5 years of learning...to stay on-course

Following on from last week’s Happy 5th Birthday post on what we had been up to, we promised some more information on things we had learned over the last 5 years.  As you would hope there is no shortage of things to learn in this line of work, and with the diversity of clients that we have had the pleasure of working with we get opportunities to uncover all kinds of interesting gems.  There are a few which are over-arching and seem to be more fundamental than others and interestingly the main one we have come across is:

Being On-Course is probably even more critical now that than it has ever been.

20 years ago it was undoubtedly the case that some elements of running a business were a lot easier.  The world was apparently “simpler”.  Some of this is down to the very technological changes that have “enabled” businesses to become more efficient, and some of these have also led to changes in the ways consumers are now able to interact with businesses.

Spring forward to today and we constantly hear of the importance of CX, UX, EX, engagement, authenticity, etc etc, as though they were new ideas - they aren’t.  You always had to engage with your customers and offer an experience at the very least commensurate with the value they perceived.  The best businesses always did this more authentically and that was often achieved through excellent employee engagement.  Indeed those businesses who had a clearly articulated strategy, vision and values that was well communicated, believed and followed throughout their organisation always seemed to be able to serve customers better, and grow sales better - for me working at Waitrose and then Bunnings many moons ago taught me the value of everyone in the entire company understanding where “due north” is, and I continue to bang on about it all of the time…. These businesses were relentless in making sure that everything that happened internally and externally was completely aligned with the overall strategy: from branding, to communications, to store layouts, individual KPI's and so on.

In the old world (not that it was THAT long ago!) it was almost impossible for customers to understand the corporate culture of most of the businesses they interacted with; or to judge their level of corporate responsibility (if by chance they felt the need to do that kind of thing); or to uncover how ethically they may or may not have sourced their products and raw materials.  The disconnects between the public facing side of the business and “behind the scenes” was significant and a number of businesses got away with it through good or great execution of at least a couple of P’s...normally product, price or promotion.

Of course these businesses would often not be quite as profitable as others, maybe didn’t grow quite as quickly with teams not working perfectly in unison, but they could muddle through.

The big differences appearing ever more rapidly and urgently today are to do with how customers are able to experience your business.  The customer journey can now start almost anywhere.  Today your employees from back to front of house are potentially on display through one social media platform or another.  Employees are now using Glassdoor and other employer review sites almost as religiously as the plethora of product review sites available to customers to find out about all of the dirty little secrets that would previously have remained exactly that.  Your brand and its communications are no longer just in one or two media which you have complete control over, they can be everywhere at any time, often with a scary lack of control!

That is at the extremes of the spectrum of success & failure.  The wonders of this overly connected world mean that it is ridiculously easy for consumers to sniff out whether your business really lives its vision and values....so beware of misaligned teams, objectives, communications in any business big or small, not only is it going to lead to the inefficiencies it always used to, it could also lead to diminishing sales and customer appeal that has the potential to  make those inefficiencies terminal.