Life Without Television

You can always beat the big guy. If you’re starting out in a business, there are always some people, some companies that are big names, and it looks like they’ve got all the bases covered. But you have two big advantages.

First of all, when you’re small, you’re agile. You can change quicker than the big company. When an organisation grows it has a lot invested in its existence, and risks start to look less enticing. So it starts to play safe, it relies on what has worked in the past, it gets choked up in its own bureaucracy.

Secondly, you’ve got creativity. There will always be the new. Creativity is about difference, newness or even just rearranging. Maybe Google dominates search, but what if search changes? Auction sites might find it hard to supplant eBay, but how about changing the nature of online auctions?

I’m not giving you solutions, because the answers are far from easy. But a solution is always possible.

Let your customers go quickly and painlessly.

When someone decides that they no longer want your services, it’s usually too late to do anything about it. What you can do, is act professionally and make the process of switching suppliers uncomplicated and swift.

A bureaucratic, unhelpful attitude does not reverse a bad opinion, it confirms it.

It’s also worth remembering that when customers leave, it can be because of budget, location and just not being a great fit with you or your company. If you make their final experience a negative one, they’re much less likely to recommend you to someone who could be your customer.

Recently I heard an SEO say that ethics have no place in marketing. I wanted to argue with that, but I feel that in some ways he is right.

The problem is, before you are a marketer, you’re a human being. And being human is all about ethics.

Seth Godin points out in a post about the Kindle that the costs for paper and inventory disappear for Amazon when supplying books. So why do those books cost the same as their physical versions? Actually for someone who buys second-hand, they’re more expensive.

For economists the short answer is always “because that’s what people are prepared to pay”. But I wonder if Amazon have a smarter idea.

The proprietary format that Amazon uses creates a kind of scarcity. If you want to read a book on the Kindle, you have to get it from Amazon. So you’re stuck with the price they charge. This all changes when someone starts to provide an alternative service which seems like a pot of gold waiting to be plundered. Or so it would be, except customers wouldn’t be able to read your downloads on a Kindle. So anyone who wants to go into competition has to create their own hardware or rely on the existing offerings. Which are kind of underwhelming.

In a way it makes sense to take advantage of this, but what irks me is that if I was a Kindle user, I’d feel kind of cheated every time I downloaded a book. As a long-term strategy you could do better.