This year many business owners and executives feel as if their customers all borrowed Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak because they simply have disappeared. Were you expecting that to happen when you looked forward from 9 months ago? Did you think about how your market was going to shift? Are you prepared for the shift in the marketplace that will happen in another 9 months?
Because we have become such short-sighted in our planning and reporting and we feel the marketplace is changing too fast for us to keep up, executives are being reactive instead of being proactive. Leadership of growing companies need to constantly be looking for the pulse of the customer. What are they craving, what will they be craving in 12 months, what can we offer them they will love but don't even realize they want it?
Did you know you needed an MP3 player before one existed? Did we realize that cell phones were a necessary personal item? Did we even realize back in the day we would need highly interactive websites before we even knew the Internet existed?
Customer choices are driven by what they want and what they think they want. Right now customers want value, personal selling, and low cost. When the credit crisis hit last September and it appeared the American market was in dire straits did you gather your executives to talk about what consumer behavior was going to look like in 12 months? I think most executives were sharing in the panic of looking for survival and getting through current times. Imagine, if you spent the right amount of time to predict where consumers would be right now how much better you would be positioned?
The reason customers are disappearing is because no one was ready for this moment in time. What if GM had decided in January to offer a "Cash for Clunkers" program as a way if stimulating growth? The response has been overwhelming. Could they have saved the company from going into bankruptcy instead of their feeble attempt of begging for money in Washington?
To look forward and predict your marketplace in 12 months you need to be asking the following questions:
1. How will my customer buying behaviors be different than they are today?
2. What are the desired product characteristics that will speak to my customer then?
3. What could I create that would tilt the marketplace in my favor?
4. What type of permission marketing approach will reach my customers at that time?
5. How can I create more nimbleness in my organization to make changes fast enough to stay in front of customer demands and expectations?
By spending time on these questions for the coming year, you will engage in creating predictability through your research and proactive choices. We learn from our hits and our misses, but we have to take action. To please an every changing customer marketplace we have to anticipate those needs before they arrive and create accurate predictions that will guide important decisions for growth.
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