Voices: the CMB Blog

Over the last year I’d heard rumors of a new “super” Walgreens coming to Downtown Boston. To be honest, it sounded a little odd: a Walgreens with a sushi bar? A nail salon? But sure enough, one sunny day in May, a coworker announced the giant Walgreens had finally opened; of course I had to check it out. The moment I opened the doors I was like a kid on Christmas morning—this is not your mother’s Walgreens.

The aisles were brightly lit, and everything was clean and well organized, but what really blew my mind were all the high-end amenities: a juice bar, frozen yogurt bar, fresh sushi, and a pharmacy that looks more like a very nice health center than a regular old pharmacy area.

It’s certainly not how most of us perceive the Walgreens brand; but it’s all part of their efforts to transform the customer experience and they’re doing it in a number of really interesting ways:

An innovative approach to the community pharmacy and health services—Like most drugstores, Walgreens' traditional stores are split between retail and pharmacy/health care services. In the new store model, there is a health and wellness wing, including consultation rooms where pharmacists and other healthcare professionals come out from behind the counter to speak privately with customers. New patient-facing “portals” allow customers to schedule appointments, access information, and share health contacts—empowering customers in the way the old model never has.

Integrating the wellness focus throughout the store—Not surprisingly, Walgreens reimagined pharmacy is getting most of the press, and it’s well-deserved. But I was also struck by how the company highlighted healthier food and beauty options in each department. At first, doing your food shopping at a drugstore sounds both unappealing and unhealthy—all processed food and junk, but if others follow Walgreens lead, that might  change. While the juice and sushi bars might have seemed at best gimmicky, and at worst like a health hazard, the holistic focus on wellness and health means that what might have seemed unimaginable (drugstore sushi?) really starts to make sense. I swear the sashimi was actually good!

Getting mobile—Walgreens' new concept also does a great job leveraging mobile to transform and improve the customer experience across departments. For instance, you can scan your prescription bottle to get a refill. That might seem like a no-brainer in this day and age but how many of us are still calling our pharmacy’s automated hotline?

And hard as it may seem to believe, not everyone just posts all their pictures to Facebook, Walgreens' QuickPrint option lets customers print their pics right from the phone they took them on. It’s a smart move for a company that realizes the drugstore photo lab may not be with us forever.

As Walgreens President and Chief Executive Officer Gregory D. Wasson puts it: “We are taking a multi-pronged approach to delivering the Well Experience. We are combining leading-edge design with enhanced products and services, increased engagement with team members and customers, and an omni-channel approach that blends our brick-and-mortar stores with e-commerce and mobile commerce. We are deliberately blurring many retail channels to fit how consumers shop today.”

Bravo Mr. Wasson, bravo.

I’m looking forward to seeing what other benefits are in store for Walgreens customers. But in the meantime, I’ll have plenty to explore at the new, impeccably designed, Super Walgreens. And for all my fellow Bostonians, the next time you need to pick up a birthday card, wine, or health and beauty products, I suggest you make a trip Downtown.

Posted by Stephanie Kimball. Stephanie is CMB’s Marketing Operations Manager and loves any and all sports, the beach, traveling, marketing, good food, and is always down for a movie night. You can follow her on twitter @SKBalls

See how CMB is helping Royal Caribbean measure guest experience and improve customer satisfaction and retention. Click here.

At any point in the innovation process, businesses can come across new information, trends or practical issues that challenge thinking about what the end result of an innovation should look like. Maybe a new technology can’t scale or the application doesn’t have a big enough market. Or perhaps competitive analysis reveals that a new service or business model isn’t as unique as once thought. There are examples that many of us could on draw from our own experiences. Challenges like these can be frustrating and force businesses to think differently—creatively—about how to move forward. They actually provide the constraints within which an innovation project must operate.

At the FEI conference in Boston, there was a lot of talk about the role of constraints in creativity. Pasquale Cetera, VP of Portfolio Management and Strategy at Merck, brought this into focus during his presentation on R&D decision-making. Pharma is clearly a very developed industry, and this is a key challenge in innovation. The low-hanging fruit has already been developed and is on the market, so to bring new products to market requires more time and investment than ever before. This, along with the fact that regulations are ever-more stringent, means that the average length of drug development is rising, and pharma companies find themselves under pressure to focus and improve success rates at each stage of the development process.

