Bust the market before it busts you
In business, no strategy works forever.
Sooner or later, markets change and competitors begin to catch
up. Drycleaners that become complacent will stumble if they
take their success for granted. The surest way to build
on past successes is to make marketbusting moves.
A marketbusting move is any action taken
by your business that makes changes to deliver superior
performance.
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1. Focusing on your customers and
transforming their purchasing experiences.
2. Changing the quality of your services.
3. Redefining your profit drivers.
4. Examining industry shifts and
exploiting them.
5. Looking for new opportunities and
entering new markets.
The focus in marketbusting has to be on
the customer. Customers don’t really care much about you
as a business. They care about themselves — about meeting
their needs and making their lives more comfortable.
The success of your business depends
mainly on meeting customers’ needs and comfort levels.
So, you need to be concerned about them and develop a greater
insight into their concerns. Don’t view your customers
like you want them to be, consider them as they are —
people who want you to fulfill their expectations and desires.
As you know, that’s not always easy.
Consider if customers would prefer to
have their clothes picked up and delivered to their homes or
offices. Would they prefer a lower-end drycleaning service for
their casual clothes?
In other words, would you significantly
increase your sales by offering a two-tiered service: one for
expensive suits and dresses and another for Polo shirts and
Dockers?
What do your services really mean to
customers? That is, how do your customers see your services
— the features and characteristics — relative to
your competitors’?
A positive feature that is regarded as
basic is one that your customers expect to receive. These are
non-negotiable. That means customers take them for granted. If
you lack the basics, then many potential customers won’t
buy from you a second time.
In the middle are positive features that
are differentiators. These are attributes that set your
services apart from the competition in a positive way.
Even more powerful are attributes that
are exciters. Exciters are so attractive to certain customers
that they are the primary reason for using your services.
Exciters can be relatively simple features.
To discover the features that would
excite your customers, ask them to complete the following
sentence: “I would have more clothes cleaned, or pay more
for my cleaning, if I could ________________.”
Sometimes it’s easier to get rid of
negative features than to add positive ones. To find out what
about your services may be a negative to customers, ask your
CSR’s “What do customers most often grumble
about?” Is it something that you could eliminate?
So far, I’ve focused on what you
can do for your customers. Of equal importance to your business
is generating profits (profit drivers).
While everyone else takes the basic
services you sell for granted, one route to marketbusting is to
change the rules by changing the services you sell or
delivering them in a different way.
Developing new services isn’t as
difficult as it may sound. Essentially it means finding a
different way to generate profits by selling customers new
services from what you offer today — like in-home carpet
and drapery cleaning, uniform rental or fire restoration.
The key focus for marketbusting involves
doing two things right:
1. Thinking of ways to dramatically
improve each service that you already offer.
2. Developing new services that can be
incorporated into your existing business.
Consider how you can take advantage of
changes affecting the industry. In general, when a major
industry change is underway, the thundering herd moves in the
same direction. But you can seize a significant advantage by
pursuing another path.
You can profit from predictable industry
swings such as the seasonal fluctuations in the drycleaning
business by prearranging with a retired presser or other
non-permanent workers to report only during peak periods, which
you know about in advance from past experience.
Major shifts in the needs and desires of
our customers can lead to great opportunities. The
question is: How can you anticipate and spot future
opportunities before your competitors discover them?
Begin by considering changes in
technology that can create new opportunities, such as Green
Earth, CO2 cleaning, wet-cleaning and tensioning equipment.
Next consider shifts in social attitudes.
like the acceptance of casual clothes for work and church.
Don’t overlook natural phenomena
like diseases and natural disasters that create business
opportunities, things like cleaning flood damaged clothes, mold
remediation and special handling of medical uniforms.
You don’t need to make a massive
new investment to profit from these ideas. You merely need to
envision how your existing package of capabilities can be
shifted to meet these needs.
If marketbusting were easy, everyone
would be doing it. Marketbusting is essentially about
continuous renewal and reinvigoration of profit streams.
Drycleaners who grow and flourish are
those who continually prospect for new opportunities to
marketbust — to engage in moves that make them stronger
and satisfy their customers’ evolving needs.
Marketbusting is an essential activity of
any business because your competitors aren’t standing
still. They’re trying to make changes and improvements
that will put you out of business.
Marketbusting, for the most part,
isn’t about dramatic breakthroughs and phenomenal
accomplishments. It’s about making changes — some
small, some large — that will enable you to compete more
effectively and efficiently for customers and your
company’s financial security.
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