A series on the three P 's that plague the Marketing Process

"If the rate of change inside an organization is less than
the rate of change outside, the end is in sight"
Jack Welch, CEO General Electric

This article was published in April 1996

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IF PROCRASTINATION WAS A CRIME,
MIDDLE MANAGERS WILL BE SERVING TIME

I bet each one of us has his or her own unspoken 'Motorola invention' scribbled on a napkin, but we don't get off the blocks fast enough. In the seventeen years since Sony gave us the Walkman, they have followed it up with 227 different models. That's something like one new Walkman every three weeks!

It takes a nanosecond for somebody to sneak up from behind you with an idea that had been mulling around your head. And unless you're passionate about change, you'll be left to wallow in the same rut, chasing after the same niche that has got eaten into by competitors who came in after - but faster - than you. When discussing short term, medium term and long term strategy, someone asked a Japanese executive what his time-frame for long term was. "Probably about 10 minutes", he said in all seriousness. In the seventeen years since Sony gave us the Walkman, they have followed it up with 227 different models. That's something like one new Walkman every three weeks!

So what's your time-frame for long term strategy? In the early ninetees, 'long term' was a convenient term used by marketers who had no strategy lined up, except perhaps increasing the number of grooves in the screw-type bottle cap for a product launched when bell bottoms were in. Look around you and you'll see the world littered with ideas that you wish you had invented but someone else beat you to it. I'll tell you my story if you promise not to laugh.

Not too very long ago, I used to argue that Electronic Pagers would compete with Cellphones, but the marketing boys disagreed with the theory that pagers and Cell-phones were two different technologies serving two different needs. One was a poor man's mobile phone, while the other was a rich man's toy. One would be used only for inbound messages, they said, while the other, by people calling up their secretary, while stuck in traffic. You don't have to be a techno-prophet like Arthur C Clarke to proclaim that minuurization is going to play havoc with both modes of communication. What if cellphones came with inbuilt Pagers, I thought, so that ordinary people could save on incoming calls?

The best idea I ever had came from from seeing a nun in Texas who, wearing an electronic Pager clipped to her habit, almost jumped out of a moving car to get to a payphone. She was probably trying to contact her Mother Superior who had beeped her. What if a Pager could be 2-way communicator equipped with outbound message facilities as well? Wouldn't it be perfect for people like construction workers - or gynaecologists - who cannot let down their tools to get to a phone? While being contactable is fine, wouldn't it be nice to be able to hit a reply key to acknowledge that you got message? Unfortunately for me someone must have pulled my big toe at night, while I spilled a design secret I had foolishly left unpatented in my head. Today there is a Motorola cellphone with a Pager tucked away into its belly. And someone else has just launched a two-way Pager, aimed not so much at nuns in Corvettes, but at executives 'trapped' in boardrooms. If there is a moral to this story it is that each of us has the potential to come up with the next electronic widget - if only we did it now! Procrastination is the enemy of market share. There is nothing terribly original in much of today's big ideas. A dozen people could have come up with 'brilliant' ideas like DOS For Dummies, Levis for women, and as the preposterous idea of caffeinated water aimed at non-coffee drinkers. But think about it, did it require an MBA to come up with the idea of a TV remote control for children, or Post-It Notes for the rest of us? I doubt it. I bet each one of us has his or her own unspoken 'Motorola invention' scribbled on a napkin, if only we didn't have to listen to our accountants, shareholders, and even astrologers who urge us to wait for the 'right market conditions' to come around.

"IF YOU BUILD IT THEY WILL COME"
Because a lot of good ideas are based on common sense rather than spreadsheets, we dismiss them for being unviable ("there are no statistics to prove this'll work"), untimely ("the market is not ready for it") or unasked for ("who the heck are you to design a financial product?"). It's been the smart - rather than the large - companies who have taken advantage of small shifts in consumer needs and competitor activity. IBM did not think much about PCs. It took a gutsy chap called Steve Jobs to go design what he called an 'insanely great' idea - a computer for individuals, rather than corporations. Doesn't that strike you as being more common sense than marketing? In fact when you get down to it, marketing, stripped of its mumbo jumbo is common sense. If we can get off the blocks fast enough. Procrastination is the hidden P in the marketing process that often holds us back. Today's rapid market and media segmentation have ushered in an era of speeded up product cycles, and unconventional advertising tactics standing ready to take advantage of small shifts in consumer needs. Like CD-ROM encyclopaedias which outsell their printed versions, it's proof that 'if you build it, they will come'.

