Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

Go where others aren’t.
The Adapter’s Edge

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Drive-in restaurants once contented themselves with waitresses on roller skates,
hamburgers that oozed grease, and milk shakes that could hold a spoon stiff for
minutes. Then McDonald’s came along with technology that upended the
industry.
For every service that has deployed technology as a weapon, another has
taken it right through its heart. You can find one conspicuous example every day
in the Wall Street Journal: the New York Stock Exchange.
The personification of the old ways of doing things among gentleman
brokerages up and down Wall Street, the Exchange was blindsided in the 1980s
by computers. Personal computers made it possible for investors to bypass
exchange brokers entirely. Just as significantly, the Exchange failed to adopt
computer systems, and once it added them, failed to integrate them. In a world
that required more speed, the Exchange’s slowness and inefficiency forced many
investors elsewhere.
Because it has such a strong brand, many people think the New York Stock
Exchange is still a giant. If it is, it is a much smaller one.
(Technology alone did not knock the NYSE from its perch. The Exchange
also was hammered by another force that drives service industries: innovations
by outsiders, which have included tax shelters, Keogh plans, IRAs, and mutual
funds. But technology dealt the Exchange several hard blows.)
Consider America’s poor—literally—car rental companies. In 1995, Budget
lost over $100 million. A major villain was Budget’s lack of a yield management
system, which can detect competitors’ rates and raise rates whenever demand for
cars increases. So each time Hertz or Avis dropped prices, Budget wouldn’t
learn and respond for days. Throughout the 1990s, car rental companies have
seemed more interested in bells and whistles— VCRs in minivans and Avis’s
illfated experiment with electronic maps on dashboards are two prominent
examples—than in basic time-and labor-saving technology, such as handheld
remote checkout devices and current, basic computers. Not coincidentally, while
America’s airlines and hotels were combining to earn almost $10 billion in 1995,
America’s car rental companies were combining to earn absolutely nothing.
In service industry after industry, technology creates the adapter’s edge. The
adapters become more proficient sooner, work out the bugs, and quickly
recognize the benefits of the technology. The adapters learn and turn that
learning into a great competitive advantage. They race to the head of the curve
while others lag, paying for the mistakes that the adapters already have made and
learned from.
Today, dozens of service industries are sleeping, content with how things
have always been. The sleepers in those industries are so many fish in a barrel

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for the smart marketer who recognizes the many ways that technology can be
applied to make customer service in that industry better, faster, cheaper, and
more reliable.
What does this mean? Every service company should have a director of
technology who studies and regularly tells management how new technologies
can be used for competitive advantage.
In addition, every internal review of a company’s marketing should ask four
questions that have not been typical of marketing reviews until now:
In our industry, are we second to none technologically?
Among service industries, and compared with firms of our approximate size,
are we second to none technologically?
Are we doing all we need today to be second to none two years from now?
Have we carefully considered innovative ways that new technology can be
used to improve our service and grow our business?