Strategic Planning Analogy #543: Starving Artist

THE STORY
I love writing music. I’ve put together 16 CDs worth of music. The problem is that I have odd tastes in music. As a result, almost nobody else likes my music.

I suppose I could write a different kind of music—in a style more popular with the masses. But that would be less satisfying to me, both from an artistic as well as creative point of view. So I continue to write my music in a way that brings me great personal pleasure, even though it means that others find it difficult to listen to.

It’s a good thing I’m not trying to earn a living with my music. Otherwise, I’d be one of those “starving artists.”

THE ANALOGY
It’s one thing to get great personal pleasure from what you do. It’s quite another thing to provide great pleasure to your customers/audience. Quite often, what gives you great pleasure does nothing for your customer and vice versa. I painfully learned this lesson with my music writing.

For a hobby, that’s not such a big deal, but for a business, that can destroy you.

I know that there is a lot of writing out there about trying to make the work environment enjoyable for employees. Many go further to talk about making the work projects themselves enjoyable and satisfying for employees.

This seems particularly important when companies want to hire a lot of great engineers, for which there seems to be a perpetual shortage. For example, Google has all of its exciting “Moon Shot” projects in part as a lure to get great engineers, who want to work on cool things.

But at the end of the day, businesses must ultimately provide some sort of excitement and pleasure for their customers. If they don’t, those customers will go somewhere else. Happy employees can be a great thing, but happy employees producing unwanted stuff doesn’t get you very far.

I may be content to be a starving artist with my music writing hobby, because I’m more interested in my hobby pleasing me than pleasing others. But you don’t want to have a “starving artist” company, since starving companies eventually die.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that long-term success in business requires receiving an income from what your company does which exceeds its costs. Ultimately, the ones who buy what you’re selling determine your income. Therefore, if you are not offing something which people want to buy, your business is in trouble.

This sounds pretty obvious and you would think it does not need to be said. However, in the January 1, 2015 edition of Fortune magazine, they quote a study by CB Insights which caught my attention on this topic. CB Insights analyzed 101 failed startup companies to determine why these firms failed. Their conclusion? The number one reason these startups failed was “no market need.”

In other words, we’ve got tons of companies out there built around a strategy to create something that people don’t want. Incredible!

How did we get to a point where companies no longer think that they have to deliver something desired by customers (or don’t do enough work to find out what they really want)? I think it boils down to three things:

1. Easy Start-Up Funding

First, there is a lot more investment capital looking for great start-ups than there are great start-ups to invest in. With all that investment capital looking for a place to invest, you get money pouring into poorly conceived business models.

Why worry about getting money from customers when you can get all the funding you need from private capital? In a sense, capitalism gets distorted to the point where the private capital funds become the “customer” of the start-up. As long as you please them, you don’t have to worry about pleasing the true end customer. I spoke more about that in an earlier blog.

Living off equity funding may work for a while, but eventually the investors want to get a return on that investment. This requires either: finding more, bigger investors (sort of like a pyramid scheme), or getting the real customers to pay up. And it is the time gap from start-up to pay-up that allows businesses to get a bit lazy about staying laser-focused on pleasing the customer.

2. Disconnect Between Payer and User

Second, a lot of the startup business models have the user pay virtually nothing to use the product. Instead, the money is to come from advertisers or a small subset of “premium” users (the “Freemium” model). By disconnecting the user from the payer, one can get confused about who the customer is and how to please them.

In the advertising model, you have to please the advertisers in order to have a winning business model. They are the ones who pay, so they are your customer. However, many firms have taken the path of Twitter, and spent so much time making the users happy that they failed to figure out how to make the real customers (the advertisers) happy. That is a losing long-term model.

In the end, you typically get what you pay for. If you pay nothing, then you are less attached in your usage. Look at all the free games out there. To survive, the game businesses need to convert many of the free gamers into premium gamers who are willing to pay extra to get tokens or weapons or powers or whatever. It appears that people get bored quickly with these free games and often switch to another free game rather than pay in order to continue in the old game.

It seems the game wasn’t as good as the developers thought. It was played because it was free, not because it was good. Without the discipline of getting the user to pay, it is easy to build something that is not satisfying enough to ultimately produce income.

