Three Winning Strategies and Competitive Insights from Star Sales Performers for Developing Successful Products

For all the challenges that supply chain professionals, product developers, manufacturers, and companies of all kinds have faced over the last six months, the world of business can and will go on. Market opportunities must still be identified, products conceived, and partnerships for developing successful products must be formed.

Developing Successful Products for Nearly 50 years

At Pivot International, we’ve been helping businesses adapt to changing conditions, capitalize on emerging opportunities, and bring successful products to market for nearly fifty years. We are global supply chain leaders with product development expertise that spans over fourteen industries and 200,000 square feet of production capability for serving the US, Asia, and European markets. As the world of business marches on to the beat of a new drummer, we are proud to be playing a key role in helping companies defy disruption and successfully scale for the coming future.

At this very moment, company leaders and product development teams in various parts of the world are gathered in virtual conference rooms to explore opportunities for bringing a new product to market. As they undertake this exploration, their efforts can benefit greatly from the applications of three winning strategies and competitive insights of top-performing salespeople.

Strategies for Developing Successful Products

Winning Strategy #1 — Follow the Action and Focus on What’s Next

Competitive Insight: Star salespeople target customers that have emerging needs or are in a state of organizational transition, whether due to supply chain disruption, policy shifts, major industry shifts, or internal factors like a recent acquisition, the loss of a leader, or mounting discontent in a company’s culture.

Product Development Application: Follow the action, have boots on the ground, and strike while it’s hot. Focus on emerging trends and market opportunities that are being spawned by supply chain disruption, and challenges stemming from regulatory changes related to ongoing US-China trade tensions, and more.

At Pivot, we help product development teams shift their focus from existing markets with clearly defined needs to nascent markets with emerging needs. We also provide alternative sourcing solutions for surmounting supply chain challenges, including those related to regulatory changes that mandate reshoring or near-shoring for critical or security-sensitive components.

Winning Strategy #2 — Function as a Deliberate Change Agent

Competitive Insight: Top sales performers are involved in deliberately defying, disrupting, and transforming the status quo. This means they bring an understanding to ideas that fly in the face of established norms and have a sixth sense for economic and industry disorder that signal new kinds of demand — not just for products and services, but also for new ways of doing business, leading organizations, and so forth.

Product Development Application: Place more energy into the question of the market’s potential to change (and your company’s potential to change the market) rather than whether you can immediately identify customers with the willingness to buy.

Identify and challenge common assumptions about the product you’re developing and the intended market. Then, plug a new set of assumptions into the equation to advance your exploration and reveal new possibilities. Last, keep your ear to the ground for signs of critical tipping points that your company can get ahead of, actively shape, and strategically influence.

Winning Strategy #3 — Place a Premium on Agility

Competitive Insight: Extraordinary closers know that timing is everything and put a premium on customer agility. They want to know whether a customer will decisively act when presented with a compelling proposition or whether they are constrained by structures and systems that prevent this.

Product Development Application: Engage a partner with the agility to help you rapidly act on emerging market opportunities, achieve first-to-market advantage, and quickly scale production volume in response to increased or decreased demand. At Pivot, our global supply chain network, company-owned facilities, and extensive investment in the latest digital technologies set the industry bar for agility.

Pivot’s team of engineering, design, development, manufacturing, distribution, and regulatory-compliance talent serves clients across twelve locations worldwide. Our one-source model ensures a seamless end-to-end product development process backed by multiple IEC and ISO certifications, FDA registration, UL listing, and CSA approval. If you’re looking for an agile, proven partner for seizing emerging opportunities and bringing a successful product to market, Pivot delivers. Contact us today to learn more about the difference we can make to your company’s growth.

Product Developers, is Your Marketing Strategy Informed by the Right Data?

The global pandemic has turned the market landscape into what can seem like a dizzying labyrinth of new demands. In a matter of mere months, marketing teams have had to rethink their most basic assumptions about their capabilities, their customers, and more.

Accelerated change is the new normal, and businesses need increasing levels of insight and agility to identify and act on emerging product development opportunities that are informed by solid data. At Pivot International, we deploy sophisticated, data-driven market and consumer insights to guide new product development, and deliver supply chain solutions to ensure a successful launch. With expertise that spans twelve industries and 200,000 square feet of manufacturing capability, we assure market-savvy, strategically-driven, successfully executed product launch and business growth.

