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Extra Strong MINT: Making Plans
For many of you, this is a time when you’ll want to look in detail at your plans for the year ahead. But how often do you review your portfolio in terms of what your organisation actually needs rather than what it constantly demands?
One way is to categorise all the areas of your work using MINT! This stands for:
- Mapping
- Issue investigation
- New product development
- Tracking
Mapping – Map out an overview of each key market. This is possibly the most important area in terms of delivering real insight - but paradoxically it’s also the area where there is least urgent demand. Effective mapping, in advance, will bring context to so much and provide many immediate answers to questions. People often don’t know what they need to know, or just ask for background when they don’t understand something - but then there is usually insufficient time to find the answers. Mapping should cover all aspects of how the market works and why things happen. This includes:
- Customer demographics and product usage
- Their buying processes
- Their attitudes and beliefs; needs and drivers
- Competitor activity and capability
- Wider ‘environmental’ factors, such as legislation, society trends, technological developments, economic trends etc.
Together, these will provide the backdrop to all of the other work you do, and will alert you at an early stage to issues that have longer term implications for your organisation.
Issue Investigation – This is where there is often most short term demand for answers to day-to-day problems. You won’t know what the problems will be: but you need to anticipate the likely volume. Plan for this, but incorporate the ability to ‘push back’ on all demands. Firstly, ask: “Do we know the answer from previous work?” (this is where mapping often helps). Then ask how big the issue is and the likely value of finding the answer. Projects in this area can be the most time-consuming for the least value.
New Product Development – The main issue here is not about the work itself, but about being asked early enough in the planning cycle. Don’t just review current demand for NPD work. To get in early enough to have time to do the work properly, you need to pursue longer term strategic plans as well as projects in the pipeline.
Tracking – A key aspect of running a business involves knowing where you are and how well you are performing. Most organisations therefore ask for various forms of performance tracking work. This may be advertising or brand tracking; customer satisfaction; or product usage. But some of the biggest sums can be spent in this area, and too often it can tell you what’s happening too late - and without telling you why. So think widely about your sources. The source that often offers the greatest value and speed (and yet is frequently not formally included in insight work) is complaints. For more information about using complaints data, click
here.
