What’s Next?
How does your company decide what to do - build, manufacture - next? Seth Godin, author of nine books about marketing, has a very long list of reasons (excuses?) that people give to justify their decisions as to what to make and what to shelve.
Here are just a few of his. Have you used any of them?
- It’ll be fun
- It’s Bob’s turn
- It will make us look smart
- I love it
- It responds to an RFP
- It adds a feature that our CEO really, really wants
- I can sell it to customer X
- The critics will respect us
- We’ve come this far and quitting now costs too much
- We have unused capacity in the plant
Read the rest of the list here: Seth Godin’s blog, Internal Primaries.
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February 9th, 2008 at 11:27 am
“We’ve come this far and quitting now costs too much ”
i.e. I’ll be fired.
–
He’s assembled a classic set of sound-bites. Out of context they are at best talking points.
“It’s something a major customer wants
It’s something our technology can do easily
If we don’t do it, our competition will
It will increase our margins
It appeals to our competition’s base, thus growing our market share
We have a salesforce to support, and this fills in their grid
It will increase traffic to our site
It’s a copy/improvement over something our competition is doing
Our current stuff doesn’t meet regulations and this does
We have unused capacity in the plant”
One might hope that these are considerations examined in a marketing review..
Seth closes by sating:”It’s almost always done poorly and it’s almost always important.”.
He holds an MBA from Stanford, and was called “the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age” by Business Week.
His close implies that companies that follow his guidance almost always do it poorly. .
Dave M.
http://www.listenzone.com