Despite burying themselves in data, marketing teams often aren’t able to generate a reliable picture of product performance, customer needs, consumer trends, and market landscape. Here are three strategies your marketing team can draw on to ensure your efforts drive revenue and deliver bottom-line results.

Overcome Analysis Paralysis

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, and when marketing teams feel like they’re drowning in data with no meaningful metrics to tie it to, they run the risk of falling back on unvetted assumptions.

Overcome analysis paralysis with the simplest data set needed for achieving a concrete business objective. Then, create a detailed map reflecting the relationship between data, insight, and execution. By dialing your data back a bit, your team can start to get a clearer picture of the impact of specific marketing initiatives on particular business outcomes. This will also help your team better scale their ability to interpret larger data sets and learn to ask better questions for guiding ongoing R&D.

Expand Your Definition of “Digital”

It used to be that when marketing teams talked about “digital,” they thought primarily in terms of Google keywords and search results. This is still a hugely important aspect of digital marketing, but consumers (both B2B and B2C) increasingly rely on social media, email, automated chat, company web pages, and more to research products, vet brands, and make buying decisions.

All of these interactions generate a dynamic digital footprint. It’s critical to track and map this footprint to gain visibility into who your customers are, how they discover you, learn about you, connect with you, and buy from you. (Or, just as critically, buy from a competitor). Marketing teams can benefit enormously from the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms that provide visibility into this crucial information.

Identify and Optimize Effective Pathways for Catalyzing Conversion

The “Zero Moment of Truth,” a phrase that Google coined in 2011 that refers to a customer’s first step in researching a product or service, has now taken on a whole new significance. Compared to even five years ago, the purchase journey has become much less linear and complex. Now there are dozens (if not hundreds) of digital touchpoints involved in the path to purchase. This means that the series and sequence of touchpoint(s) that most effectively drive actual buying behavior are harder to predict.

For this reason, each touchpoint — and particularly the relationships between them — should be analyzed and A/B tested to definitively identify and optimize the most effective pathways for catalyzing conversion. In today’s climate of accelerated change, shifting consumer behavior, and unpredictable market demands, decisions informed by sound data are essential to bringing successful products to market and remaining relevant in the face of fierce competition.

Pivot International and its subsidiaries are behind some of the world’s most successful consumer, industrial, and medical products. Using advanced analytics and extensive business development experience, we can help your business gain the market and customer insights you need to identify and act on emerging opportunities to drive growth. Our business development services include strategic planning, market analysis, website advisement, advertising and marketing, external sales consulting, and more. Contact us today to learn more about the product development support and supply chain solutions we’re providing for businesses worldwide.

Industry X.0: How Product Developers Can Combine Digital Technologies to Drive Growth

As the digital age accelerates and the global market continues to present steep challenges to businesses’ profit margins, companies are better recognizing the role of Industry X.0 in driving growth. If you haven’t yet heard of Industry X.0, leading management consulting firm Accenture defines it as:

• “A new digital paradigm for businesses to embrace constant technological change—and profit from it.
• Businesses that move beyond experimenting with IT bundles or SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, cloud) stacks, combining digital technologies to drive both top-line and bottom-line growth.
• Businesses that incorporate Industry 4.0’s core operational efficiencies, but also leverage combinations of advanced digital technologies to continuously create new, hyper-personalized experiences in both a business-to-consumer and business-to-business context.”

Pivot International’s proven track record of combining state-of-the-art digital technologies for successfully bringing new products to market has made it a leader in Industry X.0 and a premier single-source partner for top companies worldwide. With a nearly 50-year history in product development and design, Pivot leverages smart, efficient processes that increase productivity and lower costs.

To make the most of Industry X.0, it’s not enough to merely mix and match digital technologies. Companies must also update their operating models and value chains to create a larger eco-system in which digital combinations can gain the greatest traction. That said, combining technologies is a worthy place to start on the road to building digital muscle. With this in mind, what digital combinations are proving to most powerfully drive cost savings and growth? We’ll focus on four in particular.

1. Augmented and Virtual Reality

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are allowing manufacturers to speed up their design processes and perform more in-depth product testing prior to production. By making it easier to contextually experiment with designs and iteratively improve them, these technologies lend themselves to next-level innovation and superior performance. At Pivot International, for instance, our teams utilize AR and VR to make strategic product improvements to designs. This enables us to deliver significant cost-savings to our clients since it can eliminate or reduce the need for physical materials until later in the product development process.