  

3. Building what the Builders Want

The third reason why we see companies not building what the customers want is because many of these businesses are more interested in building what the builders want to build. This seems especially true in engineering-driven firms. The engineers want to work on interesting challenges, cool features, and be the first to do something that will impress other engineers. Add to that the fact that the millennial generation (who tend to be running these startups) are more interested in attaching social causes to their business aspirations (sustainability, helping the less fortunate, etc.).

As mentioned earlier, many of today’s businesses focus on pleasing the employees over pleasing the customers. As a result, we end up with a lot of interesting challenges solved, a lot of jealous engineers, and some social good—but unsatisfied customers. We need look no further than the Amazon Fire phone. It did some cool stuff, like making a 3D screen without the need for special glasses. Unfortunately, customers weren’t looking for these things, so the phone was a flop.

Just because an offering does some cool stuff does not mean it is doing stuff people are willing to pay enough for to justify the cost of the feature. Truly “cool” stuff is stuff the customer wows over, not what the engineers or geeks wow over.

I read an article recently about how many retailers were spending all of their development money on building cool apps, when what the customer really wanted was just an easier way to sort through the inventory on line and easily make a purchase. Sure, inventory and purchase don’t sound as cool to an employee as building a lot of snazzy apps, but that’s what gets the customer excited…so it should be what we focus on.

Getting Back to The Customer

So although making employees happy is a good thing, the better thing is to make the customer happy. Happy customers pay the bills that keep you in business.

Don’t fall into the trap of forgetting the customer because you have tons of investor cash, a free offering, and happy employees. Eventually, the business needs to create income and the sooner you figure that out, the better. The idea of “we’ll build the cool thing now and figure out how to monetize it later” is what leads to that earlier finding that most startups fail because “there was no market need.”

  

SUMMARY
Successful businesses need a business model where the money coming in ultimately exceeds the money going out. That only happens if you are offering something so pleasing to the customer that they are willing to pay more for it than what it costs to deliver. Therefore, the key to any business strategy is to please customers enough to make this happen. If you forget to focus on pleasing customers and instead focus on pleasing investors, employees or non-paying users, you can end up with a broken business.

FINAL THOUGHTS
There may be some creative satisfaction in being the starving artist, but you’re still starving.

Strategic Planning Analogy #340: The Box vs. The Contents

THE STORY
A short time ago, I bought a fancy new water dish for our cats. It came with an electric pump. The pump pushed the water up over the outside of an inverted bowl. The cats were then supposed to lick the water as it ran down the bowl.

The manufacturer claimed that cats would love this fancy device. After all, cats are supposed to prefer gurgling running water over still water. In addition, this fancy device increased the levels of oxygen in the water, which is supposed to make it tastier.

I assembled the fancy water dispenser and waited for the cats to show their loving approval by instantly licking the water off the inverted bowl. Instead, I found one of the cats crawling into the box the product came in and playing with the cardboard flaps on the top of the box.

Apparently, the box was more interesting to the cat than its contents.

THE ANALOGY
This experience with my cats should be familiar to anyone who has given gifts to small children. Quite often, they find the gift box to have greater play value than the toy that came in the box.

I have seen many parents get upset when the expensive toy is tossed aside as preference is given to the cheap box. But I say so what if the box is getting more attention than the contents. The child is happy and having fun. Isn’t that they whole point of giving in the first place?

Many business people also find themselves like those gift givers. They struggle mightily to create a superior product that their customers are supposed to love and then are disappointed when the product is ignored because the consumers are more interested in something deemed by the manufacturers as “superficial.”

“What’s the matter with these stupid customers?” they may ask. “Don’t they realize that my product is superior? Why are they distracted by these superficial things?”

My response? If something other than the actual product is what is making the customer happy, then perhaps you should be paying attention to more than just the product. Consider the entire package when developing your strategy. The whole idea is to make the customer happy, and if happiness comes from something other than the product itself, then that’s okay…just figure out a way to win on these non-product attributes.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here has to do with recognizing the difference between a focus on the product and a focus on the customer experience. A focus on the product tends to be internally oriented—a focus on what I do to make the product superior. A focus on customer experience is externally oriented—a focus on how the customer interacts with the product. If you focus on the customer experience, you may find that the customer is not looking for ultimate product superiority. What they want is a better total experience, and that can only be improved by looking attributes external to the product.