It’s a big challenge with a significant bottom line attached to it. The necessity to maintain the business in spite of this has given rise to innovations that simply were not needed to make a profit until recently. Some of the innovations that Pasquale highlighted include:

• New lead optimization approaches in the Discovery stage, so that suboptimal leads are let go early-on

• Use of biomarkers to improve the probability of success in Phase 2 (Efficacy & Proof of Concept)

• Business model innovation: from fully integrated pharma companies (FIPCOS) to fully integrated pharma networks (FIPNETS)

• Collaboration with health payers to solve problems vs. traditional antagonistic relationships

Innovating within these kinds of big-picture constraints isn’t just a big-industry phenomenon. There are impressive innovations coming out of emerging markets, be it in the form of new agricultural models that support small farmers, mobile computing in Africa, or new type of distribution system for a CPG in India—as a few examples.

So, the next time you come across a challenge that alters the reality of your business, I encourage you to approach it not as a threat, but as an opportunity to differentiate and push innovation farther than it would have gone otherwise.

Jennifer is a Director at  South Street Strategy Group. She recently received the 2013 “Member of the Year” award by the Association for Strategic Planning (ASP), the preeminent professional association for those engaged in strategic thinking, planning and action.

South Street Strategy Group, an independent sister company of Chadwick Martin Bailey, integrates the best of strategy consulting and marketing science to develop better growth and value delivery strategies. 

See how CMB and the South Street Strategy Group helped SunTrust use a customer-centric approach to inform brand strategy, improve marketing tactics, and drive organizational  transformation. Read the case study.

Over the past 3 years, there has been no shortage of attempts to forecast the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on patients and insurers, but the truth is, the changing care model has ramifications that extend well beyond the waiting room. The multi-billion dollar medical device industry is smack-dab in the middle of tremendous regulatory and economic changes—including the ACA and the Medical Device Excise Tax (MDET). Earlier this year CMB’s MedTech team partnered with the Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council (MassMEDIC) to survey 123 of their members for their perspectives on the past, present, and future expectations for innovation and growth in the medical device industry. Below, are a few highlights from The 2013 MedTech Industry and Innovation Study:   

• One of the most profound shifts, reflected in the results of our study, is the emerging influence of economic buyers on medical device innovation. The traditional med device market model places physicians at the center of innovation efforts, and to be sure they’re still very much at the forefront of med device companies’ minds. But as the ACA’s cost containment policies come into effect, hospital administrators and insurers will see their influence grow, as they become increasingly involved in purchasing decisions. Indeed, while just under one third of respondents said they have focused their innovation efforts on economic buyers in the past, 53% said economic buyers would receive their attention in the future.

• Not surprisingly, the MDET has elicited a great deal of conversation, with med device companies’ still strenuously objecting to the tax that came into effect last year. However, while the industry as a whole has actively advocated for MDET’s repeal, a surprising 40% have yet to plan to address the tax. For those who have made or acted upon plans to address the tax, workforce reductions and reductions in R&D spend top the list of mitigating actions.  Despite considerable concerns over the changing care model, many respondents were optimistic for the future, with the bulk of respondents expecting increased revenue, both inside and outside the US in the coming 5 years.

• Asked to evaluate their performance on key success factors, the vast majority indicated that their company currently meets or exceeds expectations when it comes to identifying customer wants and needs and determining the most compelling features set—table stakes in new product development in any industry. Respondents also identified areas for differentiation (i.e., capabilities that are important for future success, but that most don’t perform well on).  Organizations that with the following core skills will win in the future - prioritizing resources, determining how to price product(s)/service(s) given the dramatic changes, and developing compelling clinical data to support their product(s)/service(s). 

Click here to read the full report.

The results of this study were presented at MassMEDIC's 17th Annual Conference on May 8th 2013.

