UnicornyHow to create valueThese episodes work through both the theory and the practice. Geoffrey Moore on crossing the chasm from early adopters to mainstream markets, and his Zone to Win framework for managing innovation alongside the core business. Blue Ocean Strategy's value innovation logic applied to real markets. The operational challenge of keeping creative momentum alive when you're also running today's P&L. Whether you're launching something new, defending against a disruptor, or trying to understand why your category is moving faster than your strategy, these conversations give you frameworks that hold up under pressure.
In this episode of The Unicorny Marketing Show, we welcome back Valentina Kristensen from OakNorth Bank. Since her first appearance, Valentina has taken on a broader role as Corporate Affairs Director and shares how OakNorth continues to disrupt the seemingly…
In this continuation of the discussion with Professor Ben Bensaou from INSEAD Business School, Dom explores how organisations can build a robust framework for continuous improvement and creativity. Bensaou introduces the concept of the "innovating engine,"…
In this episode of The Unicorny Marketing Show, Professor Ben M. Bensaou of INSEAD Business School joins us to discuss how organisations can build a culture where innovation thrives. Bensaou shares real-world examples from companies like Starwood Hotels and…
When Michelle Booth joined us in the studio to talk about marketing transformation, product incubation and agile and marketing in action, we closed the show with a discussion around a PEST analysis like we sometimes do (Political, Economic, Social and…
This is part 2 of a two-part (plus bonus) episode in which we met the amazing Michelle Booth, a champion of marketing transformation who thrives leading teams that are agile and empowered. We pick up her story, dealing with heartbreak at Bó, but illustrate…
Increasingly, I'm seeing that traditional organisational structures are under scrutiny because they're just too slow. But that's not always the case, and today's guest is going to prove it. In this episode we dig into the experience of Michelle Booth, [these…
We're going to change things up a little again in this episode. Since December, we've looked at marketing disruptive technologies in a few of our episodes, including two epic shows with the legendary Geoffrey Moore. When we spoke to him about marketing to an…
In this episode of the Unicorny podcast, host Dom Hawes digs deep into innovation without sacrificing performance as he's joined by Zone to Win author, Geoffrey Moore. Geoffrey is a world-famous business consultant, author and marketing expert with a stable…
Geoffrey Moore is an organisational theorist, management consultant and author of Crossing the Chasm , Inside the Tornado , Zone to Win and several other books that have shaped how technology companies market themselves. He is, in Dom's view, the single most…
Value Innovation in Action: Promotion and Place This is the second half of an extraordinary dive into value innovation, or what INSEAD professors Chan Kim and Renée Maugborgne call Blue Ocean Strategy. In this part of our incredible interview with JetBlue…
Value Innovation in Action: JetBlue Ocean Strategy This is a show all about value innovation, or what INSEAD professors Chan Kim and Renée Maugborgne call Blue Ocean Strategy. You’re about to hear an incredible interview with Jet Blue Airline’s General…
LeasePlan's research, run over about four months with focus groups followed by quantitative work, found the problem was not range anxiety but change anxiety. People put up artificial barriers because they dislike change; EV drivers thought there were plenty of charge points while non-drivers thought there were too few. The research also found too few fleet managers had driven an EV themselves, so try-before-you-buy became part of the answer. Hear the full discussion in episode 43
Professor Ben Bensaou found the word innovation intimidates people, because they assume they must deliver the next breakthrough. Innovating is a verb describing an activity: looking for new ideas, testing them and developing the best, with no guaranteed outcome. When he switched to this language in training, the fear left the room; he compares innovation to the tip of an iceberg and innovating to the mass beneath the surface. Hear the full discussion in episode 87
Moore says categories are defined by a set of competitors, while markets are defined by a set of customers. A market is a group of customers with a common use case who talk to each other when making buying decisions. Because pragmatic B2B buyers rely on word of mouth from peers, winning several deals in one community makes you the de facto standard, while deals outside your segment do not help. Hear the full discussion in episode 32
The performance zone delivers products and services to customers and is where the business is judged. The productivity zone holds shared services such as HR, finance, IT and marketing that support performance. The incubation zone runs new ventures like start-ups using a venture capital operating model, and the transformation zone, led directly by the CEO, is used rarely to create a new franchise or change the operating model. Hear the full discussion in episode 36
Michelle Booth's team analysed 2 million anonymised spending accounts and found financial stability depends more on behaviour than income. Around 60 in-home interviews and social media analysis showed the target was people who were unconfident about money and focused on the present. Bó was designed as a companion account for spending money, targeted by attitude, to help people spend less than they earn, more like 'Couch to 5K than Strava'. Hear the full discussion in episode 46
Bó succeeded in incubation but was folded amid COVID, competing priorities and executive changes, just before a major campaign launched. Dom notes Geoffrey Moore's view that moving through the transformation zone requires sponsorship all the way to the CEO. The Bó team moved as a unit into NatWest to revitalise its brand platform, bringing its psychological safety and fast ways of working with it. Hear the full discussion in episode 47
INSEAD professor Ben Bensaou says innovation is for everybody. At a Starwood conference, 700 frontline hotel managers with no innovation training spent three hours on the streets of Paris observing travellers and came back with 1,700 ideas, one of which became a global family programme. He calls this the 'democratisation of innovation': giving frontline staff permission and simple tools, because more ideas create more chances of a great one. Hear the full discussion in episode 86
