14Who Moved My Market?
Whom Would You Call?
Triumph International is a German lingerie manufacturing business. They wanted to sell bras online. Who did they call to make that happen? Well, of course they called whom any of us would call in that situation. They called the 200-year-old national postal service of Singapore.
Just as Triumph International was changing their business to meet the changing demands of their marketplace, Singapore Post had also changed their business to stay relevant in a marketplace that had gone from letters, postcards, and stamps to e-communication and e-commerce.
We all have to remagnetize.
Your market is changing. You may think your market is evolving slowly, with plenty of time for you to make adjustments and small changes as you go along. But the chances are that your market is changing, or about to change, much more rapidly than you imagine. You'd better be prepared to move quickly on to your “next act.”
It's become almost a tired old cliché to say that everything from customers to technology to society and the entire world is constantly and rapidly changing. Sadly, many businesses will intellectually acknowledge that change but then go back to doing business like they've always done it, as if somehow they were operating in a vacuum in which either change wasn't taking place, or that the changes that were happening would affect everyone but them.
Some of us are old enough to remember playing with old-fashioned horseshoe-shaped magnets when we ...
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