Learning to Change
Alan Mitchell writes at Right Side Up about the difficulty of adapting old competencies and business practices to new market situations.
It is one thing, in the spirit of Ted Levitt, to declare that you are in the transportation business, not the railroad business. But it is quite another, to build a business to satisfy this broader demand.
Commenting on the FT's new year's editorial, Alan says :
"Real value-creating businesses do not revolve around abstractions like ‘music’ or ‘researched, edited information’. They revolve around the nitty-gritties: the exact bundle of value, how it is distributed, purchased and used, at what cost and for what revenues: all the things that are increasingly not the same. The market for quality information may well grow. Whether it grows within the framework of an institution like the FT is a very different matter indeed."
He's right, of course. In the grand scheme of things the question is not whether the skills of FMCG marketing may or may not transfer to a B2B environment. But whether either transfers to a flexible, unbundled, collaborative (add more 'modern' adjectives of your choice) person-centric environment.
The question is not what Citibank can learn from Kelloggs, but what both can learn from E-Bay? Or Google? Or MyOffers? or Skype?
In the end, It is not revolutions that pose a threat for brand marketers, but 'disruptive continuity' - the sort of continuity that makes physical albums, and pre-printed books increasingly redundant.
As P&G's CMO James Stengel is quoted as saying: " The traditional marketing model we all grew up with is obsolete."
If so, it is incumbent upon marketers to use their abundant imagination to replace it, rather than defend the status quo.
Editor
