A Realignment?
Back in the day, when I was a young and impressionable Political Science student, I learned about realigning elections. It's one of those events that come along every so often where the trends change more permanently, not just a "one-off".
Ronald Reagan's 1980 election was one of those. Some say Barack Obama's election is another. But you really can't tell if it's a realignment or not until several years (maybe a decade or two) after the fact.
Which brings me to a thought I had recently. Actually, I asked this question at the recent IMA Executive Summit and it was met with 10 seconds of the loudest silence I've ever heard. It went like this:
It's 9 months from now, or 12, or whatever number you like. Things are better for our market. We're sitting in front of End User X, and we hear "you know, we stopped rewarding and recognizing our stakeholders because of the economy. We're still in business. We're making money. Our employees are happy. Why should we start doing this again?"
I mean, this is some Scary Shit. I have a friend who teaches Economics at Stanford and he swears our business is built on a shaky foundation that has no validity. What happens if he's right? And this change in the way our clients incentivize employees and customers is in a realignment? Then what?
I know, I know--it's never gonna happen, certainly not to the Nth degree. But the question raises another one--how can we educate our clients to view us not as a cost, but as an investment? The culture of our end-users is that what we do is not a critical-path component. How much farther is it down the path to the point where clients don't see us as useful at all?
In this downturn we have some time to think about these sorts of things (since we aren't bogged down by pesky customers buying stuff). The market's leaders need to figure out how to make us more important and relevant. Because when it gets busy again we'll have to deal with customers...
Pete
posted by Pete Mitchell at 9:56 AM
1 Comments:
Seriously Pete, am I the only one reading your Diablog?
Just this last week, I've had customers (actually what I like to call not-currently-buying-customers) call to ask if I had any information that would help them justify continuing incentive and/or travel programs with their management. Just exactly the kind of information that the IRF and the Forum and the IMA is providing (altho we could use a lot more about consumer promotions please....). I confess that along with the White Papers and research studies, I also sent the link to the Texas Roadhouse CEO /CNBC spot with a notation that at least there was one company left that was profitable, not taking government funds and had some balls....
The fact that companies are asking for supporting information rather than taking the knee-jerk reaction of cancelling programs is encouraging to me.
To your point, I was weary of hearing the phrase "mission critical" at the Summit. Face it, our stuff is just NOT mission critical to companies that are fighting for their very survival. Nor will "employee engagement" be a factor until key employees start jumping ship -- and that's not likely to happen until there is somewhere to jump.
So, as a friend of mine likes to say, "in a flood, sell boats...in a plague, sell coffins". We need to readjust our product or service mix to suit the market. Employees just happy to have a job right now? Focus on customer retention. Need new customers? We're now "business development specialists".
And I think it couldn't hurt to support our lobbyists who are in Washington trying to educate government leaders on the viability of incentives as an effective and proven business strategy so at least they do no more harm.
In the meantime, we can always cross our fingers.
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