Based on these concepts, can you think of any company or product campaign that has fallen prey to marketing myopia? And, what were the implications and consequences?
- Carolyn, Siena, & Shayna
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Week 4- Marketing Myopia
Successful products/services are a result of companies doing an effective job of understanding consumer values and creating products that fulfill a consumer need even as those values evolve and change over time. Alternatively, products can easily flop when companies only focus inwardly on their own needs instead of defining the needs of their customers, as described in the article Marketing Myopia. A related article we have attached here also identifies this concept and discusses the importance of thorough exploratory market research through several approaches.
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I hope you don't mind if I troll this and take it in a bit of a different direction. On the same topic I often times see business owners/managers falling into this same hole. That is, they have a tendency to hire folks around them that share the same views and options and end up with biased, self selected data of their companies performance and strategy. It is the 'yes man' syndrome and although everyone is aware of it, it is a hard thing not to perpetuate when you are making choices of who to hire. People have a tendency to hire others with similar views and background.
ReplyDeleteWhat I have tried to do (not always successfully) and encourage other business owners to do, is take a very real assessment of their strengths and weaknesses and hire for the gaps. Know what you don't know (which is 99.9% of the stuff out there), know what you are not good at, then hire folks that can help.
Elicited contrarian views and make sure the environment is supportive of that. As I like to say - now that we have this strategy/view/direction, someone make me a liar, tell me why it's wrong, tell me why it's bad business and the customers are going to run screaming from out stores.
I have found there is almost never one right answer and many times a quick wrong answer is better than a slow, thoughtful, right answer. Or as the saying goes, "best is the enemy of better".
Wade
This article made so much sense when I was reading it and yet I am having trouble coming up with a product or a company that I can pinpoint its failure to marketing myopia. It is easy to say that most failures of companies occur because their product wasn't successful enough, or demanded enough in the market place, but I imagine that it would be pretty difficult to work back and blame it on a specific decision (or lack thereof) to evolve towards the customer's needs.
ReplyDeleteI keep going back to the thought of car models that don't stay successful, or car companies that have vanished from the marketplace. In a sense, the company is actually evolving by discontinuing that particular model of car with a new one that consumers demand...or are they simply not paying attention to how to make that particular model more adapted to what consumers want and therefore it goes away?
I have been attending some meetings of the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network over the past couple of months. One topic which is brought up often in their forums and panels addresses this exact affliction - marketing myopia. Entrepreneurs will always be ardent advocates for their products/services/ideas. But, the great entrepreneur, the one who will take his/her idea to market and sell it for millions, is the one who has vetted and tested the idea, elicited outside advice/counsel, or even failed, re-tooled, and started over because he/she LISTENED.
ReplyDeleteTo continue from Aaron's point above, you could make the case that the American car industry has been myopic for years. They continue to produce big, heave, fuel inefficient vehicles. Only after other nations introduced Hybrids, electric and more fuel efficient vehicles, coupled with the near collapse of their industry, did they finally decide that may need some "glasses" to fix their near sightedness (myopia).
Only time will tell if they will take this time in history to fix their eye sight...permanently.
I would like to differentiate between myopic vision of leaders creating a new product vs. the myopic vision of leaders of established industry. When it comes to new ideas and innovation (whether its is business, science or politics) most people are blind followers, they absolutely have no clue to differentiate between an absolutely dumb idea and an absolutely brilliant idea. The world today we live in would have been a totally different, had the innovators and change leaders gave up their ideas on the advice of peer advice, focus groups and surveys. Think of Einstein, how many scientists rejected his theory of relativity as utter nonsense. Or Copernicus, if he had continued to believe that earth is the center of the universe, and all heavenly bodies revolved around it.
ReplyDeleteIn order to be successful in creating something new, you need to deeply passionate, even to the point of being narcissist. No wonder, why most successful CEOs are card carrying narcissist. Take for example Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Andy Grove ...
