Failure is not fatal but failure to change might be – John Wooden
Somehow, somewhere, our basic programming got all screwed up. While throughout life, change is inevitable — in business, in our economy, in our relationships with others — we are fundamentally hard-wired by human nature to resist it.
For example, last week I spoke with the president and founder of a successful food manufacturer in Southern California. He told me about how his company was losing business for the past two years and that he was seeing the dark clouds building up on the horizon for his company and the employees he felt responsible for. B2B and B2C sales were being eaten away by competitors. And some key buyers insisted on margins he could not sustain. In short, his business was coming to a critical juncture and he knew that one primary reason was his lackluster, forgettable marketing efforts. He then said something that still bothers me today: “I know of your company’s reputation and that making a change to your firm would probably be the right thing to do, but for too many reasons, I just can’t switch agencies or strategies at this time.”
While I’m not a psychologist, 25+ years in marketing has taught me that there are some primary causes for why business executives struggle with change. You can probably add another 10 causes yourself but here are my 5 “issue buckets” for resisting change. See how many sound way too familiar.
5. The status quo is good enough…or “We’ve always done it this way and there’s no reason to change.” That’s not what one would call a rallying cry for success, yet it’s said day in and day out. Couple that with a poison called “being comfortable,” and you’ll unfortunately arrive at the intersection of “Irrelevance Blvd.” and “Vulnerable Ave.” Status quo, you know, is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in’. – Ronald Reagan
4. Not seeing the Marketplace as it really is. Without any real-world customer and competitive research, the marketplace can be seen in a very skewed manner; in essence, believing one’s own BS! Any recommended, alternative approach to what is taking place is ridiculed and discounted.
3. Change costs money. In a bad economy, logic might suggest that the best thing to do is hunker down, put your arms around the money you’ve got, hold tight and wait it out. Only here’s the truth: more companies have saved themselves into bankruptcy than spent themselves there.
2. It worked before. Past success often drives and validates current behaviors. Unfortunately, though, what got you here won’t necessarily get you there because too many other things have changed, so those old formulas will no longer work.
1. Fear. Since it’s never known for sure what will happen when one makes changes, the fear of change merely leads to inertia. But the truth is, like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights, one is sure to encounter untold damage unless there’s movement. (I supposed I could have said that a shark that doesn’t continue to move forward drowns, but that’s just too many animal metaphors!)
One needs to trust that through taking action and moving out of one’s own comfort zone, there’s an opportunity to grow, evolve, and possibly transform into something much greater. My vote is to do something. Anything.
If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. – Wayne Dyer
You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight. – Jim Rohn
— by Rolf Gutknecht, Agent of Change
Here’s an interesting way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing. And you can do it in two seconds. Simply ask this question: Does our advertising & marketing program make our competition nervous? Or are they thinking, “this isn’t a problem for us!”?
I’ll cut right to th
e chase. If they’re not nervous, you’re losing important ground.
Your single most important job as a marketer is to strike a chord in the marketplace and make people react…reshuffle their brain cells, if you will. If you’re successful, it will certainly raise eyebrows at the competitors’ offices. You know you’re winning when people at “the other guys” run around the office waiving your ad yelling “Did you see THIS!”
Watching the commercials during the Super Bowl, I can’t help but wonder how few competitors feel really threatened by what other advertisers spent millions to run. If you think about the four or five spots you actually remember (let alone the one or two whose products raised your interest), then imagine how much money was spent that changed nothing at all.
One of my favorite experiences came out of a campaign we created for Vivitar. We boldly compared our client’s digital camera quality with four major competing brands, visually demonstrating the quality of each camera using the same subject. Shortly after the campaign began, a letter arrived from the attorney of one of the other brands we featured demanding details on how we set up the shots. Gladly, we sent them the documentation and that was the last we heard from them. On the other hand, not surprisingly, sales of Vivitar cameras shot up.
More than once, I’ve had the joyous experience of actually listening to our clients’ competitors complaining about our clients’ campaigns (their not realizing that we created them in the first place). It’s a lovely sound.
If your marketing is really doing the job, your competition is saying things like “that’s not fair,” “this is making us look bad,” “we need to ramp up our own campaign,” and “why don’t WE do stuff like that!”
What kills a good marketing program is expectedness, complacency, just being good enough. But if you think the competition is taking notice of your marketing efforts and they don’t like it, you’re on the right path and you dare not stray at your peril.
Take the two-second test and decide if those who covet your customers are saying bad things about you in their hallways, or are high-fiving themselves all the way to the bank at your expense.