PM's Profile

This sounds like a fantastic initiative – thank you for sharing! The question you pose about scalability seems very real! There are a couple of challenges I foresee. Firstly, will Clover alter it’s menu for national trends (across all it’s stores when it does go national), or would there be complete autonomy at a store level? Both seem to come with it’s fair bit of challenges. Secondly, does the customer truly know what they want? Often, the value add in this industry is being able to bring new tastes to the customers and not necessarily be as input-driven. With these two points in mind, a consideration is that maybe Clover is better off staying as a local brand? Their innovative approach and aspirations for scale seem to come at a heavy trade off!

Identifying who should gain the benefits from breakthroughs achieved in iterative research is a difficult question to answer, however a critical one, particularly to foster an environment where researchers feel incentivized to pursue their work in important fields such as the one highlighted. In my opinion, we might require new industry guidelines for intellectual property, that accounts for the movement towards open innovation practices.

I wonder whether the industry and Nike is ready to widely commercialize a shoe built with 3D printed components just yet? As the article highlights, there are significant implications on Nike’s ability to deliver, specifically with the increased production lead time. While the product undoubtedly seems superior, could a strong but premature focus on 3D printed shoes serve as a distraction from their core business?

As the article suggests, there has been a shift in the industry towards increasing use of “niche” brands. An innovative move such as this is a strong marketing play for a large and established player like Chanel, allowing it to create it’s own nice and projecting an image of being established but not outdated. Though the first line of products had a long product development cycle, I believe that Chanel would be able to leverage its experience and its patented technology to quickly scale the number of applications. My take is that they should allow for greater customization – which would serve as a strong differentiation – especially when competing against other established players who might not be able to offer any thing similar anytime soon!

Taking “leaps forward” will have to be the approach that Salesforce takes with its adoption and implementation of AI-driven solutions. Salesforce has been a market leader in the CRM world and this move will allow it to stay ahead of the curve, especially at a time when countless open-source CRM platforms are entering the market. CRM platforms still require heavy input from a data/tech team at the client-end to design dashboards and make sense of heaps of data; providing access to “smarter” analytics would become it’s key differentiation.

This is going to be a tough battle for Walmart! No doubt that strengthening it’s digit presence via Sam’s Club and acquisitions such as Flipkart will help the company stride forward. However in this battle for data-driven retail marketing, Amazon has the advantage of understanding and predicting consumer wide trends well outside it’s immediate customer-base, due to AWS’s far reach! While Walmart should continue down the path of having a strong omni-channel strategy, should it be seeking an alternative USP, such as best in class in-store experience?