“We’ll do that based on our five strategic directions.”
Someone should let this VP know that moving in five directions at once is the same as going nowhere.
Yeah, I know. It’s “semantics” but I am perpetually amazed by the looseness and vagueness of language at some places. And frankly, if being clear isn’t important to the VP, it won’t be important to their employees, who will make it very unclear for their customers.
This is the same place from whence “I don’t think there’s a difference between strategy and tactics” came.
Edward de Bono (he’s a well-quoted thinker about thinking, if you can say that) says that our first instict is to shy away from competition. If you’re a restaurant and another restaurant opens up across the street, we feel the dread of competition.
We worry that the new place will cut our customer base in half because suddenly people have a choice that didn’t exist before.
deBono debunks it by saying that the second restaurant will make people think of your area as a restaurant district, bringing people to the area to make their decision about where to eat once they get here. You’ve increased the marketplace by bringing more people to your industry. Even if you market share drops, you total number of customer will increase.
Why? Because youa re shifting the position of the decision. If people came to your restaurant, they had to make the decision to eat there probably before they got in the car. If there’s 3 or more restuarants in the area, people will show up and decide in place.
What’s the difference? If you force people to decide before they get in the car, you are competing against every restaurant in town, even if you don’t see that competition. As a member of the restaurant district, the decision can be made closer to (your) home. Your localized marketing efforts will have more payoff once you get people close to your store. And localized marketing is cheaper than city-wide or region-wide marketing. It’s better targeted and will generate more returns.
Someone passed along a book on copyrighting theysaid was like the “Little Red Book” on marketing. Claude C. Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising (read the full copy for free).
Actually, they didn’t call it the Little Red Book, but when I read it, it reads like The Book of Five Rings, short koan-like statements that sound like one thing but mean another.
Of course, when I read it, I can’t help but think of Dwight Schrute’s speech to salespeople:
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