ASSESSING and Developing Strategies
Imagine:
Tapping into the corporate memory during strategic planning
Getting diverse assessment of new strategies overnight
Affected stakeholders engaging in new strategy formation and review
Case Story #1 Coca Cola
Purpose/Challenge
Coca Cola is one of the most recognized brands in the world, and in each country the Coca Cola franchisee is faced with a set of unique and shifting challenges, challenges that spring from the national culture and the national psyche.
Coca Cola Systems, which consists of the Coca Cola company and its more than 300 worldwide bottling partners, wanted to explore the future business environment for its products in South Korea. Not only were they interested in developing strategies to capitalize on the opportunities there, they were equally interesting in developing strategies to address a uniquely South Korean problem–the consumers’ concern with the safety of bottled drinks. This concern was part of the South Korean public’s over-all distrust of the North Korean regime and the harmful activities they feared that the regime might potentially engage in.
Coca Cola wanted to find a way to involve many different categories of their consumers in helping to develop strategies to assure their products’ safety.
WindTunneling Intervention
Some 260 consumers and distributors participated in the first stages of the WindTunneling project. In the Generate Ideas Activity, the participants were invited to outline what they thought should be included in Coca Cola’s manufacturing, storage and selling strategies to assure consumer confidence in the safety of the products. The Assess Ideas function was then used to determine which of these strategic ideas the participants viewed as both the most vital and most effective.
The group of strategic responses assessed by the consumers and distributors was then used by the Coca Cola staff in the WindTunneling Integrate Activity to clarify the factors that would need to be considered in developing the implementation pathways for those strategies.
Value of Intervention to Coca Cola
The changes which resulted from the WindTunneling project set a new benchmark for Coca Cola Systems beverage security planning in South Korea. Subsequent marketing surveys indicated that these changes increased the confidence of consumers in Coca Cola products and contributed significantly to the sales growth in the following year.
Actions taken as a result of WindTunneling Outcomes
The outcomes were incorporated into mainstream planning while the WindTunneling process was commissioned for other projects within Coca Cola Systems.
Case Story #2 Dairy Farmers in Australia
Purpose/Challenge
Dairy Australia is the national association for dairy farmers and the dairy industry. DA’s role is to help farmers adapt to a changing operating environment and to assure a profitable, sustainable dairy industry.
The dairy industry was under significant pressure from all its stakeholders to develop strategies that would enable the industry as a whole to continue to grow in an era of climate change. Some of the questions they wished to answer included– “what are the risks that may emerge, either from climate change itself, and/or from policies developed by competitors and governments to mitigate climate change impacts?”; and also “what options are available that would enable the dairy industry to become part of the solution rather than being seen as part of the problem?”
WindTunneling Intervention
With the participation of some 500 dairy farmers and processors across Australia, the first stage of the WindTunneling project generated possible futures from which to consider these and other questions. These futures were then assessed by the participants and a set of possible strategic responses were developed.
Through the Integrate activity of the WindTunneling program, the participants then examined and assessed these strategic responses for their potential value in improving the dairy industry’s performance against possible climate change induced phenomena.
Value of Intervention to DA
DA indicated that the WindTunneling process had successfully provided them with a much more effective way of dealing with future uncertainty. Specifically, it had enabled them to identify areas of greatest risk to the industry, to build resilience into various management strategies, and to pinpoint areas for further strategic improvements.
Actions Taken as a Result of WindTunneling Outcomes
The outcomes were immediately incorporated into industry-wide strategic planning, and the DA went on to use WindTunneling for a variety of other projects.