Andrew runs CMB’s MedTech practice and has spent the better part of the past decade helping some of the most successful MedTech companies make difficult strategic decisions.  In his free time, Andrew enjoys scrubbing into tracheotomies with clients, and running with his dog Moby.

Next week you'll find us at the Front End of Innovation 2013 sharing how we, along with our partners at South Street Strategy, took a practical, focused, and innovative approach to new product development for Tauck Worldwide. Read a little bit about what we did here:

The Challenge

Tauck Worldwide, an industry leader with over 85 years experience in premium guided tours, wanted to create a new travel concept to meet the needs of a population increasingly comfortable with researching, planning, and traveling on their own. Tauck needed innovative thinking to define and build a new type of tour product – one that appealed to next gen customers, conveyed a unique brand identity while standing out from competitors in the crowded travel market space. 

What We Did

CMB and principals from South Street Strategy Group used a multi-method, multi-source approach to:

• Select top opportunities on which to focus

• Ideate across functions with executives and senior managers, leveraging insight and experience in the market

• Research and assess the competitive landscape and baby boomer’s core  travel goals and needs – particularly un-met needs

• Test alternatives to guide product development, pricing and identify target guests who are most interested in the new product line

• Identify acquisition targets in the travel industry, new business models, and new product offerings, by leveraging core competencies, that would create significant value for the company and address baby boomer needs

• Work with the CEO, CFO, and COO and the New Ventures Group to ensure recommendations were aligned with business constraints, addressed operational challenges and met business goals

How It Was Used

Tauck launched the Culturious brand as a totally new product line on time and with unanimous board approval. The new brand, which currently consists of 8 packages and destinations, meets customer needs by offering small-group tours geared toward active baby boomers with an interest in active, culturally engaging travel. The brand has won awards, including the 2010 Innovation prize from the Connecticut Quality Improvement Award Partnerships (CQIA).

To learn more about our approach to New Product and Service Development click here.

For more of our case studies click here. 

With ever more crowded industries, and customers’ ever-growing access to information that guides decision-making, if ever there was an era where the customer came first, this is it. Landing on a strategy that will delight current and prospective customers requires getting to know them both qualitatively and quantitatively. And herein lies the challenge. This kind of insight takes time and money and often gets pushed off or short-changed.

It’s true that data should not be the only driver of your strategy. Indeed, as Steve Lohr of the New York Times recently wrote: Listening to the data is important…but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model?

Taking these words to heart, strategy is both an art and a science. At some point, asking for the umpteenth model of sensitivity analysis simply isn’t productive to decision-making. On the flip side, building a strategy based on anecdotal evidence from the sales team (for example) will usually result in more pain than gain, financially and operationally.

Data will ground your thinking in facts. Intuition and experience will guide your thinking on why the facts are what they are and how to take action.

I often find that data is at its most valuable when used to:

• Prioritize. Having data around which questions or problems are most important to address and which opportunities are most attractive is imperative to prioritizing which paths or solutions a company chooses. Even one data point can have big impact: when one of our clients learned that 50% of its online directory was inaccurate in some way, the decision around which customer-facing channel to focus on first was easy to make.

• Challenge assumptions. Without an outside-in approach, companies are making big bets on assumptions about the market and their customers. An insurance company I once worked with wanted to extend their brand into what seemed to be an adjacent product space from their point of view. However, customer research revealed that customers actually didn’t trust that company—or any insurance company—to manage this new line of business well.

• Shore up confidence. Whether launching a new product or service, redesigning a brand or moving into an adjacent market, a new strategy needs to be sold up the executive chain. Data, from the mouth of the customer, not only reduces risk in decision-making but helps sell the decision internally. Bringing the outside in changes people’s minds.

How well do you apply the science of data to the art of strategy?

Jennifer von Briesen is a Director at  South Street Strategy Group.

South Street Strategy Group, an independent sister company of Chadwick Martin Bailey, integrates the best of strategy consulting and marketing science to develop better growth and value delivery strategies.

See how CMB and the South Street Strategy Group helped SunTrust use a customer-centric approach to inform brand strategy, improve marketing tactics, and drive organizational  transformation. Read the case study.