2. Artificial Intelligence

Designs can be created with a potentially dizzying array of features. This can make it difficult to accurately assess which features are superfluous and which are indispensable as assessed from functional-performance, user-experience, manufacturability, and marketability perspectives. While AR and VR facilitate experimentation to determine what features can be developed, artificial intelligence (AI) delivers predictive analytics that helps product developers identify which features should be developed. AI can also be used to predict possible threats to a potential product’s success, such as market instability or supply chain vulnerability. This helps businesses reduce risk throughout the product development process, especially in the volatile front-end stages.

3. Digital Twinning

Via the creation of virtual models or digital replicas of physical assets, digital twinning makes it possible for either AI programs or human operators to monitor these assets for potential problems and correct them prior to their actual occurrence. This is done using data from Internet-of-Things sensors placed on physical assets to analyze their efficiency, condition, and real-time status. Creating a digital twin helps companies gain insight into how to proactively improve operations, increase efficiency, and identify issues before they become problems. Machine-learning feeds this valuable data back into the original system with the result that risk is dramatically reduced and ROI is significantly increased.  

4. 3D Printing

Most often used for prototyping, 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing) can save companies both time and money by producing product iterations at a faster, more economical rate. As products in development often need to undergo multiple iterations in rapid succession, 3D printing expedites design updates and modifications. It also allows businesses to easily and quickly create personalized products for an individual customer or niche market.

Becoming an Industry X.0 enterprise starts with taking steps to leverage the right combination of digital technology that’s right for your business. Those that embark on this technological journey today will become the growth leaders of tomorrow. If you’re ready to revolutionize your product development and see how Pivot’s advanced application of Industry X.0 can help your business successfully scale for the future, contact us today.

How to Ensure Design Drives Revenue in New Product Development

While it’s long been known that design is critical to product performance, companies are increasingly correlating design with bottom-line results. Organizations that have invested in top design talent and advanced design processes drive results that go beyond product performance and user experience (UX). These results can be traced directly to revenue and define design as one of the company’s chief competitive differentiators.

With nearly 50 years of experience in bringing successful products to market, Pivot International leverages leading-edge design to not only improve and perfect the products we develop but also to enhance operations and fuel bottom-line results. Our extensive portfolio includes a breadth of industry-leading innovations spanning a broad range of sectors that have put our partners on the map. From electronic consumer products to award-winning medical devices, we use advanced design applications to optimize manufacturability to help our partners efficiently scale.  

How do companies that have made design a key revenue-driver differ from their competitors, and how can your company leverage design to achieve your concrete business objectives? Here are six winning approaches.

1. Get the Entire Team Onboard

At a seasoned product design firm, it’s common practice for the entire organization to be involved in the design process — even those on the executive team. In fact, at Apple, Steve Jobs ushered in an era of the CEO as “Lead Product Designer.” In an interview, one of his close collaborators, Glenn Reid, said, “(Steve) told me once that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design. He was right there in the middle of it. All of it.” Bringing your design team and key stakeholders together to work collaboratively on all aspects of design is crucial to developing and delivering a successful product.

2. Apply Design to the Bigger Picture

Companies who have mastered the art of design for driving revenue apply design not only in the business, but also on the business. It’s one thing to apply design, for example, to client deliverables or even to your own company website. It’s another thing to apply design to business operations, organizational development, and market strategy.

3. Empower Your Design Team

Design teams that are involved in critical business decisions and encouraged to collaborate with other key stakeholders have been shown to be four times more likely to originate novel concept designs and assume ownership of key features and innovations. Furthermore, their chances of reporting directly to the CEO double in companies that most effectively leverage design to drive revenue. This highlights how essential it is to empower your design team in relation to the larger product development cohort.

4. Nurture a Culture of Questions

Known for the level of autonomy it gives employees across the company, Netflix empowers product designers to question the status quo and search for new ways to grow the business. They tackle questions, for example, about how the content discovery experience can be improved. This approach inspires product design teams to build and iterate on different concepts.

5. Operate Like a Laboratory

Design teams at top companies tend to have more robust experimentation practices, like concept, A/B, and beta testing. Additionally, these teams have efficient systems in place to swiftly recruit customers for focus groups and UX testing. They are also more likely to have formalized processes for running design experiments and testing the data they generate.   

