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Business Rule #27:
Spread the Word
April 29, 2005
by Caroline Pfouts
Being the best isn’t enough. You have to get the
word out.
You can paint the most beautiful, artistic, poignant picture in the world. But if you hang it in a closet, no one can appreciate it. Worse yet, no one will buy it. And there certainly won’t be a bidding war between competing art collectors. Great sales results require marketing.
As part of his strategy, Alex Thomason hoped to capitalize on the tension between Kendra Todd and Craig Williams by choosing Tana Goertz to join him on the Net Worth team. Sure enough, left alone with no other teammates to act as a buffer, Kendra and Craig argued non-stop. They disagreed on everything from the design for the limited-edition T-shirt, to the pricing. It seemed that whatever one said, the other had to dispute it on principle.
Luckily for Magna, they didn’t let that get in their way. Even with all of their utter contempt for each other, Kendra and Craig had everything they needed to succeed at this week’s challenge. Teammates don’t have to like each other to do an effective job. As a manager, it’s important to remember that your job is to lead, not to make friends.
Kendra also understood that if she didn’t take on the job of the Project Manager for this task, Craig would ignore all of her input. Kendra has been an effective “team of one” before. As Project Manager on the brochure for the Plymouth Solstice, she pulled an all-nighter when the rest of her team went to bed.
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Granted, she completely disregarded Craig’s suggestion that a star design would be more universal (i.e. appeal more to men) than the heart design. Although Craig was right, the difference wasn’t enough to affect the outcome. Even with a somewhat inferior design, Magna still raised more than twice the revenue Net Worth made on this challenge.
Now, I have a friend who is a major movie fan. He has a catalog of tens of thousands of films on video. He even had special cabinets installed along the walls of his media room to hold all of the tapes. Even so, his collection has a very limited value. Why? It’s all on Betamax.
Just ask anyone who remembers the old Sony tape machines from twenty years ago, and they’ll tell you that Beta had a sharper, clearer picture than VHS. It hardly mattered. Just having a superior product wasn’t enough for Beta’s survival. While Sony delighted in its exclusivity, the VHS manufactures were busy flooding the market with film titles. Who cares how clear the picture is, if it’s not the movie you want to watch? No one wants to have shelves and shelves of tapes for a video player that has been discontinued. Beta taught the entertainment industry the importance of software versus hardware—and the value of getting the right kind of information into the market in a timely fashion.
What decided the Hanes T-shirt contest wasn’t the difference in the designs, the delay caused by Net Worth’s trip to Staten Island for beads, or the pricing variance. What won the victory for Magna was Kendra asking about the art collectors who were already fans of Romeo Britto’s work.
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You have to get the word out.
