Tag Archives: product mix

Gartner: Cloud computing, Analytics Top 2010 Strategic Tech List …

Cloud computing and analytics have jumped front and center. Gartner renamed Business Intelligence (BI) to Analytics.
On the analytics front, Gartner said in a presentation: “We have reached the point in the improvement of performance and costs that we can afford to perform analytics and simulation for each and every action taken in the business. Not [...]

Customer Buying Patterns - What you can learn From Pizza Sales

First order take rates tell us about the relative popularity of different options. For example, consider a small set of possible pizza toppings.

Topping

Take Rate

Pepperoni

40%

Mushrooms

20%

Pineapple

3%

Canadian Bacon

3%

Green Peppers

10%

Customer buying patterns really start with second order take rates, which tell us about pairs of options, or toppings. Second order take rates tell us about relative [...]

Part I: Reporting, Business Intelligence, Data Mining, Analytics: Actionable Tasks!

Reporting, Business Intelligence and Data mining cause data overload. We need to provide business users with actionable tasks based on analytics.

The Number of Choice Combinations Depend…

The number of build combinations depends on which features are included. The build combinations is the product mix or the marketing mix. Understanding this is important as product complexity is a key driver of process complexity.

How I want to buy a car

Every five or so years, I shop for a new car. I hate car shopping. The haggling, the long trips to dealerships way outside of town, the hours and hours of waiting, punctuated by furtive whispers to my husband, “Don’t give in! Stick to our budget! But don’t tell them our budget!” and similar. But [...]

Shopping for a new monitor

I do a lot of work from home. My office has a huge picture window, a desk and my laptop. As a system administrator, I often read long log files or wade through large amounts of data; sometimes I need to work from an online reference as I’m tweaking system settings on my servers. A [...]

Q&A with Mark Gottfredson, Bain & Company

In today’s post, we talk to Mark Gottfredson about product complexity and customer choice.
Emcien: It’s natural for companies to add products and features to keep customers happy. What are the downfalls?
MG: The challenge of adding complexity is it’s the most natural thing in the world. Marketing comes up with new ideas for products or configurations [...]

Arm your salespeople to make the sale

Your salespeople are representing and selling your product. Customers who want to buy your product typically list a few things they want and look to the salesperson to guide them. The salesperson is their advisor on your product offering. The salesperson is expected to know the product and suggest good choices for the customer. Is your salesperson equipped to do that?

Variation is valuable

Advances in interconnection technologies are driving an increasingly demand-driven market. Customers are learning to expect to get what they want, when they want it, how they want it. And they tell you in each and every interaction they have with your company, or not. In a demand-driven world, increasing product variation and complexity in your [...]

Extending the product configuration to gain insight

One of the most important components in choice complexity is the product configuration itself, the mixture of product options that give a product its unique signature. Obviously the typical product orderable options are needed to analyze the complexity of a product, but other more abstract options can offer surprising insights into product and customer behaviors.
A [...]