6. Mind Your Metrics

Design ROI is challenging to quantify, but high-level teams are usually those that are more likely to measure standard indicators like NPS and to design team-operations measures. USAA, for example, uses a design scorecard that includes ratings on everything from a design’s functional performance to market appeal to manufacturability.

As organizations learn the value of investing in design thinking, they need to take greater account of how effectively they’re leveraging design to drive revenue. If you’re looking for comprehensive, expert design services for a new or existing product, Pivot brings world-class talent and proven processes for ensuring that design drives bottom-line results. To request a free consultation, contact us today.

How Product Developers Can Survive and Thrive in an Era of Escalating Supply Chain Disruption

With the protracted US-China trade wars only recently abating and the outbreak of COVID-19, supply chain disruption continues to loom large. Whether threats to sourcing are geopolitical, viral, or climatic, it’s never been more clear to product developers that securing their supply chain is mission-critical.

At Pivot International, we’re a qualified Essential and Critical Supplier that’s helping companies weather disruption. With nearly a half-century of experience across twelve industries, 200,000 square feet of manufacturing capability, and the latest in supply chain digitization, we deliver effective solutions for businesses seeking both short- and longer-term solutions to the current sourcing crisis.

How can product developers not only survive but also thrive amid global upheaval? Here are three approaches for successfully navigating supply chain disruption.

Diversification

Diversification can help to mitigate risk by ensuring companies can maintain continuity across the multiple connected links that comprise the integrity and security of the supply chain. The proverbial wisdom of not putting too many eggs in a single basket is illustrative of the necessity of diversification to supply chain health. Sourcing from a single supplier is risky at best and catastrophic at worst, and a distributed network of suppliers and facilities can greatly mitigate the danger of disruption. 

Pivot’s highly diversified and distributed global supply chain network has enabled it to largely protect its partners from disruption related to trade tensions and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the virus has introduced challenges to China-based facilities, Pivot has helped its customers successfully surmount these challenges by providing alternative supply chain solutions via its two Philippines-based locations.

Transparency

In supply chain management, transparency refers to how deeply companies can see into and account for the interconnected links in their supply chain and how freely they share this information, both internally and externally. A lack of transparency can pose operational issues that can halt business. For instance, shipments missing origin documents can be held up at port and this costly issue can ripple through the entire supply chain. Additionally, amid global disruptions, transparency can support compliance in the face of changing regulations, and help companies identify and act on opportunities to resolve supply chain interruptions, as well as improve overall efficiency and performance.

Digitization

Digitization, which is the adoption and deployment of innovative digital technologies like AI, SMT, and blockchain platforms, can help companies build agility, reliability, and scalability in supply chain logistics by managing and “opportunizing” complexity. Applying innovations like these to the value chain can increase visibility and transparency, allowing manufacturers to make rapid changes to their operations to respond to emerging threats or market-based opportunities.

At Pivot International, we’re helping companies successfully navigate global supply chain disruption and a rapidly changing market. As a single-source product development, design, engineering, and manufacturing company with seven locations worldwide, we deliver advanced supply chain solutions for businesses of all types, from startups to enterprise organizations. 

If your company is confronting sourcing challenges due to COVID-19 or other threats, contact us today to learn more about how we can help you secure your supply chain and fortify your business for the future.

Seeking Market Insights for New Product Development? Try Social Listening

Social listening — analyzing what consumers say on social media — is a method typically used in consumer-facing sectors that enable businesses to learn about the opinions customers hold about particular products. What is not yet widely realized is just how much this approach can inform and fuel new product development (NPD). By gaining actionable insights in real-time, without incurring the high cost of more conventional practices, like focus groups and research reports, companies that engage in social listening can gain a competitive advantage.

Also, unlike other methods traditionally used to assess what consumers think of new products, social listening:

• Provides nearly limitless samples
• Produces opinions that are not subject to bias
• Ensures that results never become dated
• Creates a link between consumer sentiment and purchase behavior

Social media is a largely untapped goldmine for consumer data. And, as artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to enhance the capabilities of social listening, we’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible with this approach.

