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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS78

thinking was so male-dominated that she had to sign her early business
development letters as ‘Steve’ in order to be taken seriously.

When Steve Millar joined BRL Hardy, the Australian wine company, as
managing director in the early 1990s, his background in finance and
consumer products gave him a quite different perspective on the wine
market’s conventions. He swiftly realised that wine companies tended
to belong to wine makers who focused more on their craft than on the
market. As we shall see later in this chapter, Millar went on to adopt an
innovative, marketing-led approach to transform his company.

conventional industry thinking was so male-
dominated that she had to sign her early
business development letters as ‘Steve’

escaping from marketing myopia Alternatively, your assumptions on
product usage may be constrained by your past understanding of the
market or by your knowledge of the original intentions behind the
product or service. Marketing brand managers are often brought down to
earth with a bump when they first listen to focus groups discussing their
products, precisely because focus groups ‘speak it as it is’ about the
products, without a manufacturer’s frame of reference and respect for the
product.

While focus groups can help your understanding of an existing
product’s usage and can possibly identify problems associated with it,
users may lack the language or insight adequately to explain what is
wrong and, perhaps even more importantly, what might be missing.
Equally, relying on written customer feedback and user questionnaires
may provide useful pointers, but many users do not take the trouble to
complain, they just turn to alternative products. In any case,
productive feedback presupposes that you have asked the appropriate
questions in the first place.

that’s just how it is, isn’t it? Another drawback to written or spoken
feedback is that users develop work-around solutions which become so
automatic that they become unable to articulate the original problems. If
all the members of a product category typically present a particular
failing, consumers often assume that they have to put up with the