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DR. JOE-ISMS
Quotes, comments, and excerpts from speeches and writings.
Key concepts to manage by:
- stay ahead of your customers, and let your competitors worry about you; it's only by anticipating needs of customers and building offerings that will make them profitable that businesses succeed. Keeping up with competitors dooms you to mediocrity.
- study the marketplace and know it better than those you sell against; find the subtle things about the market that can kill your business, acknowledge them and avoid them; what you don't know can hurt you, but you'll at least have a depth of knowledge that will make you better able to adapt to change
- long range planning is kind of silly if you can't figure out the present
- don't do market research if you're trying to validate an already in-place strategy; the market will tell you if you're right or not if you're willing to listen
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The printing industry is resistant to change. Really?
I have heard the phrase "our biggest competitor is the status quo" uttered many times over the years, implying that the printing industry does nothing about technology. It was uttered by the digital printing companies in 1995, it was commonly said by the Internet companies in recent years.
This is the industry that made a massive sea change from letterpress to offset and is now going to digital printing. It went from hot type to cold type to laser printing in the span of 15 years. It went from stripping to full film imposition to direct-to-plate in 10 years. It went from color separation by camera, to scanner, to big digital color systems, to desktop published color in less than 20 years. In proofing we've gone from press proofs to two major kinds of off-press proofs to digital proofs and Acrobat PDF proofs in 25 years. PDF proofs have taken over the design business, and is on its way to taking over the high-end proofing, maybe in 3 years.
All this means that a production worker has had to cope with 3-5 major technology changes in the span of their career, and the owners have, too. Status quo? Change IS the status quo. Just because a company is trying to sell something nobody wants, doesn't mean the industry you're selling to doesn't change.
Why marketing executives fail
The major cause of the marketing executive revolving door is persistent overforecasting of adoption rates and market size. When you combine that with a lack of appreciation for the segmentation of the market and lack of knowledge of historical purchase behavior, the results are deadly to careers and to companies. The dot-com debacle, the failure of digital printing vendors to achieve their original forecasts are prime examples.
Overforecasting
Too many companies introduce new products with great hoopla and chest-beating about their lofty goals. After a period of time, the company is in trouble as sales are not what they expected. Were the products bad? Not usually. Had they realistically forecast, rather than planning to inflated sales goals (often to ensure budget approval), they would have a reserve of marketing dollars that could sustain them through market scale-up.
Market demographics
Markets have more segments than suppliers imagine, and often paint the market with the same brush. I'll never forget how the look of surprise and anger when I told the owner of a now-former direct-to-plate supplier that the number of printing plants that could afford direct-to-plate was 8,000 U.S. plants. He had always been told there were 50,000 printing plants. Everyone at the company assumed that every one of those 50,000 plants was just like Quebecor or R.R. Donnelley. On top of that, the 50,000 was way off too.
Creating demand
I've always said that printers don't buy things until they lose business to it or a customer demands it. That is, they've been led down the garden path so many times, that they want to know that something works, and that when it works, it helps produce sales. Always keep in mind the customer's customer, and work on their needs, and the market will follow. But traditional production-oriented sales management won't allow that. It won't allow the time for market creation. It's more obsessed with counting sales calls that finding problems and solving them. And in order to do that you need a deep understanding of your customer's business and their customer's business. You can't build a sustainable and steady business any other way.
Know your customers
A few years ago, I was at a meeting of a major color shop that serviced the catalog market. I asked what I thought was an innocent question: "How many of you read Catalog Age magazine?" To my surprise, of the 20 or so people there, only one raised their hand. When I say to know your customers business, I don't mean to know what they print and how they print it. I mean to know what drives their business. What kinds of problems are they faced with. Only by understanding their problems in their terms can you craft a competitive and pre-emptive solution.
© Copyright 1999-2005 Strategies for Management, Inc.
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