Sometimes Survival IS Success!

Ok, I must confess, I cannot help but take selfish advantage of the current business and economic circumstances to point out the benefits of customer experience success™.   I know, I promised the customer experience success™ equation but sometimes opportunities present themselves that are just too good to pass up.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the potential serious ramifications of what transpired recently with Bear Stearns and the Federal bail-out.  There’s more than enough written by now about the enormity of impact of a major institution in the financial market going from over $160/share to a paltry $2/share

I even read an article where the words “Great Depression” were drudged up as visual illustration to describe the potential fall-out for our economy.  Wow!  If there were any doubts (and there should not have been) about the U.S. economy being in a recession, hopefully the rose-colored glasses are now off and in the trash where they belong.  I know for myself once I saw the reactive stance Starbucks took toward product pricing and service levels; the writing was on the proverbial wall and had been for quite some time.

However, these are the times when the truly smart business leaders get noticed.   We have a saying, “all boats rise on the incoming tide.”  This is a pithy way of stating the fact already mentioned earlier in this blog that much of what is written in the business press about the glories of this or that CEO or EVP within a company is usually based off of a very minute period of time. 

Everyone can look like a hero if you only evaluate their 15 minutes of fame.  The real evaluation of a business leader’s ability is their amount and level of success(es) over time, through many business cycles, and even across different companies in which they may have tried to work their version of business magic.  You just cannot learn much of any value from a one-trick pony.  But that’s just my bias.

The questions inevitably come up during this type of market period as to the value of both market research and customer experience.   The questions are universal:  could you have predicted this?  What could have been done to prevent it using customer knowledge?  Wouldn’t it have happened anyway?  A firm that size had to use some method of tapping into the universal customer consciousness and this still happened, doesn’t that in itself negate what you do as a business?  Etc, etc, etc.

In this particular instance, a business leader would have had to have their head totally buried in the sand not to see this coming several months ago.  To the usefulness of market research question, there was plenty of good worthwhile market research data showing consumer confidence trends, anticipated buying habit changes, and more to KNOW something bad was going to happen.  There is no excuse for what happened with Bear Stearns. 

However, there are reasons.  The number one reason is again what I’ve already talked about in previous blogs.  Companies are led by people and being people, business leaders are just as prone to getting caught up in a gold rush, lemming mentality as any gritty, toothless miner that risked their life years ago to cross the country for California gold.  The big difference is while the miner risked just his life and potentially that of his family.  Today’s business leaders put much more at risk, including the savings and future retirements of thousands of employees.

So, where does something like customer experience success™ fit in this and answering questions the current market situation raises?

From the previous post (“Are We Practicing Customer Experience Success™ or Doing Market Research”) you now should know the level of commitment a company has to make to do business with us through our customer experience success™ program.  It’s a lot of work, it’s not easy work, and it’s not for every company!

Having said that, this current situation allows me to trumpet the benefits of the program in companies where we have implemented it. 

1)  Our clients knew “something” (not good) was going to happen in the consumer marketplace over two years ago.  It had different definitions depending on the industry the client was in.

2)  They knew reduced spending and increased price sensitivity were going to become hallmarks of future business positioning for their continued existence.

3)  Depending on their current market position relative to competitors and consumers’ reaction to marketplace trends, several client companies knew they had to change their entire business structure in order to survive.

4)  They also knew what realistic options were open to them and which had the highest probability of achieving success, or survival, among customers and potential customers.

What happened with our clients?  Again, it goes back to knowing that leaders of companies’ belief in and ability to act upon knowledge, even when that knowledge is handsomely derived, ultimately drive the outcome of a company’s future survival.

With a large retailer, they took serious pre-emptive actions to stream-line their company and bring it in line with the type of retailer we both envisioned surviving what we heard could happen in the marketplace from our customer pulse-taking.  Part of this action was a totally new campaign focused on a “value” message, something this firm had ardently avoided since its inception.   

Pundits, college professors, Harvard business PhD’s, etc, universally pooh-poohed and even harshly harangued this client’s revised messaging strategy when it was first announced.  The competitive reaction was swift to nullify it.  Not at all unexpectedly from our client’s perspective.  What the experts, and the competitors, did not understand was the immense amount of effort driven within the company to prepare for what in effect is a business drought. 

Re-positioning was absolutely necessary for this company to survive moving forward.  The new messaging campaign is fully able to be supported from the retail floor through to the corporate headquarters for many years to come.  In short, this company will survive, and is even now slowly growing at a time when others in their industry are not, and when others are pulling in the reigns without a plan of action in place.  In retrospect, we look like geniuses and are admired as such in this company. 

Among another client in the financial industry, we are feeling the pressure of the housing collapse, the credit crunch and Wall Street’s turmoil in very real ways.  Again, the foreknowledge of what was coming was there many many months ago even for this company.  However, the drive for revenue growth, making profit numbers for the Street, and just that ego thing I referred to about business leaders – all have taken their toll. 

Decisions were in place and actions taken by various divisions of the company that did not mesh with what was being forecast from a customer perspective.  The only upside is that the “hit” is less than it could have been for this company since they started to redirect energies and address fundamental weaknesses in their mortgage business earlier than most.  They will survive!  And that is as good as it gets in their industry right now.  Survival alone is success.

In summary and then I’ll get off my soapbox, can market research and customer experience success™ be used to show the direction of future trends?  Of course!  Can they be used to illustrate where a company could end up depending on future customer trends?  Yes! 

But only customer experience success™ takes the game to the point of answering that major criticism of standalone market research projects – what options are viable and open to us within our employee, customer, and potential customer base? 

Ok, again, more on the customer experience success™ equation later, really!