At Pivot International, we’re a global leader in helping companies translate consumer insights into winning products. With nearly half a century of experience as a worldwide single-source leader, we bring a deep understanding of market dynamics and the consumer landscape to the product development process. From proof-of-concept to design to prototype production to manufacture to supply chain management, we leverage advanced expertise and innovative technology to power our partner’s success.

How can social listening offer insights into your NPD? Let’s take a look.

Smarter, Cleaner Data

Recent machine learning innovations have enabled smart analysis of natural language content and monitoring of images and videos. These advancements have allowed businesses to explore a broader range of consumer sentiment and purchase behavior. For instance, social listening may reveal that when consumers come within geographical proximity of a product or service, they are more likely to post about it on social media or to make a purchase. This means that organizations can now map and update consumer preferences, as well as monitor how consumers connect with and influence others.

Additionally, machine learning helps with the problem of unclean data by filtering out fake content produced by a manufacturer’s marketing agency, sellers, or robots. The consequence? Businesses can avoid garnering misleading data about their brand.

Clearer Customer Sentiment

A product concept that’s ideal for the market right now might be outdated when the product launches. Social media provides clues about changing consumer preferences, allowing companies to better predict future trends and assess whether a trend can support their product goals. Social listening can also determine how trends in one market affect those in another, as well as facilitate the development of customized products for specific demographics.

Improved Operations

On top of providing data that offers insights into consumer opinions, preferences, and sentiment, social listening can give businesses the ability to gather valuable customer feedback that can inform more effective responses and product modifications or adaptations. Social media posts complaining that a portable battery, for example, is too large to conveniently carry could prompt a manufacturer to improve its portability while maintaining the same level of power capacity.

In today’s digital, social media-powered world, businesses that fail to implement social listening may find it increasingly challenging to create products that meet the rapidly changing needs and preferences of the modern consumer. However, businesses that learn how to understand consumers through the online platforms they regularly utilize (3.5 billion people globally spend an average of three hours per day on social media), will have a significant advantage in the marketplace.

At Pivot International, we bring sophisticated methods for gaining insight into consumer sentiment, purchase behavior, and market demand — information that can be leveraged to your advantage during the NPD process. If you’re looking for a partner with a proven track record of helping businesses across the globe bring award-winning products successfully to market, we can help. Contact us today to learn more about the competitive difference Pivot can make to your product development and bottom line.

Best Front-End Practices for Ensuring Success in New Product Development

When New Product Development (NPD) fails, it’s often in either the last or commercial stage of the development process. However, these late-stage failures can most often be traced to the beginning stage or the front end of NPD. The front end begins when an organization recognizes that an opportunity lies within an idea and ends with the approval or disapproval of a proposed project. More than any other phase of the product development process, the front end exhibits a dynamic and interactive nature, characterized by:

• The need for complex information processing
• Ad hoc decision-making
• Conflicting organizational pressures
• High degrees of complexity and uncertainty

These elements contribute to volatility during the earlier stages of NPD, increasing the likelihood of mistakes, delays, and communication breakdowns that can eventually result in product failure. The good news is that these challenges can be overcome by using best practices for managing the front end of NPD.

At Pivot International, we bring nearly fifty years of experience in NPD and have developed systematic processes and practices for fortifying every phase of the product development process. By leveraging comprehensive systems and solutions for optimizing product design, development, manufacture, and distribution, Pivot has established itself as a global leader that helps companies worldwide bring award-winning products successfully to market.

Here are five front-end practices that must be deployed to vouchsafe the early stages of NPD and ensure a profitable outcome.

1. Achieve a Shared Definition of Success

Research shows that the ability to manage the front end of NPD necessitates the creation of a robust product definition that outlines in great detail what success will look like, along with metrics for assessing and corroborating this success. A product definition functions as a statement and common point of reference for achieving a set of specific and highly integrated goals. A robust product definition must meet the following criterion:

• Be clear, stable, and unambiguous
• Has passed business and feasibility analysis 
• Includes product concepts (consisting of a description of underlying technologies, statements on customer benefits and evaluations of market opportunities, as well as analyses of market positioning, competitors and alignments with existing business plans)

2. Seek a Collaborative NPD Partner

External partners can assist in the front end of NPD. A carefully vetted supplier, for example, can reduce technological uncertainty. Effective supplier cooperation can decrease time-to-market, reduce development costs, and improve product quality. At Pivot, we take a broad perspective on the value chain at the front end of NPD to acquire useful input for concept development.

