For all of the big thinking that goes on in some businesses, and for all of the books and experts that tell you to seize a great market opportunity when it comes along by betting big, you see surprisingly little of this kind of aggressive marketing in your day to day life.
In fact, much of the business world measures success in relatively small, incremental gains.
Some corporations delight when revenue moves up 5% vs 2% in the same quarter last year. Or, they throw a party when they drive market share up by 10 basis points.
When a company offers an employee a 6% increase, it’s considered a “big raise” because inflation is only running at 2%.
Measuring Everything
Since we measure absolutely everything we need to know (and many things we don’t) we get fixated on comparing numbers, making relatively small gains seems like real improvements.
Which begs the questions, just what is success anyway? Is it a relative measure, comparing today’s performance against the past?
Or is it a measure of what you could have done had you not set incremental targets – a measure of you vs the world, instead of you vs yourself 12 months ago.
Incremental Thinking Goes Out the Window when things get Bad…
It’s interesting that incremental thinking disappears when things get desperate. Apple was in lousy shape a few years ago, so any incremental measures they had were useless to them. As a brand and a company they were in a downward spiral.
Once the quarter over quarter incremental gains no longer mattered, they had nothing to lose -- so they made some big bets, and they changed the course of music with the iPod as well as reinventing themselves in the computer space.
Do you think when the iPod was launching, Apple was worrying about a 2% increase in revenues? Nope. they had their eyes on a much bigger prize.
The Moral of the Story…
I recognize that companies need to show incremental gains to demonstrate to shareholders that the company is heading in the right direction. But marketing departments (and companies in general) need to take their eyes off the percentages every now and again and think about what they could accomplish if they bet big on the right opportunity.
