Et Tu Trends?
| Check out the remaining segments of this six-part series |
|---|
| Part 1: Setting or Following Construction Trends to Build Your Business |
| Part 2: Cutting the B2B Gordian Knot |
| Part 3: Adopting an Anticipate, React, Adapt B2B Strategy |
| Part 4: Et Tu Trends? |
| Part 5: “Other” Factors Influencing What You Think Increases Sales |
| Part 6: “Other” Factors Influencing What You Think Decreases Sales. |
You may have heard “Et Tu Brute?” which were Ceasar’s dying words (And you too Brutus?) as Brutus joined the other assassins to kill Ceasar. The idea here is do trends kill you too?
You’ve got your segments lined up, your strategies in place, what’s next? Do you follow trends, not follow them, or create your own?
Perhaps the toughest question: from all the segmentation you just did, who is really your customer? And the real question on top of that is, how do you find and retain these customers? This is the only way you can find out if trends will kill you or not.
You see, it’s really not about trends, which come and go; it’s about who your customer really is. Trends may attract clients, maintain your current clients, but it is the blocking and tackling that keeps customers viable. You need to know, in short, more than your customers know.
Ultimately, the customer is most often the consumer, but a manufacturer sometimes doesn’t aim at the consumer. Besides, consumers also require a definition. While all facility managers are consumers, not all consumers are facility managers. Buying radio commercials on a baseball game to reach facility managers is a “spray and pray” strategy that will waste your money fast. Here’s a better way.
After segmenting value chain participants like designers or architects (who follow trends closely), you’ll be faced with myriad possibilities to be looked at and that sometimes obstruct your own “perceptions.” In fact, the designers may very well lead a manufacturer astray since they are more “sensitive” to the comings and goings of trends.
Selling to showrooms or retailers as your target gives us a different set of problems. Besides taking us further from the consumer (end user), it’s hard to believe a retailer will “bleed” for a manufacturer. In customer service, for example, most showrooms will throw the consumer back to the manufacturer when things go South. Two-step and three-step distribution changes “who” the customer is as well. So. where to begin?
A better way is to do your own research, not just about trends but about segments and everything else discussed in this series and create your own “benchmarks” on a wide variety of topics which are chosen based on various events or activity occurring in the market. These benchmarks can be used to compare with other reported industry trends, a company’s internal analysis of trends, or other third-party information generated by other agencies such as the government or construction associations who produce trend information. Then, YOU decide to follow or create the trend!
Research: Why it is Important
Whatever research you conduct, there are other factors that influence a business strategy and whether sales might increase, decrease, or stay the same compared to the past year. Therefore, knowing the trends and topics in advance of these “other factors” currently impacting your business can be valuable in any company’s strategic planning and in developing those segments discussed earlier. In other words, if you’re prepared with your own research findings, you can look at these “other” factors and actually shape them to your own advantage, whether you believe they will influence sales or not.
Find out about these factors in part 5 of this series: “Other” Factors Influencing What You Think Increases Sales. And if you want a convenient single pdf file of the entire series, email inquiries@a-i-m.com. And thanks for reading!