3. Align General Business Strategy With NPD

Alignment between NPD and strategy highlights the need for firms to engage in product portfolio planning. For example, firms need to strategically think when planning an optimal mix of product attributes that meet customers’ wants and needs.

The alignment of an organization’s NPD with its general business strategy is a critical front-end success factor. Companies that use their core competencies in front-end projects are better able to keep their business strategies on point and in focus.

4. Enlist Cross-Functional Cooperation

Cross-functional cooperation is critical to front-end success. It benefits task analysis, reduces uncertainty, enhances communication, promotes idea diversity, and brings greater stringency to idea evaluation and selection.

Manufacturing and process design, for instance, should cooperate to assure the feasibility of manufacturing proposed products. Both R&D and marketing, for example, benefit from collaboration, with each taking responsibility for product concept and product definition and sharing this information company-wide.

5. Leverage Integrative Project Management

A project manager is responsible for expertly guiding a project through various stages, including front-end and sub-phases. They request support, lobby for resources, and handle technical and design issues. They also influence product definitions, outline project objectives, promote teamwork, and facilitate strategic alignment.

At Pivot, our project managers are involved in each of these critical tasks. As it pertains specifically to front-end processes, they are intricately involved in facilitating collaboration, articulating shared goals, prioritizing workflows, mapping and tracking path dependencies, and providing leadership and oversight.

From front-end product definition to design to prototyping to manufacturing to distribution, Pivot offers businesses the support they need throughout all stages of NPD while maximizing their Internal Rate of Return. Our mission lies in helping companies successfully and cost-effectively realize their new product’s potential and profitably see it to market. If you’re looking for a leading NPD partner, contact us today to learn more about how Pivot can help you bring your product idea to life and grow your business.

New Product Development and the Changing Consumer Landscape

According to a recent report by Deloitte on consumer behavior, the consumer has not changed in many of the ways popularly believed and commonly reported. To be clear, the consumer is changing. But these changes are primarily driven by economic and market conditions rather than by what might appear to be fundamental changes to consumers’ psychological makeup.

At Pivot International, we’re a global single-source leader that understands that successful product development depends on an integrated understanding of the dynamic demographic factors that generate the unique needs, cultural biases, and purchase decisions of today’s changing consumer. These demographic factors are complex and varied, and include but are not limited to:

• Age
• Race
• Culture
• Ethnicity
• Education levels
• Geography
• Regionalism
• Income
• Economics

Companies seeking to bring new products to market must identify partners that bring: 1) deep insight into how demographic factors influence consumer behavior, and 2) proven experience in applying this insight to every phase of the product development process. These phases encompass product conception, design, prototyping, manufacturing, distribution, and supply chain management.

With this in mind, here are four changes to the consumer landscape product developers need to be aware of.  

1. The Consumer Base is Becoming Increasingly Diversified

Today’s consumer base is diverse, splintered, and heterogeneous. Though this diversity is most pronounced among the Millennial generation, a dramatic shift in U.S. ethnic and racial composition is a well-established and ongoing phenomenon.

What’s more, the rise of Gen Z and the growing emphasis on “personalization” will not only continue to drive diversification but also further increase demand for individually configurable or customized products. With this desire, the challenge of personalization at scale will continue to mount.

2. Younger Consumers are Moving to City Centers

In contrast to the Baby Boomer’s flight from city centers to suburbs, today’s young consumers are migrating to them, possibly drawn by a closer proximity to work (which eliminates the expense and inconvenience of a long commute) as well as greater access to cultural activities.

This trend is complexifying the consumer landscape. Just as the mid-century mass migration from city-centers to suburbs had a major impact on the economy and consumers’ spending patterns, so do today’s migratory patterns. Among other challenges, increasingly dense city centers will continue to pose last-mile delivery hurdles to successful distribution. 

3. Regional Migration is Driving Fragmentation

Geographic and demographic factors are more complex than urban vs. suburban and rural. It’s not just that younger consumers are increasingly moving to city centers; it’s that there are larger, generation-specific, regional migrations underway.

Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers, and Millennials are all on the move to different areas of the country. The implications outlined by Deloitte are clear: “Each generational cohort brings its own set of needs and demands to the region they migrate to, further amplifying the differences among consumers in various parts of the country.

4. Economic Inequality is Growing

A deepening divide is taking place between the top 20% of income earners and the rest of the population, with this divide profoundly impacting consumer behavior.

