Example Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I am a member of my organization’s sales & marketing department and my challenge is to improve  the brand visibility in order to increase sales in the uncovered market through different channel  partner and without over shooting the marketing budgets. The major challenge was also the market  that we used to represent was already over saturated. The project requires to have good no of field  force to reach to the uncovered customers. And company is not ready to give us the human resource  as well. The project is limited to internal resources (i.e., budget and employee time). As we are going  to a un-ventured territory and deviating from the traditional way of marketing it’s the challenge by  itself.

Selection

As this is the 1st time we are experimenting some new way of marketing through digital mode so we  thought of taking up the learning launch tool. Broadly speaking, the learning launch is an experiment  meant to quickly test an idea and prototype. And replicating the idea if it gets success or go for  another one with little modification. It also gives us the levy of launching the idea in phase manner.

Application

For our first phase, we focused on the structure/execution for small customer segment with the help  of a business partner on tele marketing. The business partner had expertise on tele marketing and  required no of tele callers who can explain our product, technology and brand benefit to the  customer. So we trained the tele callers about the products and technology in 2days and tried out  some of the practice session of query handling. Once they started calling the customers we tried to  record the data and feedback from each call. These data and feedback helped us to improve some of  the improvement areas that we incorporated in the 2nd phase.

In the 2nd phase, we targeted the uncovered customers of metro cities where we could not reach  because of scarcity in Human resources. This time we have included tele marketing along with  sampling of our products where we did find the positive response. Because of the feel factor and  experiencing the effect of the product in front of the eyes that convinced many of the customers.  Apart from that now we are also representing our presence through tele medium the customers felt  some connection which was not present earlier. The idea gave us not only good business increment  but also because of the visibility increased there was an increase in the contribution from old  customers also. It gave us more than 50% growth from metro cities instantly.

That encouraged us to percolate the idea to other parts of the country and now it is a successful  revenue generator for the organisation.

Insight

By applying the learning launch tool, our team identified our assumptions and designed launches to  test these assumptions. Additionally, we thought through anticipated results, expecting to find that  a more agile approach would improve our outcome at the end, and the team was fairly open to the  new feedback & data analysis got from the initial roll out helped us to get to loop holes and  improved processes. Moving forward, our team will review this insight and incorporate it into future  launch designs. The ongoing incorporation of insight is particularly important at this stage, as  launches come every segment of the business.

Approach

The success of the team has given trust on design thinking activities/tools and at this stage of  business, the phase wise launch is the appropriate tool. As previously mentioned, our team needs to  review the insight gained from our first launches and incorporate this insight into future launch  designs. Future launch should reflect insight gained, progress made, and come closer to a compelling  solution ready for full rollout.

