DW's Blog
“If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” — Yogi Berra
by DW Green — April 5, 2010
The supermarket industry’s marketing and advertising activities deal almost exclusively with what works today and almost never with what’s going to work tomorrow.
Too few companies run research to determine what their entire market place will be like in three years? In five years? And very few are committed to a vision that basically says, “We truly believe we know where this industry is going. We know what the leader will look like, sound like, think like, and be like in five years, and we know something else. We’re going to be that leader!
Precious few can say, “That’s us. That’s our store.” And to those precious few, chances are they will, in fact, be that leader. Because they’re the only ones who know where they’re going…as for the rest of us… as Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”
If you look at today’s strengths and are satisfied with building on those strengths because they suffice today, chances are you’ll not be competitive in a few years because your competition is going to be very, very different in those few years. In other words, those aspects of your operation which you identify with strengths today, in a different competitive market my not be viewed as strengths at all. And the one certainty we all face, once again, is that it’s going to be a different competitive market in the very near future.
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