Product life cycles
generally go from an extremely innovative starting point through a development
phase and very frequently, finish up as a commodity with a multitude of manufacturers
and suppliers.
All well and good
and we all have experience of products which have passed through this process. Typical would be the ball-point pen, post-it
notes and paper staplers.
All of these have
been launched on to the market, gone through all the phases and are now a
commodity with many companies supplying the same or at east similar products.
However just
occasionally a product is launched that is so innovative that no-one seems to
be able to copy it and it remains the leader in its field.
If products have
this sort of life cycle, what about companies and indeed commercial or
industrial sectors themselves?
Look at your
business and ask yourself, are we a truly innovative organisation or (and be honest about it) are we much the
same as many other businesses in this field?
There is little
point in kidding ourselves. The market
and the customers will soon find out where you are placed on the
Innovation/Commodity continuum.
The sorry fat is
that there are many commercial and industrial sectors of the economy that could
be classed as being commoditised and many professional practices fall into this
category as well.
This is not to say
that many organisations that are, on the face of it, commoditised are
necessarily unsuccessful. It is
perfectly possible to minimise and even eliminate risk and run the business
satisfactorily but without much excitement.
It is, of course,
unlikely that the business will stand out from the crowd or indeed rate
particularly highly on a search engine.
It all depends on
the business culture, what seems the right thing to do, how experimental are
the leaders and owners and what level of risk is acceptable to them.
Take a look at
what used to be the way to find a tradesman to do some work in your home, that
is, by those massive catalogues listing just about every suppler of every
service that you want or need.
How did we decide
on which one to call? Was it by
locality, by the size of the advertisement, or the first one in the listing?
None of these bear
any relationship to the ability of the person or business offering the service
or the standard of service that we could expect until we start the telephoning
process and try to find out.
What usually
happens is that we ask friends or colleagues if they can recommend someone and
so the “word of mouth” method was
born.
It is all very
inefficient even when the massive printed book is now replaced by a quick search
on Google simply because some clever geek has used search engine optimisation
to position the business at the top of page one of the search.
It doesn’t mean
that they are any different from anyone else; it is just that they have found a
better SEO specialist.
What then is the
answer? How can we drag ourselves out of
the mass of “me too” businesses in
our sector and make it clear to the market and prospective customers that we
offer something different.
By the way,
difference doesn’t always imply services or products. It can be the way that we deliver the
product, the way that we answer the telephone, the speed at which we pay bills
and the level of service which we give to every customer or prospect at all
ties and without exception.
It is easy to say
that we need to be different. Some time
devoted to ways of being different and bringing everyone in the business into
the process will pay massive dividends in the long run. Driving that culture into the business should
be the major function of the leader and probably the only “top down” contribution that is critical to the growth, success and
general health of the organisation.
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