Bleach
For example, consider bleach. The purpose of bleach is to cleanse and disinfect. Therefore, one might think that to make customers happy, one should focus on making superior bleach—one that is the absolute best at cleaning and disinfecting.

The problem is this…it is difficult to make any one formulation of bleach meaningfully superior at cleaning and disinfecting. They all perform pretty much the same.

So what did Clorox do? They focused on the packaging. They created a unique spout on the top of their bleach bottle which reduced splashing. This made it easier to pour the bleach and less likely that any of the bleach would accidentally spill onto the person doing the pouring. Like in the story, they focused on the box (the bottle) rather than the contents (the bleach).

From a consumer experience perspective, this was a huge benefit. If bleach accidentally spills on a user, it can ruin the clothes they are wearing. By reducing the risk of ruining clothes being worn, Clorox made a superior user experience. Even though Clorox did nothing to improve the performance of the product (the bleach), they made the customer happier. And isn’t that the point?

Beer
I was working on a project one time to try to do some business in Mexico. During my conversations with one of the Mexicans, he made the following comment. “I don’t understand you Americans. Here in Mexico, we consider Corona to be one of the lowest quality, poorest tasting beers available. Yet, Corona is the beer you Americans decided to import, and you treat it like it is a premiere, high quality product. And by the way, everyone knows that the US has higher quality water than Mexico. So why are you importing beer, which is mostly water, from a place known for having inferior water?”

The problem with my Mexican friend’s logic was that he was product focused. He assumed that superior sales should go to superior products. He saw Corona as an inferior beer product. First, it came from a nation with inferior water and second, among other beers using that same water, it was considered by locals to have an inferior taste.

Here in the US, however, the major concern was not the quality of the liquid in the beer bottle, but the experience the customer had when holding that Corona bottle. Shortly after the conversation with my Mexican friend, I was on a camping trip in the US. On the campsite next to mine, a group of status-conscious Yuppies set up for the night. It’s hard to say they were “camping” because they brought all the creature comforts of their city life with them, including large propane street lights.

They decided they were going to have a party all night (which made it hard for my family to be camping next door). Everything about their party broadcast to the world their attachment to anything regarding status consciousness, including the way they dressed, the way they talked and the way they acted. And, as part of this status conscious behavior, they only beer they had was Corona.

To these Yuppie “campers,” it was almost irrelevant how the Corona tasted. It was just one more prop to enhance they experience of status-conscious lifestyle (and a darn good prop at that). Crown Imports, the firm that imports Corona to the US, apparently understood the importance of the packaging over the contents. They spent their time positioning Corona as the perfect beer for the status-conscious beer drinker. At the time they introduced the US to the beer, it was uniquely positioned as the beer where you put a lime wedge in the mouth of the bottle (how’s that for unique status packaging?).

There are lots of ways to improve the consumer experience that have nothing to do with the quality of the product itself. You can make the product easier to use through packaging (like Clorox). You can package the product inside better customer service (see this blog on gravel). You can connect the use of the product to charitable or social causes (see this blog on Toms shoes). You can improve convenience through the choice of delivery schedules or distribution channels. You can imbue the product with a status appearance (like Corona). You can take the same contents and customize them through packaging for different end users (consider Tide to Go stick versus Swash Get it Out stick).

You can position the product to be more fun to use (like McDonald’s Happy Meal packaging around a regular hamburger). Having watched how some kids “consume” a Happy Meal, this is a true case where the contents (the food) are often thrown away and the packaging (box and toy) is what is really enjoyed. This is very much like the story of my cat and the box.

So What have we Learned?

1) Don’t Just Focus on the Product
I’ve seen many business people get overly focused on the product and ignore almost everything else. The strategic emphasis is only on those internal product issues—improving production, improving quality. This is the “est” strategy. If I can only make my product the big-est, fast-est, cheap-est, strong-est, or some other “est,” then I am all set.

Unfortunately, the winner is often someone whose product is merely “good enough” but is packaged in a superior way.

I’m not saying to ignore the product. Product functionality must surpass certain minimum thresholds. But obsessing on complete product superiority to the exclusion of all the other factors important to the consumer is a mistake.

If you must focus only on the product, then define the product broadly, to include the packaging, the positioning, the image, the service behind the product, and so on. This is where key strategic choices can really make or break your business.