Now narcissist leaders by their very nature surrounds themselves with people who think like themselves. Remember Apple's Chief Engineer Mr. Papermaster, who was unceremoniously shown the door when he had the audacity to challenge Steve Jobs that you can not have an antenna that is part of the iPhone4 body. Most these narcissistic leaders institutes program to filter in leaders and employees who think like themselves and identify with them (take six-sigma program of Mr. Welch.) And that's where the danger lies, the setting in of company myopia. As the industry matures, these myopic leaders in charge of the companies continues on behaving that it is a nascent industry, ignoring consumers need. They fail to take in to account that the market conditions have changed. Consumers have been using their product and services for a while and there is a critical mass of consumers who do understand needs are being met or not by the products and services produced by these narcissistic companies. This mass of consumers are ready to try something new if they get the opportunity.
But maybe this is cycle of life, a beneficial thing for the consumers. It is the way to get rid of companies before they get too enormous and create openings for new companies to come in and replace them.
An industry that comes to mind for me is the fast food industry. Just to change it up a bit from cars and oil:) Today everyone always seems to be looking for the healthy option. It is in the news a lot and society as a whole seems to be more in tune with health when it comes to restaurants. This is a big adjustment for most fast food places since their #1 goal is typically speed and taste, not so much health as most of us know. It has been interesting to me to see how many of the tradition Burger King or KFCs, to name a few, that have gone out of business in my area. I don't have any real numbers on this, but it seems that maybe they were too slow to change with the market place and listen to the customers desire for healthier options. McDonalds on the other had seems to be adapting with salads and apples and other healthy alternatives. For me this seems to be another example of an industry that can get too focused on different things to put on a hamburger or ways to fry a chicken and not listen to their customer.
ReplyDeleteThe product/services I think of that has fallen into marketing myopia is US news. After dwindling to only a handful of large newspaper corporations in recent years, the focus of these organizations has moved more towards competing on cost thus reducing quality while upping quantity (think the 24-hour news cycle). I'm sure most people don't want sound bites and snippets of information that don't really tell them what's going or worse mislead them from the truth. However, news organizations continue to produce more and more of this. In a world where everything is becoming increasingly connected and information is prevalent (although sources can't be as trusted) it will be interesting where news organizations end up. Overall, I thought this was a good article but I'm a little conflicted. The article assumes that growth can be sustained by one organization indefinitely and that this is a good thing. I'm not sure that's true if you take it to the extreme and Javed has an interesting point that maybe this is the natural cycle of organizations. Can the company that started down one path ever completely change everything it does in order to provide the best experience for the user? Or will they provide a reasonably good experience but it takes a completely different mindset (new company) to deliver the best experience in the end?
ReplyDeleteOne industry that came to mind is the recent online coupon business. From surface level it looks like it's a customer satisfying process, offering customers discounted prices at local businesses. I recently read an article however that pinpoints how coupon businesses like Groupon actually give the businesses that sign up for the offer the short end of the stick. http://gawker.com/5786492/the-groupon-backlash-its-the-business-model-stupid.
ReplyDeleteTheir model concentrates on attracting businesses for selling coupons, and somewhat ignores the needs of their primary customer, local businesses. However because the coupons are so popular to the end consumer, the industry has grown and spawned multiple competitors like Living Social and Google. It will be interesting to see if the online coupon business can sustain their model or if there will be a backlash from the businesses, forcing Groupon and others to meet their needs rather than focus on a goods producing process.
As a small business owner, I have paid very close attention to make sure that I am not negotiating myself the "short end of the stick" (as Emily eloquently put it) when considering sales channels such as Groupon and the likes. They are actively selling to small businesses who fall prey upon the marketing myopia phenomenon. These games to win short-term revenues ends up wreaking havoc because the cost outlay to provide the services to these one-time purchasers can force a small business to shut down by bargain hunters who are single "flash" transactions.
ReplyDelete