Harvard Business Review (HBR) was familiar with how Forio’s educational simulations worked well in a classroom context. But HBR’s audience of managers and business executives is rarely in a classroom — even an online one.
HBR knew that their audience needed something that could both educate and be immediately useful in a real-world setting: some combination of tutorial and tool. Forio and HBR worked together to design a series of lightweight analytics applications that would do both.
During the design phase, the team recognized another important aspect for the applications: they needed to be very specific, “bite-size” chunks of information. So the team ended up creating several applications, each addressing a separate area of analysis typically completed when going to market with a new product.
The results of the collaboration are three tools, each available for purchase from the HBR store.
Customer Lifetime Value
The Customer Lifetime Value application includes a tutorial with background information and a series of exercises on customer segmentation, profit, costs, retention, and time value, culminating in how customer lifetime value is calculated. Users input their own data to determine results for their business.
Pricing for Profit
The Pricing for Profit application includes tutorial-style examples for both new and existing products, and analyzes value, demand, and profit to determine appropriate pricing. Users input their own data to determine the best price for their product or service.
Market Sizing
The Market Sizing application first walks users through concepts of market penetration by segment, potential market sales, current sales and revenue, and current market share and averages. Users see how the data fit together to provide a realistic market sizing estimate. The application is also a tool: users input their own data to test hypotheses and more objectively come to consensus about marketing and product development plans.
