Believe or Leave — Committing Yourself to a Difference, owning mind space is everything.
You will be in a meeting tomorrow morning after reading this note. I’m no bolt of lightning, but what's the chance of you stopping what you are doing and start doing something radical instead.
Rubi Sanchez co-founded Wearless Tech Inc. alongside Siva Nattamai, an ex-Tesla engineer.
You can’t just go on forever, floating with the tide of competitors in your category, monitoring the competition, conducting surveys to find out what your customers want now.
The biggest question to ask is, what do you want?
What do you want to communicate to the world. If the answer is "nothing in particular" then you may as well go straight home and stay there. You need to find out what your company has to offer that will, in some way enrich the world. And you must believe in that. You have to believe it so strongly that you become unique at what you do.
"CocoonCam is a “wearless” camera that allows parents to track heart rate, temperature and respiration.
If you think that sounds impossible then you will be forced out of the market sooner than you think. In the very near future there will be no room for the "me too" company. Everywhere you look there is an over abundance of stuff. There are too many shops, too many advertising messages, too many TV channels, hamburgers, cars, clothes and just about anything you can think of.
We live in an era of excess. Offering more of the same is not a viable option.
There is no point in competing for shelf space by simply making more noise. The only shelf space you need to dominate and own is that place in the human brain, my mind space.
Without mind space there is no room for your company in the market
in what now is the new value economy. Ask yourself this very minute — what is your unique value and can it be communicated and multiplied repeatedly.
At present the noise is deafening, we see approximately 3000 marketing messages each and every day. Amidst all this white noise you are expected to transmit your brand message. But how? The answer is surprisingly simple, yet incredibly difficult to live up to.
To make itself heard, a company has to offer the market something unique. To offer something unique, the company has to focus its activities. It has to appeal to narrower segments by marketing its brand globally. Reaching narrow segments means more focus on building values.
Privahini Bradoo, who studied at the University of Auckland, had a vision to build low-cost, environmentally friendly refineries to recycle e-waste that led to her founding BlueOak.
Courtesy of the Internet what is now happening is that remote customers in India will see your brand success elsewhere in their narrow focus of interest and love you for it. Every good company Googles daily, bench marking itself against the best in class.
This applies whether you are selling beautifully crafted timber cladding or merino clothing, the more your values circulate the globe and are respected amongst your peers the more you will be propelled as a company. This centrifugal effect at present goes unnoticed but is growing at the speed of sound.
Companies in my belief will be forced to think radically to survive in this new economy.
I see so many busy implementing IT structures and CRM systems in order to improve coordination of all their activities. But there is no point in these things for their own sake. So many I notice have not really stopped to define the essence of what they do. They fail to concentrate on finding a unique difference within a category.
BlueOak saw gold, silver, copper, palladium and other valuable metals going to waste and believed in doing something about it.
Most of the opportunities so often are right under their noses but they will never be discovered without disruptive thinking.
We hosted a professional services firm this week who seemed so puffed in their category, yet I know them to be good people with a solid delivery, its just that the world’s changed on them and the distinctive tune we developed 15 years ago is now passé.
Identifying the right people and giving birth to the metamorphosis is a major struggle. And, as Simon Holbrook our Chrysalis Innovation Director says “this stuff’s not for everyone.”
So leap up and gather your shakers and movers who believe, and kindly ask those that don’t to leave.
Owning mind space is everything.