thinking/critical

All business owners must differentiate or compete on price, but the stakes are much higher for designer businesses. Differentiation on design is the primary argument for maintaining higher prices, and failure to do so undermines the entire business premise. Do you know which questions to ask when establishing your pricing strategy?

The changes you choose to make now will have tremendous impact on the success you can expect in the future. Too many companies are cutting loose important (strategic) talent, eliminating their advertising budgets, changing their marketing strategies, and reducing their operations to customer-unfriendly shells in fear-fueled efforts to survive.

I invite you to ponder two thoughts over the weekend. I’d like you to think about the effects of fear, and the benefits of action.

A depressed economy takes existing conditions and magnifies them. It’s like stop-action photography. The bad business decisions we make that would normally unfold over years, instead unravel in a year, a quarter, or even a month. This is how we explain some organizations in every industry thriving while their competitors contract and fail.

The 24-hour news cycle requires 24-hour news content. The news world looks to itself for reportage. The competition to produce stories leads to little – or rushed – thought and analysis. News consumers dislike ambiguity and crave comfort, so the news media spoon-feeds us certainty and pre-approved bias. The result? Very few people understand the current economy, economic history, or the potential pitfalls and promise of various solutions.

Recent government intervention makes it likely that we will experience another short burst of growth prior to experiencing a recession. Job growth hasn’t increased because it can’t – the labor market is too tight. But an interesting trifecta – the government’s new financial incentives for business to invest in infrastructure, the weak dollar creating export growth, and the emerging baby-boomer retirement wave – should contribute to earnings growth for American workers over the next few years.