"There's one thing about feet, everybody's got two of them," the general manager at WMUS-Muskegon, Mich. told his sales department to encourage them to sell radio ads to shoe stores.
I was in the room and while everyone was groaning, a light was clicking on for me.
Shoe stores weren't on my account list and never would be.
Even though I saw the wisdom in what the boss had said, there just wasn't enough money in Mom and Pop shoe stores for me to clear a decent profit on the time I would have to invest to make the sale.
However, the idea, "Everybody's got two of them," did ring a bell with me. That bell sounds like this:
1. Figure out what people will want and what they will need -- often they are two different things.
2. Decide how you are going to give it to them.
3. If you give them what they want, even if they don't know they want it, what you want will naturally follow.
Did you see what I did there? I didn't write, "Give them what they need and want." I wrote, "Figure out what people WILL want and what they WILL need."
You have to be the leader. Decide what your customers are going to need and want before they need and want it.
Henry Ford did that with the automobile.
How many people do you think wanted a car in the 1890s or even before 1910? How many people do you think felt they needed a car?
We'd still be using horses and buggies if Ford left it up to a turn of the century focus group.
Ford didn't invent the automobile. But he came up with a way to make cars affordably so that people would want them and would then decide they needed them, and in the end would be able to buy them.
Did he wait for the market to develop? No, he did not. Ford created the market and said, "If I gave people what they wanted, I would have given them faster horses.”
What have you done that the focus groups told you was impossible?
Just send me an email to rod@rodkackley.com or drop a comment here and we will share it with others who are building their own businesses.
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the stories of the entrepreneurs who build a cluster of prosperity in Grand Rapids, while the rest of Michigan was crashing down around them. There were plenty of people who told them it wouldn’t work.
A free read of the first three chapters is available on this app.
Last Chance Mile is available wherever books are sold online including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iTunes, as well as on the shelves of Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street, and West Coast Coffee-Monroe Center, Grand Rapids.
To order a personally autographed hardcover or softcover edition, just click the Add To Cart button on my website, www.rodkackley.com
No comments:
Post a Comment