The Entrepreneurial Success Bet
Value is in the eye of the beholder.
Whether something is considered valuable or not depends on human needs as well as human perception, and is ultimately reflected in human behavior.
Value creation therefore only succeeds if a company is consistently right in its assessment of what other people value. Some things change, others remain the same.
Every venture is thus like a bet. A bet on what will be valued by certain people today and in the future.
Such a bet on the future pays off when customers can recognize the value of the offerings for themselves and are willing to pay the hopefully well-calculated price. Then the company serves a purpose, and the paying customers make it a "meaningful matter" for everyone involved.
By the same token, the bet can also fail if the value is not recognized by enough people. In the worst case, because it was not delivered as promised. Often, however, it is also because it is assumed that a good product would market itself and automatically lead to the creation of a brand.
Above all, the bet is at risk of failing when circumstances and the associated needs or behaviors of customers change without the offerings keeping pace with these changes.
Challenges in Constant Flux: Successful Navigation in Dynamic Markets
A company's success often leads to blindness regarding necessary changes and can thus quickly become its own undoing. The quality of our decisions determines long-term success.
Those who rest on the success of yesterday and today may lose their business tomorrow. In buyer markets, dissatisfied customers simply move on to the next best alternative. And if they feel like it, they leave a bad review beforehand and share it with their network.
In dynamic times, where surprises and new ideas from the competition are part of everyday life, it is all the more important to be vigilant and to condense weak signals into significant ones.
To ensure competitiveness, it is crucial to repeatedly engage with the overarching dynamics and their effects on the lives of customers from various perspectives. In short: to learn how society is changing, what is important to customers, which of their wishes remain unfulfilled, and how these can be addressed.
Integrating contradictions and merging perspectives is best achieved through regular dialogue and discourse with employees, customers, and partners. Complexity requires diversity.
In this way, companies have a realistic chance to adapt their offerings and the associated experience to market requirements and to design them in a customer-centric manner. What exactly is meant by customer centricity?
- Customers have needs that they can articulate and want to see fulfilled by purchasing a product or service. As a service provider, the goal is to understand these needs and fulfill them as best as possible.
- Customers have demands that they cannot articulate because they are unaware of the problem and/or the solution. Identifying these unsolved problems and open wishes of the customer is essential to create suitable offerings and turn them into the needs of paying customers.
In many companies, there is a lack of an overarching and holistic view with sufficient distance from their own realities. The competition also usually remains unconsidered. As a result, important insights into market dynamics and changes on the customer side are missing. Usually, there is a lack of time and peace because strategic work is not prioritized.
Under these circumstances, necessary changes are recognized too late or not at all. Under-complex value creation and operational hecticness are the consequences of a lack of strategic work. Many companies turn it around to their own detriment: "We don't need a strategy because we are not a corporation, and we don't have time for strategy because we have to take care of the operational business."
This makes it difficult for many companies to keep up with changes in purchasing behavior, technological developments, and the high expectations of customers driven by the good ideas of the competition.
Strategic Foresight and Empathy as Prerequisites for Customer Centricity and Differentiation
For business owners, one of the greatest challenges is consequently to adapt their offerings and their communication in a timely manner to changing needs, motives, and behaviors in order to arouse interest (communication) and cover demand (offering).
Many business owners rightly ask themselves: How can this succeed (in the future) given so many alternative solutions and communication offers?
- Foresight: Keep an eye on the environment, the market, the customers, relevant trends, and the competition. Invest in the long-term healthy development of the business and brand. Create your own systems and assets that have the potential to gain value over the long term and help you achieve more autonomy.
- Customer Centricity: Do not orient business development toward technologies and trends, but toward the behavior and needs of the people you want to reach. Recognize and awaken unfulfilled demands. Put the customer benefit in focus and ensure that the organization enables everyone to contribute in a value-creating way.
- Empathy: Immerse yourself in the life and emotional worlds of the people to be reached in order to gain insights, address real needs, create resonance, and promote purchasing decisions.
- Differentiation: Create real added value and ensure that the offer remains in memory through quality, so as to be the only option at the right moments for the right people.
The first step for successful marketing in the digital age is to become aware of the overarching dynamics as well as your own target groups and their interests, needs, and motives, in order to ensure an offer that is perceived as valuable.
From cybernetics, we know: to be a match for external dynamics, organizations must also increase the dynamics of their own system. Only then do companies have a chance to design their products, their service, and their communication in a customer-centric way and make them an unforgettable experience—before the competition has already taken care of it.
Despite all the external change, humans remain largely unchanged in their essence. How we perceive complexity and dynamics and subsequently react to them certainly changes through the respective context. Engaging with external dynamics therefore inevitably leads us to the psycho-dynamics that take place within us and are embedded in social systems.
Those who better penetrate these connections in their complexity and translate them into entrepreneurial actions will win.
How about you? Do you regularly put yourself in a position to recognize what people consider relevant, useful, and valuable today and tomorrow?
The following article series will help you better understand and utilize relevant external developments as well as the driving forces of your ideal customers.
For more clarity and focus.
Overview of the Article Series
- Why yesterday's business success and today's operational hecticness put your company at risk
- System optimization vs. system overcoming: why continuous improvement stands in the way of real innovations
- How system overcoming succeeds: from the obsession with optimization to strategic conviction
- Relevance, Resonance, and Acceptance: The Success Criteria of Every Entrepreneurial Bet
