Wii, Toyota Scion or the latest Nike shoe), customers get more of what they want before they know they want it.
The four forces of change that I discussed in chapter 1 – especially the fourth, increasing expectations – are the cause of this change. The bottom line, as you can see from my mate's example, is that the more variety, the better quality and the faster service customers enjoy, and the more information that is available to them about you versus the competition, the more finicky, demanding and impatient they become. In that context, competitive advantages quickly turn into competitive necessities that rivals can copy and adapt for themselves.
For you as a businessperson, that situation desperately requires you to flip on its head any notion that fast, good, cheap – pick 2 is sufficient in today's market. It is 'Fast, Good, Cheap – Pick 3' as a minimum, plus something above and beyond these three necessities where genuine competitive advantage will be found.
In order to really grasp this flip and implement it into your day-to-day operations you must understand:
To compete in any market, being fast, good and cheap is table stakes, the price of entry. To achieve competitive advantage, you must lead the league in at least one category and be industry standard in the remainder.
To sustain competitive advantage, you must commit to a perpetual cycle of innovation. Fast today is not fast enough for tomorrow. Good today is not good enough for tomorrow. Cheap today is not cheap enough for tomorrow.
As a business goal, customer satisfaction sucks! If you're ever going to move beyond satisfying customer needs to fulfilling customer wants, which is where the big profits are, you've got to be fast, good, cheap and more!
When I tell executives, 'Customer satisfaction sucks!', they look at me like I'm crazy. If anything is accepted business wisdom today, it is that customer satisfaction is paramount.
Yes and no. Bear with me while I split a very important hair.
My cable television provider recently called to ask if I was satisfied with my new package. Well, the service does what they promised it would do, but I'm not going out of my way to tell people how great it is. Instead of five television channels with nothing on that I want to watch, there are 105 (or something like that). I need digital television service if I'm going to get the most out of my high-definition flat-panel television. But I don't want lots of channels. I want one that shows what I want to watch.
Lots of channels satisfied my need, but it didn't fulfil my want. The cable television industry as a whole is a classic example of company needs and wants being out of alignment with customer needs and wants. New digital video recorders such as Foxtel's IQ and services like TiVo are going some of the way to addressing this disparity, as are cable television packages offering you the ability to choose your dominant programming such as sport, movies or some other genre that interests you. The programmers, the television networks and the cable television providers want to aggregate dozens and hundreds of channels into tiered services that only seem to fulfil customers' desire to watch what they choose when they choose.
That's the subscription model the industry wants. And some customers are probably perfectly happy with it. But other customers aren't going to be happy until they get à la carte pricing that enables them to pick and choose only the channels they really want to watch, or until they can freely choose high-definition video from millions of sources streaming over the internet. Over the next few years, as YouTube continues to grow, and more households opt for digital video recorders like TiVo, I suspect more and more customers will choose to program their own television viewing rather than settling for the cable television industry's programming packages. Channel 7 has negotiated with TiVo to bring this DVR to Australia, much to the displeasure of
The four forces of change that I discussed in chapter 1 – especially the fourth, increasing expectations – are the cause of this change. The bottom line, as you can see from my mate's example, is that the more variety, the better quality and the faster service customers enjoy, and the more information that is available to them about you versus the competition, the more finicky, demanding and impatient they become. In that context, competitive advantages quickly turn into competitive necessities that rivals can copy and adapt for themselves.
For you as a businessperson, that situation desperately requires you to flip on its head any notion that fast, good, cheap – pick 2 is sufficient in today's market. It is 'Fast, Good, Cheap – Pick 3' as a minimum, plus something above and beyond these three necessities where genuine competitive advantage will be found.
In order to really grasp this flip and implement it into your day-to-day operations you must understand:
To compete in any market, being fast, good and cheap is table stakes, the price of entry. To achieve competitive advantage, you must lead the league in at least one category and be industry standard in the remainder.
To sustain competitive advantage, you must commit to a perpetual cycle of innovation. Fast today is not fast enough for tomorrow. Good today is not good enough for tomorrow. Cheap today is not cheap enough for tomorrow.
As a business goal, customer satisfaction sucks! If you're ever going to move beyond satisfying customer needs to fulfilling customer wants, which is where the big profits are, you've got to be fast, good, cheap and more!
When I tell executives, 'Customer satisfaction sucks!', they look at me like I'm crazy. If anything is accepted business wisdom today, it is that customer satisfaction is paramount.
Yes and no. Bear with me while I split a very important hair.
My cable television provider recently called to ask if I was satisfied with my new package. Well, the service does what they promised it would do, but I'm not going out of my way to tell people how great it is. Instead of five television channels with nothing on that I want to watch, there are 105 (or something like that). I need digital television service if I'm going to get the most out of my high-definition flat-panel television. But I don't want lots of channels. I want one that shows what I want to watch.
Lots of channels satisfied my need, but it didn't fulfil my want. The cable television industry as a whole is a classic example of company needs and wants being out of alignment with customer needs and wants. New digital video recorders such as Foxtel's IQ and services like TiVo are going some of the way to addressing this disparity, as are cable television packages offering you the ability to choose your dominant programming such as sport, movies or some other genre that interests you. The programmers, the television networks and the cable television providers want to aggregate dozens and hundreds of channels into tiered services that only seem to fulfil customers' desire to watch what they choose when they choose.
That's the subscription model the industry wants. And some customers are probably perfectly happy with it. But other customers aren't going to be happy until they get à la carte pricing that enables them to pick and choose only the channels they really want to watch, or until they can freely choose high-definition video from millions of sources streaming over the internet. Over the next few years, as YouTube continues to grow, and more households opt for digital video recorders like TiVo, I suspect more and more customers will choose to program their own television viewing rather than settling for the cable television industry's programming packages. Channel 7 has negotiated with TiVo to bring this DVR to Australia, much to the displeasure of
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