. . . immediately dumping, junking and disposing what has become the most pervasive, prized, precious, yet unreliable marketing tool of choice for so many: the handy and overrated rear view mirror.
Driving business means driving forward, moving ahead, as a disciplined activity requiring full attention and keeping your eyes fixed on the future, while internally guided with a directed understanding and appreciation of the past.
In furniutre, the past is only prologue but not an absolute or definitive guidepost in dynamic, uncertain and challenging business conditions. Of course, the past is important, but only as a prescient indicator if the future is in full view.
Relying on rear view mirror marketing reflects abysmal sophistication. That means emulation over imagination, or in the vernacular, knocking off or copying real or perceived success to move ahead without really knowing where you’re going.
Instead of proactively meeting and sustaining the needs of the market — also known as furniture shoppers — the chosen course of least resistance actually becomes the coarse of most resistance in following and not leading.
As an appropriate analogy: In bicycle racing, the velodynamics keeps the follower in the drag of the leader, which creates an invisible enclosure or cone, containing the challenger and keeping him or her subordinate until he or she powers out to take the lead.
In racing for business, rear view marketing thwarts the breakaway necessary to lead.
The much too common vista of retrospective fixation is an old path to what happened without seeing what is about to occur.
So, while touring retrospectively on the business highway, many companies only focus on what has occurred — positive or negative — and then acts by compensating while moving forward by reactively adjusting the steering, all the time looking in the rear view mirror. Does that seem ludicrous, even though the action is more common than not.
“Oh, look, how that collection did,” a furniture executive says, peering intently in the rear view mirror, as if it were a crystal ball.
Satisfied he has adequate information, the driver corrects his course on what has been seen, happily proclaiming, “now, let’s turn this way,” while the company car speeds and careens along the business highway where only the blank backs of traffic signs and signals are visible.
Just imagine what looking ahead might accomplish, especially if sharp turns and inclines or declines are ahead?
What are the signs warning of oncoming traffic on a business highway that can’t be anticipated with all eyes fixed on the road as it passes by in the rear view mirror?
The furniture shopper is in the future, not the past. She is navigating on the electronic highway — called local search — in greater control driving toward you with her dreams, wishes and aspirations as navigation tools.
If you’re looking backward to move forward, you’re likely to miss the target because you’re the target now as the shopper seeks to find what she wants and not what you have passed.
Driving while looking in the rear view mirror means missed opportunity and a disastrous collision with the future.
Repost from February 22, 2006
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