Do You Get It?

I placed an order with Staples on the Internet the other afternoon and there was an email waiting in my in box the next morning saying that the order had already been shipped and I could expect my merchandise the next day.  I placed an order with a different company two weeks ago and I'm still waiting for that shipment to arrive. Whereas that might have been acceptable, or at least expected, a few years ago, my expectations have certainly changed. Staples gets it. The other company is headed for trouble.

This is a really obvious example of how a market has changed dramatically. Market changes are not always that dramatic and not always that obvious. What worked for the last ten (or twenty or fifty) years may not continue to work in the future. The Internet has played a big role in changing markets but it’s the companies that have exploited this technology that have made the difference, not the technology itself. Who would have ever thought that a retailer could make a thriving business just selling coffee, and charging several times the going rate for it as well? Who could have predicted that someone could build a multi-billion dollar business delivering letters and small packages overnight – competing with the established, relatively reliable and very inexpensive postal service – charging eight or ten dollars to deliver a letter in one day that the post office would deliver in a couple days for less than a dollar? And the list goes on.

It should be pretty obvious that change is coming and possibly from an entirely unexpected direction. Every business must be continuously aware of market forces and competition and be ready to adapt to meet the challenges head-on. Or, better yet, think far enough ‘outside of the box’ to be the one driving its competitors out of business. Best-in-class benchmarking – looking outside of your own industry for best practices – can sometimes be the source of game-changing ideas.

Companies that don’t ‘get it’ – don’t recognize the changing landscape at the earliest opportunity and take positive action to counteract it – are doomed.

Do you ‘get it’? Are you willing and able to recognize the first signs of change? Are you willing to abandon long-held ideas, processes, products, methods, and marketing approaches?