Intimacy with Personal as well as Organizational Brands Is a Realistic Strategy of Attracting Desired Market Share in 2013

By Mwangi Wanjumbi, Newtimes B. S. Chief Consultant/Trainer

As the year 2013 nears, many organizations, including yours are gearing up if not already reinvigorating their strategy. The main aim is to ensure either staying relevant or maintaining and at the same time building on the market share. Each will go into great lengths of defining strategic objectives, key performance measures or indicators and all other usual stuff. But, it may be important to remember one factor, variously taken for granted either inadvertently or otherwise. Perhaps, a question could be ideal for thought stimulation.

Do you as a person or organization graciously consume the products or services that you present to the marketplace? If you do, that is a good starting point. If you don’t something does not add up.  Shif Khera, a selling skills training guru and author says that you are taking advantage of your customers. Apparently, it is difficult to disagree with this author and master trainer, who I somehow started interacting with, long before his now frequent Kenyan visits.

The scenario is even worse for those who manufacture discriminating products meant for some class of citizens. That certainly ranks suppliers of lethal brews, counterfeit drugs and others, high up in this category, which constitutes a profit only driven economy.  These noted items may seem to be extreme examples, but anybody conscious of the market place knows even better.

On the same token, you are certainly familiar with people who are shy of their brands – It is about being in business. Implicitly, any business that brings the much coveted money or profit is welcome. The tragedy is that haziness may not be sustainable for long in a continually open and changing world.

In the meantime, we need to learn a few selling gimmicks from the late Steve Jobs. This fallen master innovator firmly believed in his Apple high end products. He pushed his engineers to innovate products that he could personally and with great pride use anywhere, any time. Indeed, he was not only passionate about the products, but was also user number one.

Thus, Steve Jobs believed that anything that did not meet his tastes was not worth being released to the market. So, at the public launching of the products, he could elaborately show off the features and benefits, making every potential user to instantly fall head over heels with the new arrivals. No wonder, Apple has for many years and even up to this day, maintained its position as one of the greatest companies in this world.

On professional services, I am constantly influenced by Steven R. Covey, a great mentor indeed. At one time he was put to task by Kim Dae Jang, a then formidable South Korean President. Together with his team, the president was undergoing some leadership lessons, under the tutorship of Covey himself. Alongside, the president sought to know whether Covey ever believed and lived his teachings. Despite an answer to the affirmative, the president still insisted on a re-affirmation. Only then did he give his own narrations.

Before ascending into the Presidency, Kim Dae Jang was an oppositionist per excellence who believed so much in his course. He never feared death if that is what it would take. At one stage he was like a thing, loaded into a sack full of stones and thrown into the sea, to die and be forgotten for good. However, death for Kim Dae Jang was not just yet. He was miraculously rescued by a CIA helicopter, which was within the vicinity.

Further, even under pressure to abandon his course or be shot, Kim Dae Jang was at peace pleading to be shot and die once, than beg to live on, only to eventually die many times every day, for defying his own conscience. Could Kim Dae Jang’s resoluteness have finally led him into becoming the President of South Korea? I can only make a good guess.

Meanwhile, how many of us are dying every day for defying our conscience? How many of us are ready to suffer for doing what is right because it is the right thing to do?  How many of us are proud and passionate about the personal, organizational and product brands presented to the market place?

Whatever their numbers and/or roles, they are playing in this world, they are no doubt on the path towards joining the now well known list of the world’s greatest, who are particularly  identified for their unique contributions.

But, then is being intimate with our personal/organizational brands not the best strategy of endearing ourselves to the continually conscious world? No doubt, the inevitable paradigm shifts driven by leadership, strategy and other transformational solutions may have all the needed answers