Perspective from the Dinner Party to Product Placement

Recently, we had an external speaker and author (Lisa McLeod) present to our organization about having a “noble purpose”. The entire company enjoyed the presentation which had many insights. One that I have taken to heart and applied is providing perspective around what you do and how you articulate this. Let me give you a recent example of this.

I was at a marketing conference where first thing in the morning we were asked to describe our company to those at our tables. I quickly went in to my “rehearsed” explanation that had been done a hundred times from initial acquaintances to dinner parties. It goes something like this, “I work for an industrial gas company (not natural gas) and we make Argon, Oxygen and Nitrogen. This is when at a dinner party I normally get a blank look and then I am asked if I know where to get a glass of wine. At the same conference, and prior to lunch, we were asked to move to a different table to facilitate networking opportunities. I decided to run my experiment, so when asked what our company does, I responded with the following. We have developed technology to save premature babies, provide 1.5 million patients per day in the US oxygen therapy, provide gas for 90% of the laser vision corrections done in the world, and we are on the cutting edge of hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles. The difference in response was nothing short of amazing. I was getting question after question to understand more about the company I work for. At the same time I was describing the company differently, I was reminding myself of how much our technologies touch the lives of people. Frankly, it made me feel good.

Drawing from this experience and comparing it to others in my career, I have found that the same paradigm breaking thought process has paid large dividends for our company. When preparing to market a new premium product, we had two choices. Place the product in a new package which was both costly and would have delayed the market introduction or put in a market acceptable package that was in the last stage of its life cycle. Put clearly this means that it was becoming obsolete. The traditional marketing perspective was to use the high end new packaging. Instead we took the latter route. The results were remarkable. We were fast to market, and after a couple of years, we had to move part of the line to the upscale package because we were sold out of the older package.

Another example is challenging the existing invoicing methodology. In a recent expansion of our service offer, our management the team bought into the concept of adding a line item for a service vs “rolling it in” to an existing invoice line item. Again, the results were staggering. This additional line was well accepted by the customers, and the value could be clearly identified with the pricing structure.

As you can see from these examples, stepping away from common paradigms can be very advantageous. While I am not proposing to bet your company on a step out idea, often times, you can do pilot introductions which will give you quick market feedback and comfort to support further innovations. These step outs allow you to clearly understand your customer’s value calculation and can give you tremendous insight with future products to meet their needs. Finally, if you took nothing else from this post, challenge yourself to find your companies noble purpose and present it that way at the next dinner party. You may just surprise yourself!