PPB December 2017

1 Engage – The first step is to bring together the leaders who are responsible for your business growth strategy. This includes internal leadership and forward-thinking professionals and customers who are focused on your success. 2 Scan – Be aware of and understand business and industry trends. You will want to identify the emerging forces that aremost pertinent to your success, and understand changes that the promotional products industry will be facing, including customers’ expectations and needs. 3 Connect – Study the trends and identify their likelihood of materializing and how fast they might become real forces that affect your business. This will quickly alert you to which trends require serious preparation and what impact they will have on your business. Here’s an example that shows the importance of identifying emerging trends and how this can contribute to your success. Let’s assume the community school district is one of your customers. You learn an emerging trend is a labor shortage which will result in a shortage of teachers for area schools. As a promotional products partner, you may help them with employee retention. You roll out a pilot campaign in schools to educate administrators on how promotional products can assist them in retaining teachers. The campaign may offer additional insight as to how your area schools can differentiate themselves as an exceptional place to work, thus solving the teacher shortage. This is one way that understanding and being on top of emerging trends can help your customers rise above a potential threat and, at the same time, help grow your business. 4 Act – Dedicate resources (time, money, people) to specific actions that prepare you for the future. In this step, you decide how much to invest in a trend, and using your professional expertise and those of your leaders, determine which trend you will act on that will be most advantageous for your business’s growth. 5 Measure – As with any initiative, measuring results is important to success. You will want to review analytics and other data that is instrumental in growing your return on investment. Understand what didn’t work, and refine those efforts that did. Using this five-step strategic foresight cycle, PPAI will be putting together a playbook, a collection of tactics that you can use. The activities will be designed for both large and small companies, for those that have not previously conducted strategic foresight and for those that have well-developed business processes in this area. The goal is to make PPAI’s Strategic Foresight Playbook a powerful tool that is accessible to anyone in the industry. This exciting work will help each of us, and all of us together, to position ourselves for success in the years ahead. When we use strategic foresight to elevate our members, we are doing a great service for the entire promotional products marketplace. Mary Jo Tomasini, MAS, is CEO of distributor CE Competitive Edge LLC in Stevensville, Michigan, and chair of the board for PPAI. All In For Strategic Foresight PPAI members are invited to participate in some of the pilot programs and pre-work that will go into the development of the playbook. If you are interested, email your name and contact information to PPB@ppai.org . ENGAGE SCAN CONNECT ACT MEASURE | DECEMBER 2017 | 25 INNOVATE