Responding to Fairfax posting a $2.7billion loss, the CEO of media agency Starcom, John Sintras (reportedly) reflected on Fairfax’s position by saying ‘the sector is eating a massive shit sandwich’. Well, times are tough for the newspaper business.
So what do you do if your own business is eating a massive shit sandwich?
Well you have to get back to basics. Let’s go way back to the 1960 and a paper written by Theodore Levitt titled ‘Marketing Myopia’. It provides some real insight and value for us today. Let me summise the basics from his work.
Levitt believed that organisations failed to continue their growth because of a lack of leadership. More specifically a lack of vision to identify expansion opportunities into sectors adjacent to which they were already operating. You can start to see why Fairfax and other players in the newspaper game might be struggling.
But the key principle in Levitt’s work and that which has been studied in Universities around the world since, is the need to be customer oriented instead of being product oriented. So you have to ask yourself, is your business customer oriented? Or is it product oriented?
Don’t produce and distribute a product, produce and distribute an outcome and you will hopefully avoid the whole shit sandwich situation.
Take some time away from your business and look at it from afar. If Fairfax had identified in time that their business model was based around an advertising product that was not delivering the consumer the outcome it was when the business model was set up, then maybe they wouldn’t be in this trouble.
You may identify similar issues with your own business. You might identify new opportunities in adjacent sectors. But you have to step away and you have to ask your customers.
Download: the Marketing Myopia.