Probably one of the most famous quotes in marketing comes from Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

That, in a nutshell is servitization.  Turning a traditional product offering into a service. This new customer-centric feature becomes a differentiator, adding value, building relationships, preventing commoditization, and adding profits. Data insights, generated from the Internet of Things (IoT) are often at the heart of the new service offering. Sometimes the new offering is used to generate revenue, replace the old product-centric business model, or be a complimentary add-on designed to boost loyalty.

One of the common pushbacks with the use of analytics relates to the perceived ubiquity of imperfect data. This sentiment should be familiar to many: "We can't properly analyze and make decisions until we have corrected the quality issues in the data." Unfortunately, analytics must often be based on incomplete or "dirty" data. The first step in dealing with this reality is to understand and accept that information will likely never be perfect.

Sales professionals rely on an array of different criteria to be successful: strong personal skills, a good product, reliable technology, and efficient processes. To help sales reps be more effective, organizations have made huge investments in customer relationship management (CRM) systems and other technologies.

Innovation is a central component of the manufacturing industry. It can take many forms and address many functions. It can be a simple tactic for improving shop floor operations. It can be a concept for a new type of product or service. It can be a revolutionary approach that completely disrupts the way you do business. But all innovations start much the same way: as an idea.

How does innovation fit into your growth strategy?

The biggest mall owner in the U.S., Simon Property Group, is teaming with online shopping site Rue La La’s parent company to launch a new kind of website for people looking for deals.

The real estate company announced Wednesday it’s partnering with Rue Gilt Groupe, which is backed by Michael Rubin, CEO of Fanatics’ parent company Kynetic, to create a new e-commerce business for discount shopping.

Simon has been testing the website “ShopPremiumOutlets.com” since March, building on its premium outlet centers business. The mall owner operates dozens of premium outlet centers nationwide and a handful overseas. It’s been working with certain retailers at those centers — which include Woodbury Common Premium Outlets in New York — to test selling merchandise together on this site. It says it has signed on more than 2,000 designers, and has about 300,000 products.

In this episode we talk with Morin Sarenio of CGTrader, a company of 2-million designers that’s providing retailers with immersive augmented reality that lets customers try products online before they buy them. That means better customer experience, fewer returns, and major savings on reverse logistics.

Each year ICCG, sends members of its US executive and sales team to Inforum, Infor’s annual technology and applications forum. This event is for current and prospective customers looking to drive efficiency and learn more about how to get the most from their Infor investment.

“Inforum is always an event I look forward to. In fact, this was my 14th consecutive year attending,” said Balachandran Anantharama, Senior Vice President. “When I look back on my first Inforum to this last one, it is a living testimony of how much Infor has evolved as an Enterprise Software provider from its Leadership, Solutions, Technology, Customers and the Partner Ecosystem.”

For three generations Smarties candies have been a favorite among Halloween trick-or-treaters who love the pastel-colored wafers that are even good for some allergen-sensitive children. On Wednesday the Smarties Candy Co. celebrates its 70th anniversary at its manufacturing headquarters in Union, New Jersey.

The company, founded by 96-year-old patriarch, Edward Dee has a lot to celebrate. It is one of the few family-owned mass-production confectionery companies left in the United States, and it turns out more than 2 billion rolls of the candies every year.

According to Infor, the next wave of its ERP innovations will be driven by agile deployments as it opts for a series of short iterations.

How often does a typical business decide on a new ERP system? Perhaps once a decade. It is a big decision and one that incurs massive costs if errors are made – on both a financial and an operational level.

A bad ERP strategy can ruin a company’s bottom line and stifle its growth moving forward – the irony being that growth was probably the very factor that informed the need for an ERP system in the first place.

A recent report valued the rental subscription market at around 1 billion dollars in 2018 and forecast it grows more than 20 percent a year, reaching 2.5 billion dollars by 2023. This trend isn’t lost on traditional retailers: over the last year everyone in the industry seems to be launching their own clothing rental service.

Recent research from GlobalData confirms the explosive growth of clothing rental and / or subscription services: it’s expected to reach 2.5 billion dollars value by 2023, prompting brands such as Banana Republic, Macy’s, Urban Outfitters, Trunk Club or J.C. Penney to announce their own apparel rental services.

Of course, the renewed and now emphatically changing world of Farm-to-Table is upon us and growing in popularity at rapid speed. I do find it all so very interesting because many years ago I did work with Gardenburger (in Portland, OR) prior to Kellogg’s purchasing them. 

Morningstar Farms were popular items (and still are today) but also were products that were sold primarily to vegans or vegetarians and often sold at local organic food co-ops or whole food markets (or similar). Might be a stretch analogy but let’s recall that decades ago major automobile companies were making electric cars but in similar terms the renewed and recent popularity can be directed at Tesla. Beyond meat and Impossible foods (and many others to come) will also need to be certain they can support the new demand so that they are not like Popeye’s chicken franchises that gained major popularity with their chicken sandwiches but had a complete failure with keeping up with the demand (failed supply chain).

As to the article, I think that the following words really show how McDonald's and others are afraid of falling behind, but also somewhat skeptical about whether this growth vertical will continue. Let alone, let’s be frank, McDonald's has never been the first to initiate or ingratiate itself to healthy menu items (and lifestyle-consumer) choices.

The experiment shows that the company has paid attention to consumers’ growing interest in plant-based burgers.

However, the P.L.T. is not vegan.

The stakes are smaller. If McDonald’s P.L.T. is a flop, it can quickly pull it from the market and go back to the drawing board.