Stop The Stupid Things In Your Business
We live in a world of change. Change happens! The competition comes from all over the world, which means many American companies are in trouble.
Many decisions are made that are against both good business acumen and customer loyalty. Often times, for most businesses, marketing is an exercise in figuring out what to do to get existing or potential customers to spend more money on them.
I suggest that instead of thinking about what to do, find what you can no longer do. In other words, stop doing the "stupid things".
Don't fool around is to find out what is stopping customers from spending money with you and making sure that actions or reactions never happen again.
Here is an example of what I call "stupid things". Some airlines now want to charge customers who want to speak to a live agent.
This is stupid in two ways. First, they made a decision to punish customers who want to keep getting what they got over and over again.Worse still, they have said they are charging more than usual for this level of service. How many customers will you lose to this decision? I know at least one.
There are more subtle, but no less damaging, stupid things companies should stop doing.
Take the new Wheaties boxes, for example. General Mills recently unveiled boxes of Wheaties with photos from the United States.Olympic champion. One was missing: Paul Hamm. Why?
This was General Mills' answer to my query:
"Choosing a Wheaties champion has never been an easy task, especially when we've seen so much excellence from so many champion athletes. But it's just not possible To honor all of the champions in the Wheaties Box ".
So you are leaving out the first man from the USA to win the general gymnastics championship at the Olympics in one of the sport's biggest comebacks?His return from a disastrous slide to a near-perfect stretching exercise earned almost universal praise and defined the word "champion" for most of us.
But there was controversy. As most of you know, a South Korean gymnast claimed that a mistake in scoring cost him gold and appealed to the Sports Arbitration Court, which recently ruled Hamm could keep the gold medal.
Although the medal was contested, it wasn't because Hamm did or didn't do something. General Mills, however, took the "safe" option. But by staying safe and letting Hamm outside, Wheaties alienates millions of customers who see him not as controversial but as a hero, and loses customers in the process.That's "stupid things" now.