Has your manufacturing company hit the plateau?

If your company is penny-wise and getting pounded in the marketplace, it may be because your enterprise has hit a plateau of complacency and indecision.

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