Why One Who Failed, Failed...
- Rahul K.
- Jul 23, 2016
- 3 min read
Everyone and everything, which was once best has been doomed.
Like humans, even machines as well as businesses don’t last forever in the same form rather they need to evolve with time. They die after their life-cycle is over or I must say they are replaced by their succeeding (evolved) generation. Not only is it important to understand what should be your next move but also what shouldn’t be. Not doing right is still an opportunity, but doing wrong ensues death.
I recently studied the history of creation, rise, and fall (or struggle) of over 30 different companies spread across the world. These companies were from the diverse set of industries including Apparel (Abercrombie and Fitch, American Apparel etc.), Technology (Kodak, Nokia, BlackBerry, etc.), Airlines (PanAm, Malaysian, Pakistan International Airlines, etc.), Retail network (Sears, Target Canada, etc.), and Food retail (Quiznos etc.). This analysis signified that it is not just the technology that’s always progressing, the upward trend is rather evident across the world, and across each and every industry unit.
It always takes lot of effort, research, and hell of a lot of luck to earn recognition and to build a brand. How we see most of the companies today are not what they were when they began. Nokia was a rubber based company, Sony started with telecommunication research, Sears sold watches at first, and BlackBerry changed the way people communicated through introducing Pagers into the market, and so on. The list is endless. The companies, which are designated to have fallen prey to active inertia were once the companies which completely revamped their business line. In this blog I won’t focus on what and why one has lost but instead I will focus on how can we save. Before going ahead I would like to present an analogy of children’s independence. Until the last decade children were dependent on their parents to make choices until they reached an age of 15, while now a child starts making choices right at the age of 9. Current situations with consumer behavior have been the same, the consumers who sustained the lifecycle of products for over 50 years are now killing the products in less than 10 years, in some cases it is even less than a year. Unlike baby boomers, today’s millennials are not afraid of change. And this fearlessness has perished the immunity of established corporations. There were 2 reasons of which the companies, who lost, had their market share lost to the unexpected competitors:
They didn’t expect (accept) divorce to be an occurrence between human world and material world.
They failed to understand and cater to their target segment in the rush of catering to everyone and anyone.
Each of these 2 reasons, in their several forms of existence, are embodied into the history of every business failure. Growth is a desire of any money making machine and so is a business. And the key to growth is “not losing focus on target segment and work towards expanding the size of the target segment, instead of expanding target segments itself”.
With focus comes understanding and close bonding with consumers, which ultimately helps in understanding consumers’ needs. Stay close to your consumers and understand them before anyone else does. This ongoing relationship between you and your existing consumers is something you have earned in return of your time spent. It is right to say that death is inevitable, but it is not wrong to deny that death can definitely be delayed. Don’t be fascinated by what others are good at, rather identify your niche and never fall prey of the belief that this is the end of innovation. Create, Educate, Innovate and Celebrate!!
