What are you going to do this year that is going to make you even more relevant in 2019 and 2020 and beyond? What are you going to do to create the customer experience needed to assure that you can compete and flourish long term?
Are you going to curse the online challengers who are driving you crazy? Or are you going to out think them, out serve them and make yourself irreplaceable to your clients? How are you going to write the story that your customers will want to be a part of?
You don’t need to fade away. You just need to deliver on the new expectations of your customers who are being spoiled by disrupters like Amazon. This is no time to be resting on your past accomplishments. Kodak did and a company with who on March 31, 1999 employed 83,000 people and had market capitalization of almost $21 Billion Dollars went bankrupt while a little company with 12 employees and no revenues was purchased by Facebook for $1 Billion Dollars in 2012 (Instagram). Kodak failed to innovate and stubbornly stuck to film as the world turned digital.
Your customers are getting younger and you probably are not. But that doesn’t mean your thinking needs to stay in 1999. Learn new skills. Accept the fact that your customers are going to research online. They’re going to look for reviews online. They may prefer that you communicate with them through text messages rather than phone or email. The newest Generation just now entering the workforce - Gen Z - prefers visual communication like FaceTime and Skype. They want videos, too.
Look at who is thriving. How can you take some of that mojo and rub it into the experiences you deliver? Up your game and push your partners to up theirs as well.
Pay attention to what is no longer working for you. AND FOR GOODNESS SAKE, STOP doing it!
You must avoid the fates of AOL, Blockbuster, Barnes and Noble and MySpace. Focus on what your customers want and concentrate on reinventing yourself constantly. That is work that is never done. You can be the disrupter. You can be the leader. Write your new story. The story about how you do the hard work of innovating daily to create more value and more meaning for your customers.
Paul Kiewiet MAS+ is an industry speaker, writer, consultant and coach. He serves as the executive director of MiPPA. Kiewiet was inducted into the PPAI Hall of Fame and the MiPPA Hall of Fame. He served as Chairman of PPAI in 2007. A former distributor, he founded Promotion Concepts, Inc in 1982 and worked with some of America’s most valuable brands including Coca-Cola, Kelloggs, and Whirlpool.