Hello,
2020 has started with some interesting conversations for me. I have been working with an agency, who has seen their pipeline of new work dry up and an ecommerce site which has seen a slow, but steady, decline in sales. In both cases, they cannot understand where things have gone wrong. They aren’t doing anything different that will have caused the problem.
The answer in both cases lies in the very fact that they have not changed anything! Our world is in a constant state of flux, and you cannot continue to do the same thing year in and year out and expect to see the same results.
For years, blogging and podcasting generated a good number of leads for my businesses. However, as others recognised the benefits of content marketing, it became harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. I had to adapt and explore new approaches such as building a community and nurturing this email list.
It is not always competitors who change the landscape. Instead, sometimes it is your audience who change. Maybe they move from one platform to another, such as the gradual shift away from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn and Instagram. Other times it is their expectations that have changed because of their experiences online.
In the modern world, you can never standstill. You always need to be asking yourself what happens if the current approaches stop working. What will you do next? Then you have to start preparing now before that moment is upon you.
I see agency owners and freelancers, making this mistake all the time. They have massive success with one approach. Maybe they specialise in a particular sector or in delivering a specific type of solution. That may work well for years, but then the market shifts and they are left playing catchup and struggling to pay the bills.
I also see well-established organisations making this mistake all the time; this is especially true when they have been successful in the past. Understandably they are keen to maintain the status quo. However, that becomes a fixation with continually doing the same thing, rather than a need to keep their market position.
The problem is that we tend to cling to what we know, way longer than we should. We convince ourselves that the changes we observe are temporary and will pass. In some cases, we even believe we can stop this tide of change.
Take, for example, the music industries response to Napster. They saw consumer behaviour change as people became fed up with going to the high street to buy music and being forced to buy an entire album for the one or two songs they loved.
However, instead of accommodating these changes in consumer behaviour, they attempt to hold back the tide by suing Napster out of existence.
That was fair enough as Napster was facilitating the theft of music, but they learned nothing from the experience. They thought they had maintained their existing business model and turned back the wave of change, only for Apple to sweep in a few years later with the iTunes Store.
Then others deny anything has changed. For example, an analyst at Blockbusters released a report which said:
“Investor concern over the threat of new technologies is overstated.”
You wouldn’t believe the number of times I have mentioned that quote to clients only for them to argue that they are different and that in their case, the threat really is overstated!
We all need to be looking to the future, both as organisations and as individuals. Never become complacent and when the writing is on the wall, accept it rather than fight it. For example, many Flash developers fought tooth and nail to get Apple to adopt the technology on their platform, rather than looking for what was next in their careers. Don’t make that mistake.
That may mean learning a new skillset, moving on from a company unable to change or renewing your effort to get management to face reality.
Whatever the case, stay nimble, don’t get attached and always keep moving.
