Asking to your customers what they want is not enough
because your competitors (not only the smart ones) ask the same question; therefore doing that doesn’t provide you with much competitive edge.
Observing your customers living their lives, and doing their jobs gives you an opportunity. You’ll have the chance to spot something that could make their lives easier and more enjoyable.
Observing your customers instead of waiting for their answers is to me a much better source of competitive advantage.
Is 9 to 5 what were you born to do?
Is going to work every day and ‘do what you are told’ enough for a fulfilling life? Is it what you were born to do? No, the human being has not been programmed to be a semi-automated machine; however industrialists have a stake in making us believe we are.
It is in the very act of delivering your product or service that you prove to yourself that you matter beyond any feature of the product itself. Customers leave (in many cases) not because of the quality of a product or service, but because they do not feel loved, they experience an emotional vacuum.
Only human being can fill this emotional emptiness. Successful organisations, ‘beyond creating great products’ enable their people to do the necessary emotional work required by their customers.
Emotional work is the missing ingredient in the creation of fulfilling workplaces, where your work goes well beyond the job description.
Looking for your art
is a daily job and it doesn’t care about holydays.
Bringing to the world something new is easier to be said than done, it requires you to fight the obvious answers and dig deeper within your customer’s problems.
It’s not a matter to be the fastest or the cheapest, but to understand what value your customer attaches to the solution you offer, and when it’s the best time to deliver it.
The difference between entrepreneurs and dreamers is that entrepreneurs never stop to look for the one more piece of work that will change people’s life, and they fight every single day to deliver it.
Being in the commodity business is not rewarding neither profitable. Looking inside you to discover your art is more interesting and definitely more lucrative.
Breaking the cycle of zero-sum competition
In many industries competition is still based on two main economic variables: cost and quality. Successful companies obviously offer the best quality at the lowest possible price.
This way of looking at competition is static, in other words does not recognise the role that innovation plays in an industry.
The innovators’ challenge is not to pursue quality while maintaining reasonable prices, but how to reframe the industry product or service in an unexpected way.
Innovators today are exposed to an incredible opportunity to ‘internalise social and environmental factors’ into the strategies of their organisations. This opens up incredible new opportunities for value creation, by targeting new customer’s segments ignored by the other industry participants.
Differentiating your product or service by solving social and environmental problems offers you the possibility to break the ‘zero-sum competition’ in your industry opening up new industry horizons.
I hope you will.