2) Focus on the Customer
Products must be seen within a context. That context is the way in which the customer will interact with that product. Improving that experience is more important than just improving the product. The goal of customers is not to make your production manager happy. It is to make themselves happy. And that happiness comes from having happy experiences. The more you can package your contents to accommodate and reinforce happy experiences, the better off you are—even if the actual functionality of the contents in that package are merely “good enough.”

If you want to focus on functionality, look at the functionality of the customer rather than the product. Are the customers functioning at a higher level of satisfaction (which could be rational or emotional)? If not, what can I modify in the entire package to improve their functionality?

SUMMARY
Winning strategies look beyond merely seeking superiority in product function. They look at the entire package surrounding the product to ensure that the company is superior at creating consumer experiences with the product. These superior solutions may have little to do with the actual contents of your product and more to do with how it is packaged.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Don’t be upset if your customers act like my cat and ignore the product in favor of its box, so long as they are satisfied. And maybe you should spend more time on making your “box” more enjoyable.

Strategic Planning Analogy #313: Choosing Frustration

THE STORY
I recently purchased a brand new car. This car is loaded with all sorts of features, more than on any other car I have ever owned.

One of the features on this car is a driver’s seat with seemingly infinite adjustments. I have nearly infinite adjustments:

a) Forward and Backward
b) Up and Down
c) Clockwise or Counterclockwise on the seat bottom
d) Clockwise or Counterclockwise tilting of the seat back

If that weren’t enough, there is a separate adjustment for the pedals, so that I can move them either closer to or further from the seat.

You’d think that with all those adjustments, I’d be overjoyed. Surely with that many choices I should be able to find my perfect setting for the seat.

Unfortunately, just the opposite has occurred. There were so many options that I had no idea which is the best. I sat in that car quite a long time trying a wide variety of seat settings until I became completely confused. Eventually, I just picked a setting I knew wasn’t awful, but didn’t feel perfect.

I will never be completely satisfied, because I have not tried every conceivable combination. There will always be a nagging feeling that if I only spent a few more hours, I could find a slightly better configuration. It will always feel like I am sub-optimizing my seat-comfort potential.

THE ANALOGY
One important strategic decision which typically needs to be made concerns the breadth of assortment you offer. How many choices should I offer? What should those choices be?

In this web 2.0/3.0 world, this is getting even more complex. Consumers can have more say in what you offer and may even help in the design of your offerings. In addition, small batch/flexible manufacturing and digital tweaking of software makes it ever more economical to increase the range of what you can economically offer. The potential offerings can become nearly infinite, just like the adjustments on my car seat.

At first, an infinite number of options sounds great. That way everyone can get exactly what they want—and isn’t that what we’re in business to do?

Unfortunately, the situation often ends up more like my car seat. The more options you give, the more you confuse the customer. The customer actually ends up less satisfied, because there is this nagging feeling that perhaps there are other options in that infinity of choice which might be just a bit better. Perhaps purchases are delayed because it is too difficult to make a choice. Or maybe decisions are put off because potential customers expect current options to become obsolete due to ever more new options. Or maybe the customer goes to a competitor, where the process is less bewildering.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that there is a big difference between selection and satisfaction. Often times, they can even work in opposite directions—increased selection can lead to decreased satisfaction.

Rising Expectations
Too much selection can raise expectations. The reasoning behind this thinking is that with added choice, I should expect to find something more to my particular liking. The odds of “perfection” should go up with near-infinite choice.

With higher expectations, what has happened is that I’ve increased the likelihood that the customer will be disappointed. Why? The higher the customer sets the expectation bar (closer to perfection), the more likely I will fail to exceed the bar, causing disappointment. Instead of under-promising and over-delivering (a method to increase satisfaction), infinite selection over-promises the benefit of choice and frequently does not live up to the hype.

Process Issues
Purchasing is about more than just the product. It is also about the process surrounding the product—the process of making a choice, buying the product, and using it after purchase. If the process is too burdensome, then the customer will be turned off—even for a good product.

Too much selection and flexibility can make the product or service harder to choose, more difficult to purchase, and more confusing to use. The process can destroy the overall value associated with the product.

Solution #1: Impose Limits
About 100 years ago, Sears discovered that the optimal selection for many of the items they sold was 3—one “good” (the low price option), one “better” (the best of both worlds option), and one “best” (the high quality option). Any more than three just added confusion (without adding sales).

