Tag: Consumer

Time to change your default settings!

A legacy approach might be stifling you, without you even realising it.Best practices may not be that best(or better) at all. In fact there is scope to abandon best practice as the ‘ practice ‘ as it used to exist has changed altogether.

Your current marketing and customer strategies may unknowingly be rooted in old patterns. It may be time for a change.

The purpose of business—creating a customer—and your customers—at a human level—aren’t changing. That, irrespective of all the tectonic shifts happening around them.

But for many businesses, it’s time to make a change toward having a deep understanding of their true purpose and their customers.

The terms consumer and customer are often used interchangeably but they signify very different relationships. Etymologically, consumer stems from a word that means “one who squanders or wastes,” whereas customer stems from a word meaning “a person with whom one has dealings,” with the implication that it is an ongoing relationship.

As Stanley Marcus, of Neiman Marcus, wrote, “Customers are people; consumers are statistics.”

Marketing isn’t about selling to the customer; that’s a byproduct. As the legendary Peter Drucker observed, “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy.”

It’s the time to break old tendencies. Its the time to be aware, to rebel, to kill old habits and to seek change.

Not changing is a default tendency. Change the default settings!

Needed: A Bias for Action!

Needed: A Bias for Action!
A small tweak, with due permission from Issac Newton ” every action has an equal and opposite action “.
We assume that enterprise excellence is something that we can define, analyse, plan for and them maintain in perpetuity. With every turn of the business wheel, we fancy that we now understand the One & True Lasting Thing that will distinguish a good idea from a bad one, a winning strategy from a dud.
Indeed, we labour still under the delusion that the key to winning is….the right strategy. But, what we have to learn is that ‘ excellence ‘ is not something that we can ‘ envision ‘ or  ‘ plan ‘ ahead. We create it as we go along. Then blow it up, and start anew.
Simply put, the search for excellence is…never-ending, ever-shifting. How do we ‘stick to our knitting‘ when one form of ‘knitting‘ after another unravels? You are sprinting, only to be standing in the same place.
The absence of a bias for action remains the biggest problem for large organisations. They simply Think too much. Plan too much. Meet too much. And accomplish too little.
It is an Age of Perpetual and Accelerating Transience. ” Permanence ” is a myth, it is dead. All the basic principles of business are up for grabs. We have got to play as it lays. We’ve got to make it up as we go along.
A little bit of re-emphasizing here: Of course we need Analytics(Desperately). Of course we need some Metrics(Desperately). We need to understand the power of Data(Desperately). But, like All Good Things, ..the ‘ analytics ‘ and ‘ abstractions ‘ have come to subsume the Real World of the living, breathing, emotional, complaining customer.
Companies would be extra keen to re invent their way of doing business. And there is an increasing need for a new breed of intellectual capital to make that happen.
At ISD Global we are getting ready to throw our hat in the ring. Are you biased for action?
ENDS
 
 
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