In the world of marketing and communications, Business-to-Business and Industrial has always been the ugly stepsister of Consumer Package Goods marketing. Madman Donald Draper would never waste his creative energy to try and sell a pressure vessel to a petrochemical plant. And engineering-driven manufacturers have always been suspicious of marketing’s return on investment, and more focused on sales. But that ...
Read More »ESOMAR’s First B2B Research Forum Comes to Atlanta, GA
What’s different about B2B? The first ESOMAR B2B symposium focused exclusively on B2B market research was held in Atlanta on October 14, 2014. Geo Strategy Partners participated from both the audience and the podium. KEY TAKEAWAYS B2B industrial is a fraction of a fraction: B2B market research firms comprise approximately 8% of all market research firms and those with an industrial ...
Read More »You thought SEC football was competitive?
There’s another contest in the offing. In the race to commission the first nuclear plant in this century, Tennessee Valley Authority is whomping Southern Company’s Georgia Power. According to Forbes [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/09/17/first-american-nuke-plant-in-21st-century-to-open-soon/], TVA’s Watts Bar 2 is “now over 90% completed, after the fully assembled reactor vessel was installed in August.” WB2 got Westinghouse’s AP1000: the same model slated for Georgia ...
Read More »Which Star Wars character did you like the best: R2-D2 or C-3PO?
R2-D2 or C-3PO ...
Read More »Wake up call
Study results recently released by the National Bureau of Economic Research indicate the source of an innovative idea matters. Authors of The Acquisition and Commercialization of Invention in American Manufacturing: Incidence & Impact① indicate that “of the 18% of the manufacturing firms that innovated (i.e. had introduced a product that was new to the market) between 2007 and 2009, 49% ...
Read More »The value of process innovation
Does a focus on product improvement (incremental or disruptive) come at a cost to process innovation? It shouldn’t. Companies should do both. Product innovation done right drives sales. Process innovation done right has the potential to do more: reduce defects (increasing customer satisfaction), increase throughput without capacity expansion, reduce unit cost, decrease energy costs, reduce inventory (raw materials/finished goods), and ...
Read More »A Tale of Two Companies…
Early last year, two studies brought us face to face with Petrobras and PEMEX. Both market opportunity projects were commissioned by global OEMs interested in selling product into the oil & gas industry. In Brazil, we green-lighted the opportunity and highlighted strategies most likely to result in sales success with Petrobras (unique and differentiated product, an understanding of local content ...
Read More »The Missed Opportunity in B2B
There is a certain wisdom being propagated in social media that there is no B2B or B2C but only B2H (business-to-human). It’s a nice sentiment and certainly has an element of truth but in spite of how communications technology has narrowed the differences, there are still stark contrasts between the two channels. With respect to capturing customer insights, it is worthwhile ...
Read More »Lessons for Business, Courtesy the German National Team
Like business, soccer success requires more than luck and willpower. It requires long-term strategy, short-term tactics, talented people, intimate knowledge of the competition, and excellent execution. This is exactly what the German National Team did. Select lessons from the German National Team Develop the talent The long-term vision started (as many do) with a crisis: embarrassment at EuroCup 2000. Since ...
Read More »Re-shoring advanced manufacturing
Featured speaker William L. Strang, senior vice president of operations, TOTO USA told a crowd at MODEX in Atlanta that TOTO has substantially moved manufacturing of products destined for the US market from Asia to the US. “Seventy percent of the products sold in the US today are made in the US. As few as seven years ago, 63% of ...
Read More »Is the US losing its innovation edge?
Corporations today are focusing on ROI in the near term, not basic primary research Three years ago, Geo Strategy Partners was hired by an architecture firm specializing in lab space to determine if a boom in purpose-built nano/materials science buildings witnessed in university and national lab facilities was taking place in the private sector as well. The firm was interested ...
Read More »Geo Strategy Partners represents Control Southern in the acquisition of MacAljon Valve Services.
Atlanta, GEORGIA – October 23, 2013 – Geo Strategy Partners, a middle-market strategic consulting firm is pleased to announce that Control Southern Inc., a leading provider of process control products and services, has acquired MacAljon Valve Services, a VR-certified safety valve repair center in Savannah. Geo Strategy Partners identified valve repair centers capable of supporting Control Southern’s strategic expansion into non-control ...
Read More »buildings for the NEXT BILLION
Economic developers love new buildings – especially build-to suit or preleased with the promise of job creation and a rise in property values. Atlanta has seen innumerable new buildings, job creation that places our city consistently in the top ten, and stable or rising property values in a time of national property value dilution. We have a built environment to be envied. We are also living with the effects of ...
Read More »Historic movement changes Brazil for the better
A movement which started in São Paulo on June 06 over a 20 centavos (nine cents) increase in the city’s bus fare has inspired demonstrations against corruption nationwide, with a total of 1,405,000 Brazilians flooding the streets of several major cities such as Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasília. The backdrop for the first protests was São Paulo where its ...
Read More »Learn what the military learned about Strategy
It’s human nature to look ahead to the future. We’ve been doing that since we were kids—always looking forward to the next birthday, the next school vacation, the next major life event, or simply the next weekend. This preoccupation with the future is an important aspect of leadership. The higher up the career ladder you climb, the further into the ...
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