You can always sell a salesperson. Just look what’s happening now. In a flurry of e-blasts, desperate vendors are eagerly dropping their mercantile trousers to get business. A hairy sight, for sure.
Fooling themselves, manufacturers want to fool retailers. It may work again only to peter out for no other reason than artificially dropping prices without in-place operational efficiencies can be lethal. Death not be proud, the profit poet writes about a wrong.
Instead of a executing a flexible business and marketing plan based on meeting needs of consumers, too many furniture makers reflexively feel comfortable in retrogressing. They are doing what they know best — desperate price cutting — because they may not know what else to do because they don't ask or think they know it all. H-m-m-m-m-m. Have you heard? Some KIAs (know it alls) are going out of business.
Rampant price cutting a path to the next turnaround is cutting off your knows to spite your place really to succeed, and that place is identifying ways to meet the needs of consumers. The next turnaround in the making now is the mother of all turnarounds, taking no prisoners attempting a hope-filled mercantile Bataan death march back to business.
Manufacturers only wanting to sell, sell, sell rely on their own hope-based voodoo methods. They have a surprise coming. Hope isn’t a strategy to stimulate sustained business. Hope without a substantive plan is skywriting always blown away by the winds of reality.
My friend and fellow marketing dude Eric Bauer sums up the current spate of sales prevention tactics, saying, “Too many desperate companies are doing anything just trying not to lose.”
If you’re in business trying not to lose, then you’re not executing a plan to win. In the game of business, hoping not to lose means every moment, metaphorically, is being at bat in the bottom of the Ninth Inning with two out, two strikes, no on on base and down by seven runs.
Unfortunately, the game is over for hope-based marketing.
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