NO GROWTH INDUSTRIES
EVERY ONE of today's major industries had to emerge and evolve. However, some have stopped growing. Others have the shadow of decline looming menacingly. Wherever growth is threatened, slowed or stopped it is not because the market is saturated. Probably, it is because there has been a failure in customer relations and understanding: failure from the top.
It is nigh on impossible to select a single major business category of today that did not go through a burgeoning era of being a so-called growth industry. In each case, its assumed strength was an apparently unchallenged superiority, with, it seemed, no feasible alternative available. Yet one after another of such celebrated industries retreated into decline. More will follow, ad infinitum.
In fact, there is no such thing as a growth industry. Those that assume themselves to be riding an automatic growth stallion invariably fall off. The history of the dying and dead shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay. It shows a disregard, or ignorance, of the need to mount markets and hold on tightly through innovation, change, choice and captured customer loyalty.
ADDED VALUE
Management, reaching out, should provide customer-creating drive and customer-retention added value. It must push this tightly focused awareness and action into every nook and cranny, exciting and stimulating colleagues each step of the way, rather than running a 'bandwagon' business.
The organisation needs to think of itself not as one which produces goods or services, but as a conduit for developing customers – and doing those things that will make people want to continue to buy. Fickleness abounds in every marketplace.
Relationship management is all about making it easy for customers to stay, difficult to go. The whole operation, top to bottom and back to the top, must be enthusiastically aware of the corporate style, direction, objectives, plus the needs of existing and potential customers. If they do not know where they are going, they will never find the road to take them there.
Even with attitude and aptitude in place, there are dangers. It is too easy to become obsessively responsive to fleeting customer whims and media-whipped fads; so often, there is a lack of risk-reduction market research and attitudinal surveying; sometimes, the back-office support provides insufficient ammunition for the front line troops.
TOO COMPLEX?
Within service industries in particular, there can be a tendency to reach ahead of the market, making offerings that are too complex or over sophisticated, trying to sell electronic shovels before people have familiarised themselves with spades.
Little in business is straightforward. But to grow and sustain growth, managements have to turn around to face their customers.
Professional marketing communications are crucial. And yet saying so won't make it so. Products and services are selected by purchasers' overall perceptions of the supplier, not merely by clever headlines, compelling imagery or high-sounding mission statements.
Successful marketing puts customers' needs at the centre of every stage, every process, every activity of the business machine and its output – then presents to the outside world with unified, clear and consistent messages designed to persuade customers that they will be the beneficiaries. (Out of sight is out of mind, is out of business.)
This requires a totally integrated and rigorously implemented all-company approach, explained via skilled communications. Nothing less will work.
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