As privately held industrial manufacturing companies mature,
they can reach such a plateau, a phase when management becomes contented, risk-adverse, and even deep-down
weary of the hunt. For a privately held manufacturer, the plateau phase can
make you ripe for acquisition, which can often be in your best interest, rather
than see the company you built descend from complacency into failure -- or worse,
into mediocrity.
But what happens to an industrial manufacturing company that
is not privately held, that has no true owner who can look in the mirror
and admit that the company’s leadership has grown contented
and risk adverse? Whether publicly or privately held, if your industrial
manufacturing company has hit a plateau of underachievement, it could be that this is
what needs to happen:
Your company needs to recover its lost identity.
We believe industrial manufacturers are especially challenged to become better marketers, because they often start out with a creative, engineering-guided capacity
to solve many problems, but sooner or later, they end up selling a limited line
card of “solutions” that are not in sync with a changed marketplace. When the
leaders of a company stop asking each other what business they are in, they
tend to sell themselves short by selling what they’ve always sold. Branding and
marketing are dynamic disciplines, so is engineering, and these disciplines go undeveloped when management insists that
selling harder is the way forward. Selling harder, how? Selling to who?
Loss of identity causes a manufacturer to abandon its
greater potential in the marketplace, as decisions continue to be made based on
an aged understanding of purpose and aged definitions of customer. The
underlying emotional driver is fear, not an informed understanding of the
company’s key sources of value, not a knowledge of related unmet market needs,
and not an excitement for pursuing the greater business potential of the company.
Without a vibrant brand identity to guide organizational
change, there can be no market-relevant value definition or market-relevant
marketing. There is only the act of apparent management, the making
of penny-wise decisions while getting pounded in the marketplace.
jb
www.newmill.com
