thinking/critical

The biggest danger to a business owner is lack of originality – generally demonstrated by virtue of getting trapped in his or her industry’s trends. Industry trend following simply turns your business into a commodity business. Avoid the trap, and maintain your margins.

Fight or flight syndrome leaves out an important – and destructive – third reaction. Freeze. Are you doing the business equivalent of the suicidal bunny routine?

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.

Our increasingly complex world creates consumers who seek familiarity and recognizable patterns to ease their decision-making. Business owners who sell their differences while making themselves seem very familiar will achieve the greatest success.

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.

Here’s why. Database analysis to study customers is a lot like looking at the animals in the zoo. Don’t get me wrong – you can learn a lot. But it’s an observation, not an experience. How the heck did we get to the point where the word intimacy, which means a close association or connection, of or relating to inner character or essential nature (according to Webster’s unabridged) – how did we start applying that word to a business concept that most people interpret to mean “figure out what your customers buy, when they buy it, how they buy it, and why they buy it – and use that information to sell them more of it” ?