So many businesses – small and large – have either lost sight or never really known what their business is about.
They think that their business is its function.
Which means that they miss opportunities to innovate and remain relevant for their customers.
And they are certainly behind the 8 ball when it comes to marketing.
Let’s look at a really public example of big businesses that have lost the plot because they haven’t known what business they were in, in the first place: Traditional media – newspapers, radio, tv.
These are organisations whose senior decision makers are charged with the responsibility of generating revenue through advertising sales.
There primary ‘function’ is to sell ads.
Their method is to create content to attract readers, listeners, viewers, so that they can sell ads.
But selling ads is not the purpose of their business.
Now their ad sales revenue is under attack
Why? Because their audience is being wooed by brands that are relevant.
What a pity that they didn’t see the purpose of their business as bonding their brand (their masthead) to an audience; instead of seeing the audience as just that thing they had to have to be able to fulfil the primary function of their business – selling ads.
Accordingly, when an opportunity came along to migrate the relationship the audience had with the one thing they had of real value – their brand – to new media technologies, they saw the technology as a competitor to their beautiful big sheets of white paper, or their transmitter tower – a new competitor that may compete against their core function: Selling ads.
If they realised that their purpose was the relationship between their audience and their brand – they would have embraced the new technologies as simply another environment for that relationship.
I saw a tweet recently about a new campaign by an overseas newspaper industry group that is suppose to encourage advertisers to consider newspapers in their media buy. It is a good looking campaign that talks all about what nice big advertisements in a newspaper can do for an advertiser
(And it has all the usual things that you expect from these sorts of campaigns over the years like de-positioning the traditional competitors by pointing out how newspapers can be consumed on a train, which radio and TV can’t – which is both lazy marketing and further proof of being a little out of touch with technology...but I digress). But not once does it refer to any particular newspaper brands bond, trust, relationship, with a reader....
Another tweet from someone working for a newspaper said: “Innovation is difficult when the aim of the game is to sell advertising”.
Well, yes, it would be. If you think that the aim of the game, the purpose of your business, is its function.
But that isn’t the main game. It is how the business is funded.
Imagine the innovation to traditional media – imagine the innovation and marketing strength to your own business – if every single person recognised, shared and believed in the purpose of the business, rather than its, or their own, individual functions.
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