Evolve or Repeat?
Your two choices for setting a strategy
I have a broad range of interests, two of those being innovation and figure skating. With regards to innovation I followed an inspiring workshop by Paul Bessems on how you can use blockchain organization to set up a new innovative strategy for your company. And just today I liked a posted story by the new Canadian National figure skating champion Andrew Poje where he mentioned you must reinvent yourself or otherwise, you’ll be outcompeted.
But what do these two interests have in common you may ask?
Well, both involve a high sense of competition. With innovation it may be the competition of outsiders eating pieces of your market pie, with figure skating it’s the competitors you are up against in the national and international competition. In order to stay ahead of your competitors, you must develop a strategy.
But what will you do: Evolve or Repeat?
That seems a straight forward choice, right? If you repeat yourself, you will lose the customer’s interest and they will go to your competitor. If you evolve, you stay ahead in the competition for the customer’s attention. Well, it isn’t that straightforward. I will give you some examples.
In the publishing industry content has been king since the first publisher was founded in 1534. And people who work in the sector still believe that since the company owns the content, they can charge high amounts of fees for customers to subscribe to that content. But with the introduction of open source content in 1998 that whole picture started changing. And the shift got even larger when startups like Rocketlawyer mixed open source content with open source technology. Now the customer has a choice: pay high fees for subscriptions or go to the open source content which is free.
The customer however will go where his needs will take him.
The same happens with figure skaters. Say you are a National and International Champion and you have a certain set of skills which makes you win most of the competitions. A side-effect of being successful is that you will have a large fan base. But that fan base will get bored if you do the same routine over and over and that will not make you win any upcoming competitions. Your competitors will develop new routines in order to defeat you at your own game. Therefore you must develop new routines and new skills in order to keep winning competitions and keeping your fanbase. That requires a constant revision of your figure skate strategy.
The characteristic of the common customer is that he is always looking for new opportunities, new and cheaper alternatives and may leave you at any point time. And that is a characteristic which not only affects the publishing industry but all sectors. Something you may want to influence, but with the social media marketing efforts of today that will not do. Why? Because that trait is inherent to concept of ’customer’. It has been there for all time and won’t change.
The only thing you can do in order to retain the customer’s or fan’s attention is to evolve. Setting a new strategy, whether it be introducing a new product in order to keep your customer’s attention or showing a new routine in order to retain your fan base. And if you are lucky you will even gain new customers or fans.
But when you choose to repeat, you will just be fluffing up your old products with new tools or introducing a new axle to your old routine. Customers and fans alike will recognize what you are doing and will move their attention elsewhere. As a result, your business will decline even more as will your fan base.
Yes content may be king but you are not the sole owner of it. Stories have been around for ages and before print came into being these were shared by professional story tellers. The only cost might be to feast the story teller on food and drinks before he moved to another place to share his story.
In this new day and age you will have to at least move to a new business model of open source content. Sharing your content with customers will give you a word of mouth advantage. Customers spreading the word to other customers therewith opening a new market.
Yes, your old figure skating routine was a success, it won you lots of prizes, gave you a kind of hero state. But what we have learned from history is that heroes only become great and well-known when stories are shared of their feats. And these feats usually have 1 common denominator: growth. So, throw out the old and learn a new routine. It will keep fans busy talking about you, and will definitely give a you a head start upon your competitors.
When Andrew Poje and Kaitlyn Weaver decided to step down from international competition to become part of figure skate show, they did not know what it would bring them. They just wanted to get out of the usual routine. Just to see what it would bring them, learn new skills. Well that turned out to be a great success. They have just won the Canadian National Championships.
Luckily there are efforts in the publishing industry to show growth as well. On 15 January 2019 John Wiley and Projekt Deal closed a contract which allows researchers to publish articles open access in Wiley’s journals. And other open source, open science business models will be tested as well. It will still have to proof its success. But if it brings the same kind of success as it did Andrew Poje and his partner, other publishers are bound to follow.
Therefore in my opinion, you should constantly evolve not only to stay ahead of the competition but also to reinvent yourself in order to keep the customer’s attention or even gain a new market. Repeating yourself means too much reliance on the old ways, the old products, the old strategy. And old is not what the customer is looking for in these changing times.
