When you give your idea a title, you brand it. Without a title, how will people reference it? You want your listeners to retain the concept and be able to recall specific facts, talk to others about your idea and associate it with you. Titling Retention is associated with the act of titling your initiative, project, story, etc. This increases recall, drives water-cooler conversations and easily associates with you.
How would you recommend a book to a friend if it were not for the standard practice of giving a book a title? Even prior to publishing, books have a working title so everyone involved can reference the book. Whether the critics ultimately love the book or trash it, it is the title that everyone uses to talk about the many written pages.
Wal-mart uses this practice for ideas, projects and initiatives. Just about everyone in the company is aware of Project Impact. This project was an overhaul of its U.S. business. Masterminded by Castro-Wright, the goal of the ambitious Project Impact was to tighten up the company’s operations — from the logo to making the stores look better and brighter.
Sam Walton himself always favored a cluttered presentation. “Stack ’em high and let ’em fly!” was his philosophy about how to display products to his customers, and it remained the organizing principle long after he was gone. For decades, when shoppers entered a Wal-Mart, they could expect the so-called Action Alley — the primary traffic artery from the front to the back of the store that crosses aisles — to be packed with deeply discounted items.
Project Impact set out to create a cleaner — both literally and figuratively — shopping experience that would appeal to more upper-middle-class shoppers. They made store maintenance a priority and rolled out a redesign program that opened up sightlines and made signage more readable. Store managers were ordered to clear the Action Alleys completely. Most controversially, Wal-Mart cut by thousands the number of items that it carried in each store, deciding that it would be more efficient to focus on fewer brands.
Project Impact was known by everyone – customers, shareholders and employees. But was it working? The answer was no, same-stores sales slumped for five consecutive quarters. This is where you might think twice about attaching your name and a brand to an idea.
But when Mike Duke stepped into the CEO job in February 2009, Wal-Mart was already well into implementing the radical overhaul of its U.S. business. Duke determined that the marketing changes and the cleaner stores were a good thing. But the merchandising? Well, not so good.
He could have scrapped the Project Impact name, but he took the opportunity to take this widely known project and recognize what was working and repair what was not working. They are adding back most of the items the retailer had dropped, giving more autonomy to store managers and returning displays to the Action Alley — albeit to a more limited degree. The CEO says the company has learned some lessons but contends he’s thrilled with Project Impact overall. “This is not about dialing back to where we were three or four years ago,” he says. “This is really about taking where we are and advancing to the future.”
Title your idea and ensure that everyone knows you are the author of the idea. Know that you may even have to tweak a few things along the way. In fact, you should expect some diversions before everything is fully implemented if your idea is truly transformational. But without a name, the idea will never become water-cooler conversation.
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photo by Katrina Snaps