Things in this regard haven’t changed all that much over the last century. In the US, Meineke Car Care Centers today give customers a choice of service levels, but limit it to three: Basic, Preferred or Supreme (sounds a lot like the old good, better, best).
Just because you can increase selection does not mean you should. Perhaps you should impose limits to choice.

Solution #2: Don’t Focus on the Product, Focus on the Consumer
When you focus on the product, you can start obsessing on all the things a product can do. The quest for product perfection takes control. Features, choices and flexibility can expand and get out of hand. Multi-function, do-it-all products rarely fare as well as simpler specialty products.

Rather than focusing on the product, you can focus on the consumer. Find out what the customer is trying to do and build a customer solution. This customer focus may lead to even abandoning the old product and going in a new direction.

The Corporate Strategy Board has a white paper about a B-to-B company called Alpha (a pseudonym to protect the customer’s identity). When developing their assortment, Alpha goes out and talks to the potential users of the product. They do not ask product-centered or feature-centered questions. Instead they ask them about their job. What is it they are trying to accomplish? What outcomes would make their job more successful?

Then, instead of offering infinite choice, they engineer a product specifically designed to improve the job of the one who will use the product. The customer is the hero (better at doing job) rather than the product.

Solution #3: Focus on the Process
Another alternative to product focus is process focus. What if you could offer near infinite choice, but eliminate the time, confusion and frustration of the process normally associated with infinite choice?

To illustrate, I will use another seat example—this time a bicycle seat. Once, I was in the market for a new bicycle, so I went to a bicycle shop. They had a wide selection that was a bit intimidating.

The salesman quickly pulled me aside and had me stand on a computerized platform. This computerized platform (with the salesman’s help) measured a number of parts on my body. Then the computer determined the optimal bicycle configuration for my body. The salesman adjusted the (near-infinite potential) seat to this optimal level and had me sit on it and try it out.

This made the process so easy. The computer did all the work. I didn’t have to worry about the infinite bicycle seat options—the computer found “perfection” for me (and the salesman set it up at the perfect position). The process substituted confusion with confidence (after all, the computer had no reason to lie and the salesman implemented what the computer said). It would have been great if they would have done something similar at the car dealership.

SUMMARY
Selection is not the same as satisfaction. Increased selection can actually reduce satisfaction. Rather than rushing to pursue more choice in your offering, consider limiting your offering and putting more focus on the consumer or the purchase process.

FINAL THOUGHTS
In the end, the customer doesn’t care how many thousands of products you have to sell. They are only buying one of them. Focus on making them happy with the one they eventually buy.

Strategic Planning Analogy #296: Stop Satisfying Customers

THE STORY
It is a commonly accepted principle that if you want to spend less at the supermarket, eat before you go shopping. The idea is that you tend to buy more groceries when you are hungry. Therefore, if you eat first, you won’t be hungry when in the supermarket looking at all that food.

My wife believes in this principle and eats before grocery shopping. She claims it cuts back on purchases.

Me? I have a different approach. I used to work in the grocery business, so when I am in a supermarket, it reminds me of going to work (and the things other employees do to the food when working in a supermarket). For some reason, that takes away my appetite.

THE ANALOGY
If you are hungry, you desire food. That desire (hunger) seeks to be satisfied. That’s why hungry people tend to buy more at the supermarket.

This concept applies to more than just food. No matter what you sell, the general idea is usually to satisfy some sort of demand (appetite). The concept is to find a need and fulfill it better than anyone else. People will purchase from you in order to satisfy that need.

Seeking to satisfy customers—sounds like a rather basic truth, right? Well, there’s only one problem with this approach. Once a customer is satisfied, their desire is fulfilled. The demand goes away.

You may be better off if you eat before grocery shopping, but the grocer is not. The grocer would rather that you came to the store hungry. As a business person, you want hungry customers as well—hungry for what you have to offer.

Unfortunately, once you truly and completely satisfy that hunger, the game is over. If the customer is completely satisfied, then they no longer have that need, so they no longer need to patronize your business.

Think of it like a kidney transplant. If I have a defective kidney, then I desire a new one. When the hospital does an excellent job with the kidney transplant, that need for a new kidney is completely satisfied. I’m not going to say, “Boy, that hospital did such an excellent job, I’m going to come back every month to get a new kidney.” No, I’m all done with that desire. It is fully satisfied. No more new kidneys for me.

