THE STORY
When I started my first semester at the university, I was
surprised how friendly all the students were. I had never seen such friendly
people. I thought to myself that this was going to be a great experience.
However, when I started my second semester as a freshmen, I
noticed that the other students in my classes were a lot less friendly. At first, I thought it was an odd coincidence
that I just so happened to get friendly students in all my first semester
classes, and unfriendly students in all my second semester classes.
Eventually, I figured out the real cause of the change. In
my first semester, I was surrounded by other first semester freshmen. We were all new to the university. Most of us
did not have friends on campus because we didn’t know anyone there yet. Because
of the strong desire to have friends, these first semester freshmen were acting
aggressively friendly in order to fill that desire.
By the end of the first semester, these freshmen had made a
sufficient number of friends. The need
was satisfied. Therefore, they relaxed in the second semester and were not as
desperate to aggressively make new friends. Hence, they were not as “friendly”
to me.
That is why, when I’m speaking to someone who is going off
to the university for the first time, I tell them to be careful in choosing the
classes and places where they hang out in that first semester. After all, the
people you meet in that first semester are the ones most likely to become your
lifelong friends long after university life is over.
When students first go to college, there is a brief window
of time when they are aggressively seeking out friends. In a matter of weeks,
however, that window gets closed. Enough
friends have been made during the short window of opportunity that afterwards the
aggressive behavior goes away. They are
now less likely to work abnormally hard to make more friends.
Windows of opportunity also exist in the marketplace. There
are brief moments of time when an individual is more open to creating new
purchasing behaviors or preferences. Then the window quickly closes and they become
“less friendly” towards changing those behaviors/preferences. Habit and routine
takes over; and market share hardens like concrete.
There are many triggers which can cause these windows of
opportunity to open. Moving to a new location, like a university campus, is one
such trigger. Not only may you need to be more open to finding friends after
moving, but you now may have to find a new grocery store to prefer, a new doctor,
a new hair stylist, the best place to service your car, and so on. You are much
more receptive at that time to consider new alternatives. But soon, you make
all of those choices and the window of opportunity closes.
Other triggers which can open us up to abnormally high openness
to change in behavior include getting married, having one’s first child,
getting a big promotion, buying your first home, a change in a company’s CEO, a
drastic change in the economy (up or down), revolutionary new technology which
makes the status quo behavior obsolete, and so on.
Most strategic plans include a desire to change marketplace
behavior to the benefit of the company/brand. Since triggers can have such a
strong impact on susceptibility to changes in behavior, it usually makes sense
to consider triggers as part of your strategic plan.
The principle here is that windows of opportunity are only
open for brief moments. Therefore, finding ways to quickly identify and exploit
these windows should be a priority in most strategies. If you wait until the
third semester to make friends in college, you will probably end up with fewer
friends than if you started in the first semester, when making new friends is
easier. Similarly, if you are slow in reacting to triggers in the marketplace,
you will miss out on the benefits inherent when windows of opportunity are
open.
Here are three suggestions on how to better exploit triggers
and windows of opportunity as part of your strategy.
1. Understand the Relationship
Between Triggers and Your Business
Not all triggers are equally important to your business or
your strategy. Therefore, if you want to
exploit trigger points and their windows of opportunity, you must first
understand which ones are most important to your business, and why. It is only
through understanding the relationships that you can properly determine which
triggers to exploit, and how to exploit them.
For example, I know of a church that wanted to grow. It did
research and found that the people most likely to consider seeking out a new
church were those who were new to the community. That was their key trigger
point. Additional research showed them
that the primary reason why people moved into their community was due to a job
transfer.
Therefore, the church built a strategy around seeking out and
appealing to those with job transfers.
They took out ads in the airport (the place where many of these people first
experienced the community). They formed close relationships with the companies
bringing in the most new employees to the community. As a result of strategic
actions such as these, many newcomers ended up choosing their church and it
grew very rapidly.
So do your homework to learn which triggers to exploit as
well as discover the best way to exploit the window of opportunity while it is
open.
2. Prepare in
Advance
Because these windows of opportunity may not be open very
long, one needs to act quickly—as soon as the window opens. Otherwise, by the time you figure out what to
do, it may be too late.
In a prior blog, I talked about how Caterpillar did a
scenario analysis of what would happen in significant economic downturn. They
calmly built what they believed to be the best course of action under such a
scenario. Then, when the great recession
began, Caterpillar realized that the significant economic downturn trigger had
occurred, so the quickly implemented the plan built for that scenario.
The plan worked brilliantly because it was not hastily put
together during a period of panic. When the trigger came, they pulled out the
plan and implemented it immediately with full confidence.
Other companies, like Proctor & Gamble, were criticized
for being too slow and indecisive when the great recession came. And they suffered for it.
In another example, a friend of mine told me a story about
beer in Chicago. Budweiser had been a strong competitor in Chicago, but
sometime back around the 1970s or so, the Budweiser distributors suffered from
a strike. Old Style beer, a smaller
player from out of town, knew a strike at Budweiser in Chicago was a potential
trigger point, so they prepared for it.
When the strike occurred, Old Style immediately flooded the
market to fill the void. They positioned themselves as being the one loyal to
the citizens of Chicago. They made close ties with the local sports teams. They advertised aggressively to position
themselves as Chicago’s beer. As a result, when the strike came, the former
Budweiser drinkers (who now had to find a substitute) chose Old Style and many
stayed with Old Style after the strike was over. Old Style became the strong leader in the
Chicago market. It took many decades before Budweiser regained the share lost
due to the strike. All because Old Style was prepared in advance for the
trigger.
3. Utilize Modern
Technology
Thanks to the technological advances in “Big Data”
crunching, and the data available due to social media, it has never been easier
to find out when individuals have reached a trigger point. One can now set up massive, yet finely
targeted marketing campaigns to reach individuals precisely at the point when
the trigger goes off.
I recently attended a big data conference and was amazed by
how advanced the tools are becoming (and how the prices to use them are
dropping). It would be foolish not to consider them as key tools in your
strategic arsenal.
However, given privacy concerns and other such issues, one
needs to be careful. Back in February of
2012, Target stores got into some trouble for being too indiscriminate in the
process. Due to big data analysis,
Target determined that if a customer suddenly started buying certain products (out
of a list of 29 products), there was an extremely high likelihood that the
person was pregnant. So once someone started buying these products, Target
immediately went into action with their pregnancy and new baby promotions.
Unfortunately, one of these promotional packages ended up
going to a young teenaged girl. The girl’s
father became irate and went to Target to complain. But then, a few days later, the father
apologized to Target because he learned in the interim that his daughter was
indeed pregnant. Thanks to big data, Target knew before the girl’s father.
Since then, Target is more subtle in how they exploit the
data.
The best time to convince people to switch allegiance to
your brand is when people are most prone to consider making a change.
Therefore, effective strategies can be built around finding and then exploiting
the triggers which cause people to be more susceptible to changes in behavior.
The best way to do this is by:
1.
Understanding the relationship of your brand to various
triggers.
2.
Preparing in advance a strategy to exploit that
trigger, so you can act upon it immediately.
3.
Carefully using all the modern big data and social
media tools which make finding and exploiting trigger points easier.
Another thing I remember from my college days was that at
the beginning of each school year, one of the beer companies would sponsor a
huge free concert on campus. They understood that those first semester freshmen
were not only making new friend choices, but new beer brand choices. Are you
the one exploiting these types of windows of opportunity, or are you letting
the competition get the upper hand?
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