Fenney Marketing - Marketing Consultant Adelaide SA.

Phone: 0411 755 802

Email: nicola@feeneymarketing.com.au

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Adelaide based marketing consultancy business

FEENEY marketing works successfully with a wide range of clients trading nationally and internationally, as well as local South Australian businesses.

Success – where does it hail from?

Posted: August 4th, 2009 | Author: Nicola Feeney | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: | 6 Comments »

Some people believe if it’s a good idea it will succeed. Many a mighty have fallen with this philosophy. Success comes from many factors.  You need the right product in the right place at the right time and at the right price and customers need to be willing to buy!

Good old fashioned luck also plays a part in the success equation.

For what it’s worth…. I think, successful new product development requires a team of people working collaboratively. and that doesn’t mean that bigger is better.  Yes bigger  have more engineers, lawyers, budgets, sales teams, brand names but they often work less effectively.  They’re attending more meetings, focussing on organisational issues and the daily decisions rather than what’s best for the business.

Competition today is fierce and the sequential process used to be that the new product development project passed through a chain of departments – engineering – finance – manufacturing – marketing – but that’s falling by the way.

Things done concurrently where everyone works together is faster, builds better products and speed to market is quicker. The smaller team communicates better and decisions get made.  You know the old saying, if you don’t want to make a decision, form a committee!

New product development benefits from leveraging too ie: using outside resources.  This reduces the need for permanent fixed overheads and allows businesses to expand and contract as needed.

The Japanese excelled at this.  Look at VCR production in the 80’s. How many brands where there?  Dozens.  They were able to produce a complex machine very quickly because they sourced the innards from one supplier who specialised in designing and producing the mini bits.  Proof that external specialists can be extremely valuable in getting the project done.

But these small entrepreneurial Japanese companies got bigger and more bureaucratic and the edge for manufacturing has slipped.

So move over Japan let’s say a quick G’day to China, oh and by the way, please stand up and make way for India!

Change – what’s it all mean?

Posted: August 4th, 2009 | Author: Nicola Feeney | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: | 1 Comment »

Over the last decade marketing has seen some almighty changes.  Product lifecycles have gone from years to months, manufacturing from around the corner to around the globe and distribution – well, that’s a story and a half, it hasn’t just evolved, a new beast has exploded and quickly – the Internet.

I like to call it the “5 P’s and I”!

Our humble master, the consumer, can make purchases and enjoy them within minutes!   We can manufacture in Asia, have a call centre in India, a designer in Europe and market to a global stage.

With the economy in recession, recovery, depression, turning the corner (take your pick) what does it all mean? Looking for the win/wins and being fast and flexible is more critical now than ever.

We need to be more aware and seek a better approach to re shape, embrace and react even before change happens.  Forward thinking’s the key or, you may know it simply as “strategic planning”.

The bitter pill of hindsight raises its ugly head here with poor old Polaroid!  Pioneering the humble plastic pocket camera in the sixties and seventies they designed, manufactured and marketed household pocket cameras and launched into the market with gusto and enthusiasm.

So what happened?

One word “digital”!  Instead of embracing the threat as an opportunity Polaroid minimised its significance.

By the time they acknowledged it, it was too late. Polaroid declared bankruptcy in 2001.