Between 2007 and 2017, income growth for high-income earners (>US$100,000 in mean household income) rose 1,305% higher than their lower-income peers. (<US$50,000 in mean household income). This divide is exacerbated by the increase in nondiscretionary expenses like healthcare and education across all groups.

To further complicate matters, expenses have emerged over the last decade (such as smartphones and data plans) that compete with traditional retail, making the competition for discretionary dollars even more intense.  

Conclusion: The Need for an Integrative Understanding of the Consumer

In today’s changing consumer landscape, the term “average consumer” has lost all relevance. Today’s (and tomorrow’s) consumer base is more diverse, differentiated, and complex than ever before.

When consumer demographics are examined in an integrative fashion (factoring race and ethnicity, income and education level, age and generation, migratory patterns and geographic distribution, broader economic trends, etc.), it’s clear the consumer can’t be easily categorized.

If you’re looking to bring a new product to market, Pivot can help. With nearly a half-century of proven experience in single-source product design, development, manufacture, and supply chain solutions, we apply a sophisticated, integrative understanding of consumer behavior and market conditions to every aspect of the product development process. Our approach had led hundreds of companies worldwide to partner with us to create winning products and successfully scale. If you’d like to learn more about the difference a partnership with Pivot can make to your business, contact us today for a free consultation.

3 Design Trends That are Driving Innovation in Product Development and Business Operations Alike

It’s no secret that products are continually evolving, reflecting changes in consumer demand and the techno-economic landscape. But the field of design itself is growing, and designers are thinking about design differently. They’re reconceiving their roles, taking a more interdisciplinary approach, and driving the broader application of design-thinking to deliver next-level results.

At Pivot International, we’re a global single-source product development partner that leverages the world’s top design talent and advanced technology to help our customers successfully bring new products to market. With nearly half a century of experience in product design, development, manufacturing, and supply chain management, we’re at the leading edge of the seismic shifts in design that are shaping the industry and the future.

Over the next ten years, we can expect to see an acceleration in three design trends that are already rapidly underway. These trends have as much potential to drive innovation in product design as well as how businesses operate.

Trend 1: Designers are Becoming Better Business People

Traditionally, product managers have been responsible for understanding the business case for a product. Meaning they have taken the lead on what will be designed, whereas designers have been tasked with determining how it will be designed. But designers frequently want to play a greater role in determining what they design, and this is a common source of tension in the product development process.

This tension is easing as designers are arming themselves with greater business know-how. Designers are increasingly coming to the product development table with a clearer sense of the financials related to resource allocation, process, and time management. They’re also bringing a greater awareness of ways to reduce risk and increase revenue through calculated design decisions. What’s more, designers are becoming better salespeople: they’re better able to articulate the why behind a design proposition and make a compelling case for how their idea will best solve a problem for a user and drive growth for a business.

As designers become better business and salespeople, they’re able to work more synergistically with product managers to drive revenue by strategizing about design from higher up the value chain. With more and more designers expanding their thinking and skillset in this way, we can expect to see a new generation of “growth designers” that employ experimental processes for the express purpose of optimizing business results.

Trend 2: Interdisciplinary Design is Driving Innovation

Many people are familiar with Apple founder Steve Jobs now famous 2005 Stanford commencement address in which he spoke to his passion for calligraphy and the direct role it played in the design of Apple’s iconic typography. This cross-pollination between seemingly unrelated design disciplines is increasingly being recognized and cultivated as a key driver of innovation. Today’s top designers are drawing digital product inspiration from disciplines like animation, themed entertainment design, motion media design, interactive design and game development, and even traditional Japanese arts like ikebana and origami.

As interdisciplinary design comes into greater prominence, the next decade will continue to give birth to a brave new world of product development. This world will be revolutionized as much by disciplines that originate in the distant past as by futuristic technologies like augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, AI, and SMT.

Trend 3: Design-Thinking Is Finding Broader Application

Just as product development benefits from interdisciplinary design, so too do business operations benefit from design-thinking. Broadly defined, design-thinking can be understood as a systematic method for identifying the “opportunity potential” hidden within a problem in the service of creating a novel solution. Said differently, design-thinking is less concerned with how to improve an existing game and more concerned with how to reinvent it altogether.

