Assessing Risk and Attaining Alignment

Kayrle Sieber is the VP of Marketing at Quill Corporation, whose 19 years of experience has allowed her to effectively lead and drive innovation at Quill. With both a passion and vision for marketing, innovation and customer needs, Kayrle and her team play an important role in the future of Quill Corporation. Quill is a leader in office supplies, office products, furniture and other office needs.

Four Questions with Kayrle Sieber:

1. How does your team generate new ideas?

There are a couple of different things we do. Firstly, an idea generates from business opportunity and some sort of market pressure. With that said, we have our teams occasionally come together for brainstorming sessions. These sessions occur off-site, but the key is staying on-topic and remaining focused. It is also important to choose appropriate people; we like to have a variety of people participating. For instance, you may want researchers amongst those with more customer-facing activities; a good mix is important. 

We have other ways, too. Sometimes, we like to throw it out to our associates. For instance, in the past, we've done things internally with small prizes. Generally, this results in a great response from associates and builds a nice working environment.

2. How do you identify trends? What resources does your team use to spot trends and consumer insights?

We can identify trends from our customers using analytics. We have a complex database structure that includes transactions, customer demographics, rewards -- and we look at the customer from many different angles. We have great database capabilities which allows for a lot of internal analyses. Additionally, we do a lot of surveys and have an external customer panel. The customer panel includes existing customers have have opted to be in our research pool. This pool allows us to gain unstructured information, which is very valuable.

3. What is the biggest challenge you face when innovating?

When it comes to innovation, there are a few challenges. You need to build a business case around your proposition. Building a solid case that convinces people is a bit difficult, but is necessary to achieve alignment. Another challenge is finding the right idea that is going to make a significant difference -- finding that 'wow' idea. There is understandably a lot of risk involved in developing the packaging for a product for instance. Subsequently, we all have to agree -- merch, marketing, finance -- we have to agree we're going to do this.

4. Looking to the future, how is Quill Corporation going to be a leader in innovation?

We're going to keep doing what we're doing because we're confident in our model. We may have an innovation portal by bringing in and leveraging more social media. This could be a central place for our team and our customers, and use social media. The social media aspect is important and we're looking to build more on that.