them, with cinna-mon, with chocolate, with white chocolate, with dark chocolate, filled biscuits...
* Efforts reduction: Charles Schwab offers different channels for transactions such as retails stores, telephone, Internet...
The main problem with vertical marketing is that this leads to a hyperfragmented market where few products have the volume to earn a lot of money.
Companies need to make use of an alternative idea-generating process that we call lateral marketing. Lateral marketing is to think of your product in relation to another product, service, or idea. You are thinking across two products rather than down one product. For example, the cereal company could think of cereals plus a snack. Instead of putting loose cereal in a box, they use the cereal in the form of a snack bar that can be carried and eaten any time. They may call this a health bar. Suddenly people are able to consume cereal any time of the day in a...
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