In the Harvard Business Review article “Why Design Thinking Works,” Jeanne Liedtka reports on her seven-year study on more than 50 diverse businesses: “I have seen that design thinking has the potential to do for innovation exactly what TQM [total quality management] did for manufacturing: unleash people’s full creative energies, win their commitment, and radically improve processes.”  

As we look forward to 2030, more and more companies will apply design-thinking to business challenges at both operational and cultural levels. Designers will extend their expertise outside of their teams and work cross-functionally to identify and overcome inefficiencies company-wide. This is a case of businesses using design-thinking not only to innovate new products but also to innovate the business itself. From a company’s recruiting practice to leadership development to strategic planning to sales training to project management to the breaking down of silos between departments, design-thinking is a growth technology that can impact a business’s operations and culture as powerfully as it can its product development.

At Pivot, we’re proud to be an industry leader at the forefront of the accelerating design trends that are driving innovation in product development and business operations alike. If you’re looking for a proven partner to help you take your product from design to distribution, contact us today for a free consultation. We’d love to explore with you the difference Pivot’s world-class design talent can make for your business.

Developing a Niche Product? Here’s How to Expand Into New Markets

A strong business case can be made for creating a product designed for a single vertical. After all, serving a niche market allows companies to maintain a tight focus on specialized products aimed at an exclusive market demographic. But because these markets are small, the danger of rapid market saturation is increased. Furthermore, niche products can sometimes be especially challenging to differentiate from their competitors. This danger can be offset by design innovations, as well as expansion into new markets.

At Pivot International, we understand both the business and supply chain challenges that come with niche products. As a global, industry-leading single-source partner, we’ve helped hundreds of companies develop and distribute innovative products and successfully expand into new markets. In our 47 years of experience, here are three lessons we’ve learned for ensuring niche products achieve success.

Perceive Your Product as a Building Block

Think of your product as a platform you can build upon. Take the evolution of health and fitness wearables, for example. These devices were initially developed to track specific fitness-related data in real-time, like heart rate or number-of-steps taken. Health and fitness wearables have now evolved to function as a kind of “central monitoring station” for users’ overall health and wellness. Pivot was an early driver of this evolution.

We worked with ActiGraph to create the GT9X ActiGraph Link, an advanced activity monitor that keeps users in-the-know about their health and fitness. This device captures and accessibly displays biometric data on an exceptionally wide range of human activity — a range that at the time of this product’s development was rare in consumer biometric devices. By adding innovative features to a niche product, ActiGraph was able to expand its target demographic and increase its market share.

Choose a Partner That Understands User Experience (UX)

While many industrial designers and product developers are exceptionally fluent in product functionality, they often lack a sufficient understanding of UX. This leads to the development of products (or to the addition of features) which may be functionally sound but fail to resonate with actual users.

For this reason, it’s important to choose a product development partner that brings not only functional design and engineering expertise but also a keen understanding of UX. For instance, in our recent partnership with Zibrio Inc., our task was to translate technology originally developed at NASA for a niche consumer market. Because many product development firms lack insight into UX, Zibrio came to the partnership with some concern that our engineers might see certain features of their design as “superfluous.” They were pleasantly surprised when our team affirmed these features as essential to the user experience. In fact, working closely with Zibrio’s team, we enhanced these features to ensure maximum appeal to Zibrio’s demographic. The result? Both Zibrio and Pivot were honored with a prestigious CES 2020 Innovation Award for our work on the Zibrio SmartScale.

Optimize for Distribution

Expanding into a new niche market can pose certification obstacles, cost hurdles, and supply chain challenges alike. Working with a reputable single-source partner can simplify and streamline these complexities. A partner that can guide the certification process, reduce costs with international tooling and procurement, and draw on a global supply chain network is a winning bet. 

At Pivot, by using certified ISO: 9001 and ISO: 13485 systems, we are uniquely qualified to assure low certification costs and properly executed lead-times. And because we have facilities worldwide, as well as technology that allows our partners to flexibly shift production from one location to another, we’re able to optimize our partners’ supply chains and reduce global distribution costs.

If you’re developing a niche product and are exploring ways to expand into new markets, Pivot is an industry-leading single-source partner for everything from proof-of-concept to prototyping to manufacturing to supply chain management to business development services. If you’d like to learn more about how Pivot can give your business a greater competitive edge, reach out to us today for a free, no-obligation consultation.