The people doing kidney transplants would go bankrupt waiting for repeat kidney transplant business from their patients. The surgeons have to keep seeking out new patients, because they do too good of a job satisfying the former patients. As in the case of the grocer, the more satisfied the customer, the less additional business they will get from that customer.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here has to do with the concept of satisfaction. Many businesses give a high priority to completely maximizing customer satisfaction. Bonuses at these places may even be based on the level of customer satisfaction. The idea is that the more satisfied a customer is, the better.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, if a customer is completely satisfied, then they have no additional demand (since the demand is completely met). In many cases, a fully satisfied customer no longer even needs to be a customer (or at the very least needs you less). So, perhaps complete satisfaction is the wrong goal.

Yes, we want to make customers happy, but we also want to keep them hungry enough so that they keep wanting/needing to coming back. A part of them still needs to be unsatisfied, wanting more.

Therefore, instead of focusing on “Customer Satisfaction,” I suggest a focus on “Customer Engagement.” A lot of literature has been written about how employees are more productive if they are fully engaged with their work. I think the same is true of customers. A customer fully engaged with what you are offering is a more productive customer. They will keep coming back.

Consider Ty Warner and his Beanie Babies. He never advertised them. He refused to sell them to any of the major toy retailers. Ty limited the number of Beanie Babies that any retailer could order (no more than 36 of any style per month), no matter how many they wanted. Then Ty would retire styles while they were still popular.

That certainly doesn’t sound like someone who wants to maximize consumer satisfaction. He made them hard to find, in insufficient quantities, and stopped producing them when they were still in demand. Yet this very “un-satisfaction” approach maximized consumer engagement.

People clamored to the stores to seek out the new Beanie Baby styles before they ran out. There was a mad rush when the new styles came out, and often this lead to fistfights since there were never enough to go around. Customers were tickled to death to be one of the lucky ones to get a particular style. A collectors market came about, with lots of books and web sites to help people trade Beanie Babies with others. Ty had successfully turned “customers” into avid “hobbyists.”

According to Ty, “As long as kids keep fighting over the products and retailers are angry at us because they cannot get enough, I think those are good signs.” Ty Warner understood that his success was not based on satisfying retailers or customers. It was based on engaging them.

A similar principle is used by Jean-Claude Biver, who has had a long, successful career in the Swiss watch industry, currently running Hublot. Biver would always ration his luxury watches. Even during the boom times, he would never ship as many watches as the retailers wanted. Demand always outstripped supply. As a result, the watches always maintained their luxury pricing—no need to discount to reduce inventory. This increased the luxury and exclusivity image of the brand. And in the luxury business, exclusivity and price integrity are extremely important.

According to Biver, “You only desire what you cannot get. People want exclusivity, so you must always keep the customer hungry and frustrated.” Hungry and frustrated? That doesn’t sound like someone striving for consumer satisfaction. No, but it has lead to great success. As in the grocery example, hunger makes people buy more. Hungry people are more engaged with what they are hungry for.

There are many ways to shun satisfaction and increase engagement.

1. Limit supply (never enough to satisfy)
2. Have a continual stream of new products or product improvements (make the old obsolete—not enough to satisfy anymore)
3. Cloak your product in secrecy (secret formula/recipe—like Coke and KFC, lots of mystery leads to increased curiosity)
4. Tie product (or discounts) to exclusive membership (you have to be part of a special group to participate)
5. Every time you ship/sell a product, include a promotion for yet another product (never allow a transaction to appear as the final one).
6. Sell things in installments (you don’t get it all at once)

It’s sort of like the striptease. Anticipation is heightened and made more enjoyable by not giving the audience everything they want right away. They are more engaged in the process.

So when planning your strategic approach, are your goals and tactics centered around creating satisfaction or around creating engagement? How are you planning your production supply versus anticipated demand? Are you trying to leave the customers a little hungry? Are you teasing them?

SUMMARY
Striving for total customer satisfaction can be a sub-optimal strategy. When customers are fully satisfied, they no longer need to buy what you are selling (demand is sated). Instead, your strategy should strive towards customer engagement. Keep the customer a little hungry and they’ll come back for more.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Walt Disney once said that the first rule of show-business was simple: "Always leave them wanting more." That’s probably a good rule for your business, too.