If your family can no longer settle for one newspaper, one brand of soft drink, or comes close to blows while flipping channels on TV, doesn't it make sense that homogeneity is dead? And 'solving for the gap' is in? This opens the doors of opportunity to those who want a piece of the pie. But it depends on what you consider a demographic wedge. Al Reis and Jack Trout, the marketing twosome who caution us about Line Extension, give a nod to the reverse process they call 'broadening the base'. Indeed, like Nestle~, you can't get children to consume condensed milk spread on a slice of bread, but if you're an earth-moving truck company like Catterpillar, you can claim fresh territory was by marketing a line of equally heavy-duty footwear. How 'broad' can you go? Shoemaker Nike, which found its niche in the footwear segment with Athletic footwear, did just that, creating - not filling - niches that didn't exist before. In hindsight you'd think that no marketing genius was required there : the health-conscious, sports-crazy eighties was destined to make performance shoes a hot property. Destined, yes. Predicted, no. With Basketball shoes, Jogging shoes, Tennis shoes, Training shoes, Cross-Training shoes, shoes for Squash, Mountain climbing, Wind-surfing and Scuba-diving, what was once a category became a niche, and what was for a short time a niche, is a whole new category. What if Nike clung to the one-size-fits-all single-image brand concept? What if Singer stuck to sewing machines? What if all companies sat around playing what if games?

"WHEN YOU REST, YOU RUST"
It all depends on what business you decide you want to be in. And that depends on what's taking place outside your factory - if you care to step out, that is. Mass Production is what takes place on the shop floor. 'Mass Customization' takes place in the mind. If we agree with the premise that Mass Production is out and Mass Customization is in, a lot of marketing 'risks' make sense.

Ask Coca-Cola. The world's greatest symbol of homogeneity, has now not only splintered it's stable of brands, but its advertising strategy for the single brand Coke as well. And I'm not even refering to the thirty something TV commercials for Coca-Cola Classic. In 1982, many people inside Coca-Cola scoffed at the man who dared suggest a diet variant. You were not supposed to tamper with the sacred formula, they said. Call it anything, but for heaven's sake, don't call it Coca-Cola. He did. They rolled it out. The world guzzled it. And today, Diet Coke is the world's number three soft-drink, closely trailing regular Pepsi which itself trails Coca-Cola Classic.

Ha! you exclaim, how do you explain the faux pas of 'New Coke' that was rejected by consumers in 1985? There's a good non-marketing term for it. It's called a 'mistake'. (Some Coca-Cola insiders call it a 'brilliant mistake' but that's another story). In the race to be first, you have to expect times when you could be just plain wrong. Successful companies are those willing to take risks. They are big enough to make allowances for widgets that sometimes don't work. Yet they're smart enough to checkmate the competition by anticipating change.

No one built a better mousetrap by listening to their board of investors. Ted Turner's CNN was once scoffed as the 'Chicken Noodle Network' , by those who thought that no one - not even advertisers - would be interested in a 24-hour news channel. We have all met those kinds of people. They're the ones who are so sure that your idea won't fly. The same folk who are all praises when someone else reinvents the wheel. We're not in the marketing business - we're in the idea business. And I could go on about those insanely great ideas like the Swiss Army Watch, or tooth-paste with clove-oil, but time's catching up. I've got to get back to the other idea I've been sleeping on. OK, OK, I'll let you in on a secret, if you promise not to tell anyone. It's a design for a wrist watch with an inbuilt pager.

You're kidding. It's in the market already? How dare they steal my idea !