Most businesses have a variety of product and service offerings for their customers. Based on the BCG Matrix , some products can be Stars with high market share or generate cash in excess of the total product category sales (Cash Cows), whereas others can be quite slow in the market (Dogs) or Question Marks (Problem Children), decreasing sales turnover and profitability of a whole category and, consequently, of the business over time.

So how do you improve the problem children to help the business generate more profit?

The issue

When I was working for a major player in the construction industry as an EMEA product manager, I was awarded the street furniture category. This was a £9.6m category with 10 sub categories within it, a major responsibility as I was the sole person responsible. The Cash Cow of the category were bollards, which accounted for 60% of the total category sales turnover. Stars included benches, litter bins and lighting. However, two of the sub-portfolios were Question Marks: cycling and anti-terrorism street furniture. The existing products in the anti-terrorism street furniture category were selected as a priority to re-vamp, in order to create a competitive advantage and maximise brand awareness, sales and profit.

The solution

The plan was to re-vamp the category with additional products and re-launch to the market as “Protective” instead of “anti-terrorism”, which made the category sound more inclusive of protecting people and places from vehicle-born attacks and wiped out the fear factor from the category. Along with determining objectives, project scope and buying personas, the plan consisted of:

• building an internal and external marketing communications plan for online and offline channels
• building and leading an exhibition in London, where the majority of the clients were based, to re-introduce the category
• creating marketing collateral and freebies for the exhibition and for clients
• create new products to complement the existing range and extend it, creating co-ordination throughout the range – why choose stand-alone bollards when you can have a litter bin, a seat and a planter to go with it
• re-launch internally to get the buy-in of the department and the rest of the business at the yearly company event.

Co-ordinating engineers, production and external agencies to build the products, the event and collateral were the priority for this project to succeed. Using a Gantt chart when project managing is important as it allows you to keep afloat of the workload and to make sure the project plan is delivered on time and on budget. Another tool to help planning is the RACI matrix, which is what i call a project plan summary; it identifies and clarifies roles and responsibilities of a project or a process within a cross functional organisation – works wonders on a PLC level!

The results

It took 4 months of hard work, talking to various people and teams, travelling up and down the country and – you guessed it – many sleepless nights to reach these stupendous results!

• A 2-day event in London with all experts of that field – around 50 genuine leads that were added to the pipeline for that year and increased category turnover by 1/4 in 8 months
• An internal event with a Streetscape scene, including products from all sub categories. (Excuse the video on this one, I was ill with fever and no socks in a cold shed when outside was snowing and had -4C!) This event became a showroom for sales consultants, who brought approx. 800 people from various architectural practices and government bodies to visit, with an ROI of 20% filled pipeline. I will come back to the story of the smashed up car in a later blog post
•  A new brochure, which I wrote myself after plenty of studying of Governmental practices, laws and competitor brochures. I also simplified the customer journey and introduced the future spaces renders for all other brochures that were updated after this one (p.5-7)
• Other perks for the exhibitions and customers were bollard-shaped USBs with the brochure and product videos, branded lanyards with keys to bollard locks (just missing your bollard now!) and product material samples; the feedback I received was more than positive
• 4 new products ready to sell and 3 in the pipeline, complementing existing ranges of products
• Marketing communications plan included new and existing customer email campaigns with 1/3 generated enquiries, PR campaigns to industry magazines and government journals to establish expertise, and case studies of projects with these products included

I was responsible for the design of all exhibition stands. I also created the brochure pagination, all the photography briefs and render design concepts and directed the product videos, as well as the category video. Collaboration on the product designs with the technical manager was key, creating the extended co-ordinated range.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I project managed this project like a control freak would do due to people not pulling their weight in their tasks and upper management being too busy dealing with the nitty gritty of identifying ways to increase the bottom line. The good news is that I ended up getting a bottle of champagne from my directors, thanking me for all the work I put into this project to make it a reality and the great sales result it yielded. 4 years later, I still have that bottle in my fridge.

Thank you for taking time to read my post. I am more than happy to read your feedback and your comments, please post below or email me on vdiamanti@gmail.com .