Strategies INNOVATION
‘Only the paranoid survive’ Norscot Group CEO’s focus on constant and relentless innovation THE WORLD OF RETAIL will never be the same with the rise of Amazon. They have turned retail shopping into a battle zone and many of the giants have fallen or disappeared from the landscape. It’s hard to believe that Sears, the most successful catalog company on the planet, would lose its leadership to an online retail startup called Amazon! In this battlefield, Mequon-based Norscot Group Inc., led by president and CEO Scott Stern, has emerged stronger than at any time in its history. Norscot provides officially licensed and branded merchandise to well-respected companies like Harley-Davidson, Caterpillar, GM, Bobcat and the German giant STIHL. As proof, just wander through the company’s warehouse and see the extensive inventory with thousands of branded items. What is so remarkable about their success is that every sale is a double challenge. First, they have to provide offerings with a retail appeal, from wearable clothing, to watches, to a variety of consumer goods such as backpacks, mugs, headphones and even scale models and toys that contemporary business buyers and consumers want. Second, they have to satisfy each client’s promotional merchandise objectives by developing items that reflect their brand promise and image. Big dollars turn on getting the communication of any company’s brand right. What’s the secret to growth in this type of highly competitive industry? Stern focuses on constant and relentless innovation. He surveys customers’ needs and the changing trends in the market with a staff dedicated to new and creative offerings of both products and services.
His lodestar is giving the customer — whether corporate buyer, dealer or end-user – an experience that reinforces the brand of the client he serves. Stern pays real attention to quality and at the same time studying fashion and merchandise trends. That includes producing custom catalogs to expand the choices available for his clients’ employees, dealers and customers. The best testament to Stern’s success is that many of his clients have been with his company for over 25 years. He views those customers as partners and visits them frequently to get their feedback and address their ever-changing needs. His biggest challenge is not other competitors but companies that think they can do promotional merchandising and marketing through their internal staff. That’s a never-ending challenge because many companies mistakenly think they can offer the same promotional merchandise programs without working with an experienced outside resource like Norscot. You can learn from Stern that if you’re in a competitive industry fighting for a share of the market there are a variety of ways you can emerge a winner: 1. Spend time like Stern does with his customers so you understand their mindset and more importantly uncover their needs, which change rapidly. Nothing beats faceto-face. 2. Allocate some of your budget to ethnographic research, which is basically studying consumers and how they use your product or service. This is called “fly on the wall” research and it’s superior to focus groups in which one or two customers can hijack the conversation and feedback. 3. Encourage employees to be creative and give them room to experiment. Modern neuroscience research suggests that the reason most people are hardwired to be creative is because that’s what we needed to survive as human beings. Creativity is a talent that should be nurtured and taught. Your budget should allocate a percentage of expenditures for training new and existing employees on the tools of creativity. It’s not
rocket science. 4. Are your meetings conducted in a way that fosters and encourages creative and innovative input from all attendees? That requires the team leader to encourage spending time understanding the problem and the challenge before jumping to solutions. Then commit relentless ideation in order to generate multiple solutions. A Harvard Business School study found that the more ideas put in play the higher the number of final creative solutions. 5. Allocate part of the time of your company to looking for disruptive new products. Studies show that if 10% of your current revenues come from disruptive products, that 10% will be 90% a decade from now. Nothing new there. We are constantly using products that didn’t even exist 15 or 20 years ago. Remember when Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, used as his guide for innovation and creativity at his company, “Only the paranoid survive”? Stern takes that seriously. It is one of the reasons his company, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, continues to grow and prosper and lessons can be learned from his leadership. n
DAN STEININGER Dan Steininger is an author and a national and international speaker. As president of Steininger & Associates LLC he helps companies drive innovation. He is also president of BizStarts. He can be reached through his assistant, Emily Schulz, at (262) 661-6532 or es@bdpros.com. biztimes.com / 39
