7. Culture eats strategy for breakfast

7.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

The phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” was coined by Peter Drucker and has been like a mantra for me throughout my entire working life. It’s about respecting our diverse behaviors and understanding the implications of how different we are and react as well as what a major difference that makes regarding our future success or total failure.

It leads me into accepting that we’re all different. We all represent the same value but in different ways, it’s easy if you accept it and hard if you don’t care. Every person adds different values, not more or less but different. Business will always be made between people and we are all unique, every one of us. It’s the same with marketing in which consumers are placed into groups and companies must use unique business plans per culture. Globalization, on the one hand, makes us feel like we have all things under control, feeling safe and secure in our own comfort zone. Global strategy works out in the same way, being global is being big but square. You use the raw statistics data (measurable), all square and you are either inside or out. Local strategy is actually many different strategies and normally starts out from a global one. Then, you add local variations, editions with local values for each segment, group and/or culture. Big corporations (mainly) outline just one global square strategy at the time. HP is a good example of this, despite the fact that various cultures react differently

on one square strategy. The result in different groups and cultures differ and mirrors each culture depending on how far they are from being inside or outside of this square box. For example, if you make one strategy in one single US state and that one succeeds, it’s pretty easy to expand that to the rest of the 49 states in roughly the same way and with roughly the same result. In the US, the square box works ok throughout most of the entire nation. If you try the same strategy in Europe, starting a market strategy campaign, for example, in France for the French market and that works out well, what happens if you then expand the same campaign into the rest of Europe? The campaign was successful in France it’s pretty much guaranteed that it will NOT work in any other country or culture thru out the rest of Europe! What can we learn from this? Learn and understand how our local culture values as well as how our own market works. Learn about your consumer-base and then use the right, go2market-strategy, not the other way around. It’s thinking outside of the square box (which also was a chapter in my previous book Visions & Transmission). HP and HPIndigo rescues itself by adding a wide number of qualified channels and partners that adds the local culture gap between the square and the local. Now, remember that your culture must be a pillar when you make your own strategy for your own market and your own customer. Take every local influence you can find, good or bad, get inspired and learn from that. Your strategy must add value to your own customer. By interaction, you can build your new and digital business plan. In your approach, try to understand why we have two ears and only one mouth. To be humble, to listen and understand, will make big different. It’s about the chemistry between people, groups, and culture and with that also comes respect. Do you have the right people for this proactive work today? New digital tools from this transformation will generate and add a lot of new values to work with, for your team it will be known and for your customer it will be unknown before you tell them. This new dialogue will increase your relationship with your customer and bring it to a new and closer level of business cooperation. It’s a great chance to reach a more profitable business for both parts, a win-win-situation.

Why is culture local and not global? Time has passed since the World Wide Web entered as an unknown disrupting technology and today we can safely say that it was not a “fly” (an infamous statement made by Ines Uusmann, the Swedish minister of Communication 1996, saying that the Internet was a trend that would pass by). That transformation of information was a paradigm-shift itself that changed almost all of us on all levels and we didn’t know that we had that need before we got it. Then, the next transformation affected networking, where Facebook today has passed 2.2 billion users and has grown to that stature within a decade. Again, via new technology that wasn’t aware of the gap in needs and demands. Those transformations totally changed our need for

globalization. After a while, we started to miss what we couldn’t get from being global, the other side – local and the ME generation. We started to value and starve for a more local feeling. One of the most important motors in that change is culture. After we (in the Western world) have been so global in so many ways the value chain turns back toward local again. With that move, we also move closer in our relation to our own culture. Culture works as a driver for reaching everyone in every culture, meaning less mass-communication and more masscustomization. It is also a driver toward the digital printing transformation.

To begin by working with your existing customers and your relationship together is the right move. It’s a lot cheaper, easier, and faster than chasing new customers that you don’t have any relation with today. New customers are statistically three times more expensive to address and attract then existing costumer. You also repeatedly must expose and lower prices for them changing to you, meaning lower margins. Like it has been for many commercial graphic printers, trying to defeat a competitor via price instead of offering customers growth in value. You now have the opportunity to stand out and offer added value instead of using price as the only way to win business. If you help and develop your own customer first, they will grow and stay by your side for a long time. This won’t exclude the need for any marketing, you must still address your own market and inform that you are now focusing on adding higher values on your services in your proposition.

Another way to learn more about “Conscious Culture” inside of your own organization is to read the book with the same name by Joanna Barclay. Building a strong culture known by all employees often compares to a company’s passion for its business – and yes we have to have a great passion for print.