Tactic Treadmill

If  you want to improve your fitness you have a lot of options and one of them might be a treadmill. The thing about treadmills is that you do a lot of work, spend a lot of time & energy and you don’t really get anywhere. As soon as the treadmill stops, the value stops.

You also have a number of choices to improve your business. It turns out there’s been one very popular choice I call the “tactical treadmill of business.” It looks something like this: You need customers so you place an ad in the newspaper. After that runs for a while it’s time to place an ad in the quarterly magazine  (where  it takes an enormous amount of time to get the ad  just right). Along the way you do a little direct mail trying to connect with people in your “database.”  As soon as that’s done it’s time to advertise in the newspaper again. And around and around and around it goes looking something like this:

Click to enlarge

If we plot the value of the Tactical Treadmill versus time we get a graph that used to look something like this:

Value vs Time

In the past, using the Treadmill had some certainty of a return but now there are two big problems with relying on the tactical treadmill of business.

First, when the treadmill goes away so does the value. When cash is tight and you spend less, the value is much less. Hop off the treadmill and all the value disappears. All that stuff is now in the landfill.

Second, many of the key elements that the treadmill depended on have changed. Advertising costs and response rates are going in opposite directions; ad rates are going up & response rates are going down. The number of information channels are going up at the same time our attention span is going down. At my house, for example, TV shows don’t start at 7:00 p.m., they start at 7:20 because we record them, skip the commercials and we’re still done by 8:00.

When the treadmill goes away so does the value.

Successful businesses have abandoned the Tactic Treadmill and are focusing their efforts on creating new value and connecting with customers in more meaningful ways.

As you look to the new year how about a different approach? I’d like to suggest an approach that gets you off the tactical treadmill and results in a graph that looks something like this:

Get off The Treadmill

The hard part is this approach isn’t worth very much when you start. But over time it has the potential to outperform the tactical treadmill and won’t be subject to the same downward forces as traditional media.

If you can begin to leverage some of the new opportunities of today, you’ll start to grow and develop marketing & permission assets that don’t go away, don’t diminish over time and continue to provide value as you move forward.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting a series of articles on ways to do this.

- How to listen & why it’s the best thing you can do now.
– How successful companies are realigning their business to satisfy customers.
– The biggest change traditional media wishes you didn’t know about.
– Why the new stuff isn’t the old stuff.

Thanks for reading!