Moore explains that most companies spend their innovation budget making products that are different, with better battery life or a nicer screen, but still close enough to competitors that the best price wins. True differentiation takes your offer outside the circle where competitors sit, as the iPhone did. He also warns that money meant for differentiation often gets drained into protecting mission-critical but non-differentiating activities. Hear the full discussion in episode 36
Ben identifies three: that innovation depends on superstar geniuses, that it is all about big-bang disruptive breakthroughs, and that it belongs only to senior leaders or R&D specialists. Fiskars, a 400-year-old Finnish company, disproved them by studying home gardeners and discovering watering was a key task, leading to its award-winning Waterwheel hose device and entry into a new market. Continuous, systematic innovation can transform even traditional companies. Hear the full discussion in episode 86
After winning a beachhead segment, you move into adjacent segments, either selling new use cases to the same customers or taking the same partner ecosystem to new customers, while keeping a sensible 'fish to pond' ratio. Moore calls it the most reliable play in high tech, capable of taking a company from about $50 million to $500 million. In tough times, focusing on 'trapped value' in a broken business process gives customers a reason to buy now. Hear the full discussion in episode 32
Ben found innovative organisations run two engines in parallel: an execution engine delivering today's strategy and an innovating engine building tomorrow's, with protected, regular time for staff to innovate. It runs on three processes: creating ideas, integrating them by connecting, reviewing and piloting them, and reframing. Bayer, for example, made its whole board responsible for innovation, appointed 80 senior 'innovation ambassadors' and created WeSolve, a platform where two-thirds of the best answers came from a different division from the one that posted the problem. Hear the full discussion in episode 87
Research led Neill Emmett to drop a big above-the-line campaign in favour of education. LeasePlan partnered with Robert Llewellyn's Fully Charged YouTube channel on videos showing the steps to go electric, backed by 'People Like Me' case studies showing honest pros and cons, plus free tools and guidance for brokers, large fleets and consumers. The research was also reused to educate staff internally. Hear the full discussion in episode 43
Michelle Booth says to respect the different culture and show humility, getting people to learn by doing rather than trying to convince them. She uses humour, leads from the front and creates a sense of play and curiosity around a clear goal, while working at the team's pace. To push back when marketing is held down, she digs into data with analysts to test hypotheses in the smallest, safest way before scaling. Hear the full discussion in episode 47
Bó ran as a separate business with its own culture, mission and management, but within the bank's risk profile, which cost some pace but made it robust and scalable. It had top-level executive support, a small cross-functional team including risk, legal and tech, and a culture of psychological safety where mistakes were shared and celebrated. The team built proof of concepts rather than slideware and launched with a 90-day test-and-learn period. Hear the full discussion in episode 46
Borrowing from Blue Ocean Strategy, Ben describes non-customers as people outside your usual target: those about to leave, those in other industries who are unhappy, or the large majority your industry ignores. Nintendo moved from boys to girls, then families with the Wii, then older people. In B2B it can mean other departments: Philips failed selling its mercury-free lamp to purchasing on price, then succeeded by showing CFOs the total cost of ownership including mercury disposal. Hear the full discussion in episode 86
The disruptor's job is to differentiate, but the disruptee's job is to neutralise: get good enough at the disruptor's innovation to stay in the buyer's consideration, then differentiate on other strengths. Microsoft did this repeatedly, catching and overtaking Netscape, WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, while Nokia and BlackBerry failed to neutralise the iPhone. In a downturn, Moore also recommends 'strategic acts of generosity' to strengthen relationships with your best customers and partners. Hear the full discussion in episode 36
LeasePlan ran a separate research study on what influences people to live more sustainably and found neighbours were a major influence. Framed as 'Keeping up with the Greens', it was covered by six national titles and syndicated to 157 regional ones. A paid radio day with Robert Llewellyn reached an estimated 5.5 million listeners, and the campaign won a CIPR award. Hear the full discussion in episode 43
Michelle notes that people are more likely to get divorced than switch bank accounts, and only about 30% have a will. Banks are designed by numerate people who find money interesting, while the early majority and laggards avoid thinking about money. When her team used colloquial language rather than industry terms, conversations about money online were as large as those about relationships, showing that financial services were not connecting with people. Hear the full discussion in episode 46
Working with Marcus Rashford on social mobility, the team learned that young people cannot be what they cannot see, and that youth clubs rather than schools were the safe space to talk about money and ambitions. The programme was activated across channels, including a Beano partnership that made international news. Research in youth centres found young people starting to save and signing up for college. Hear the full discussion in episode 47
Moore distinguishes performance, which harvests existing market power for financial returns, from power, which is investment that will be monetised later, such as winning a repeatable use case or dominating a segment. He told Microsoft in 2014 it had lost power every year that century because it only held people accountable for performance, and Microsoft added a power component to annual planning. A downturn, when performance is weak anyway, is a good time to invest in power. Hear the full discussion in episode 32
Frontline staff see customer problems daily and senior leaders need innovation to survive, but middle managers are responsible for execution and can block or enable ideas. BASF's Basotect foam became Procter & Gamble's Magic Eraser after a salesperson accidentally discovered it removed stains and his manager immediately connected him with the company's chemists. That link happened because BASF had trained its middle managers in customer orientation and innovation. Hear the full discussion in episode 87