What better time to introduce a new product or service than when people really care about value? Like now, for instance.
This is the point that Andrew Razeghi makes in his article “Innovating Through Recession.” Razeghi, who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, asserts that innovations are not only more necessary and valuable during a downturn, but also easier and cheaper to manage than at other times. Some notable examples:
- In February 1930, just months after the great stock market crash, Henry Luce launched Fortune magazine. Over the next seven years, subscribers rose from 30,000 to 460,000. Fortune succeeded, Razeghi says, because it “made a uniquely important contribution to its customers’ lives” with articles they could find nowhere else.
- Miracle Whip, introduced by Kraft at the 1933 World’s Fair, gave consumers a scintillating alternative to mayonnaise at a time when limited family income often meant tedious meals.
- Applying the same basic principle to women’s cosmetics, Charles Revson and his colleagues introduced a glossy line of nail polish in shades never seen before.
So, publications and Web content managers, what do our customers need right now? A few innovations occur to us:
- A guide to the workings of real estate markets that’s based on solid economic analysis and is comprehensible to someone who is interested in buying or selling a house and is willing to invest a little time learning how the system really works.
- Information about organizations that have genuinely solved problems of intergenerational conflict in the workplace. They’ve figured out how to retain workers longer and make them more productive on teams ranging in age from 20-something to 60-something. And they have the numbers to prove it.
- Web sites for intensely local communities of interest (like soccer moms and dads in Reston, Va., or Stanford MBAs who started their own companies in Seattle) that are economically viable — that is, visitors value them, maintain them, and will pay to keep them going.
- Articles about ways to reduce your organization’s costs related to health care — not ways to spend money on wellness programs, but proven ways to bring down health care costs. (There are a few out there, but we need more.)
So what’s new with you?
