Consulting Capabilities

Mark Mulligan has spent the last 12 years working with companies of all shapes and sizes right across the digital music value chain.  Mark provides a range of consulting and advisory services for the music industry that include customized implementations of structured offerings such as those show below, through to fully bespoke projects.  Mark’s expertise incorporates experience and strategy assessments, customer insight, business model review and innovation.

Whether you need a strategy day, a usability assessment, a strategic review or a consumer insights project, Mark has the expertise and experience your company needs.

For more information on Mark’s consulting capabilities and to learn how Mark can work with your company to help you profit from digital content email musicindustryblog at gmail dot com

Example consulting offerings:

360 Music Service Review

A successful music service must combine high quality usability with strategic integrity and robust positioning.  The 360 Music Service Review uses a unique framework and review tool to assess:

• User targeting: identifying of key target user segments,  understanding their needs, identifying their behaviours and characteristics, defining their reach and addressability
• User experience: quality of experience, ability to meet user needs, how UI supports UX, the service-to-device journey, multiple use case scenarios support, quality of programming and editorial etc
• Strategic integrity:  degree to which service and target consumers will deliver on strategic priorities, partnership strategy, go-to-market strategy, ability of marketing and branding to deliver upon strategic objectives
• Competitive readiness:  degree to which service is differentiated in the competitive marketplace, assessment of strengths and weaknesses, competitive opportunity gap analysis

The 360 Music Service Review typically includes:

• A kick-off meeting, agreeing on priorities, internal stakeholders, timelines, deliverables etc
• Interviews with key stakeholders across management, product, commercial and marketing teams
• Formal usability assessment of the service
• An illustrated white paper with findings, observations, analysis and recommendations with accompanying powerpoint presentation
• Half day strategy day in which results are delivered and discussed
• Optional additional team workshop sessions to help start putting the recommendations into practice

The 360 Music Service Review typically takes 6 to 8 weeks to deliver, depending on client needs and availability.  For more information email musicindustryblog at gmail dot com

You can read more about the 360 Music Service Review here.

Music Industry Innovation

Innovation is a much overused and often wrongly used term and yet it is arguably the single most important dynamic that the music industry must grasp if it is to prosper in the digital age (see Mark’s Innovation Files for more).  Leveraging years of helping global companies improve their innovation processes and practices, Mark can help your company develop the Innovation DNA that will give you competitive edge.  This can include:

• Music product innovation assessment: a formal assessment of your current music product, planned future releases and planned future successor products to identify how well they meet current consumer needs, meet and drive market demand, harness emerging behaviour, compete with other services
• Innovation workshops: a cross-team workshop to identify best and worst innovation practices, internal dynamics that need attention, what your organization needs innovation too deliver, understanding the differences between invention and innovation, ways to build working environments that foster innovation, bringing your customer into the innovation process etc.
• Innovation readiness assessment: an structured assessment of how well your company harnesses the innovation capabilities of your employees, what works, what doesn’t, how to improve, what to prioritize

 

Know your customer

These days most companies invest in consumer data and analytics.  But data alone isn’t enough.  Using his more than a decade of experience working with consumer data and managing 6 figure survey budgets, Mark can help your company join the dots between your insights, really get to know your customers and identify actionable business benefits from the data.  This can include:

• Break down the data silo: how to get better value from your data across the organization and how to make it drive informed business decisions
• Know the person, know the company: identify how key stakeholders in your organization understand your customers and see how and why that differs from company strategy
• Add flesh to the data bones: build personas around your consumer segments, identify their needs and the degree to which you currently meet these diverse needs

 

For more information on any of these offerings or other consulting or strategic needs email musicindustryblog at gmail dot com