Three Clever Questions: Don't Ignore Anymore

Often in our quest for continued business excellence and chasing new businesses, we tend to ignore asking uncomfortable questions that may spring surprises, we can better do without. With growing complexity, enhanced innovation focus and accellerated pace of change, these questions have gained lot more significance and need serious and systematic management attention, like never before.

1 Is the problem we are solving still a high priority problem for the client? Business depends upon its ability to help clients solve problems in an efficient and cost effective manner. What if the problem itself is no more a problem? Consultants banking on providing information access services to clients in earlier days have lost appeal as information access is no more a problem that clients face today. Video conferences solve the problem of managing face-2-face interaction without the need to travel. Hence business travel service agents banking on better travel services may be focused on solving problem, which may loose its own priority over time. What if the mileage efficiency of petrol engines double itself or oil prices become one-third of its present value? Alternate fuels based vehicles banking primarily on solving travel cost related problems may loose significance.

2 What is the potential appeal of the Opposite Extreme? For every loyal customer set there is a disengaged set, which is located at the other extreme of the continuum on specific service/product characteristics. If you have positioned your products with high acquisition cost and low consumable costs, there will indeed be a consumer set that prefer low acquisition cost and acceptable high running costs. If you have bunched all services and provided single price, some customers may be looking for separate prices for each service consumed. If your soft-drink is black, there are some consumers that prefer their soft-drink to be colorless. Often competition emerges from other extreme and goes unnoticed, till it starts gnawing your market share. Idea is not to advocate serving all set of customers, but to be conscious of the potential customer set that prefers the opposite of “what you offer”. You may choose to ignore them, but then that will be a strategic choice.

3 Are we depending too much on Rationality as a basis of appeal to potential customers? So much has been written about the limitation of humans to make rational decisions and how subconscious choices, operating environment and social context have disproportionately high influence on our decision making. In fact, Dan Ariely (predictably irrational), Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics), Michael J. Mauboussin (Think Twice) and other authors have not only provided examples of decisions taken by people like us that can not be labeled as rational, but also provide ideas on how to capitalize on this peculiarities associated with “how we buy?”. Marketeers know this through experience, but make sure the R&D folks, design engineers and operational excellence experts also keep this in mind and accommodate “irrationality” in their solution perspective.

Reflect! Share your views and perspectives, as always.