If you are willing to talk about businesses, what better place to start than at the very beginning! Imagine yourself jumping happily around one day, enjoying the outdoor sunshine. Suddenly, you slip on a pile of dog poop and land face down in another pile. “Ewwww!!” you think, as you pick your smelly self up – a blissful day ruined!
In anger, you shake your fist at the sky and swear, “I will make it my sole duty in life to make a pooper scooper that will be so easy to use that every dog owner will buy one!” And behold, a new business is born!
Eagerly, you run home and spend hours designing your poop picker upper. Finally, after days of trial and error, you built the perfect product! Great! Now, if someone only knew about it and cared…
Marketing Your Business
Here comes the other maximum of the work! It’s important in business to not only have a good product but to market it as well! After all, what use is the best product if no one knows about it?
So, in glee, you run out and tell all the dog owners you meet about your poopie scoopie. You advertise in local newspapers. You affiliate with dog companies. You pay promotion firms to get your brand out there.
Whew, that’s a lot of work… but it was worth it! The sales come flooding in, and all seems good for a while. This is where the quality of your product starts mattering…
Why The Quality Of Your Product Is Important
Now one of two situations happen.
Situation 1:
After that initial wave of sales and customers, you are back to where you were before your marketing campaign. You have no customers and a poopie thing that you think is good! This is what happens when your product (which might include your attitude in selling it) is not good! People probably got crap all over their hands using your “great” invention and decided to just let the poop lie where um… it drops.
If you want to sell more pooper scoopers, you’ll have to start that whole tedious marketing campaign over again! Not only that, but there’s only so many ways you can market it. Your time is also limited, so your “business” can’t really scale all that well!
Situation 2:
After the initial wave, you start getting phone calls from customers complementing you on how well your apparatus works. In fact, these people keep showing up again and again to buy extra poop bags! This is what happens when you create a good product – people keep coming back to use it again and again.
Not only that, but it seems like a lot of new faces keep showing up even long after your marketing campaign. And why wouldn’t they? Who do you think your loyal customers recommended when if one of their friends asked them how they solved their dog poop problems?
With a good product, you get a loyal customer and a never ending supply of referrals. Isn’t that way better than going out there to just sell one poop scooper?
Also, consider that you are only separated by 6 degrees from everyone on Earth. That means if each of your friends told all their friends about your product (say it takes a month) and so forth, it’ll only take 6 months before everyone on Earth knows about it! Cool huh?
A Caution About Quality
A word of caution is in order though! One of the most common mistakes that a lot of people make after hearing this is that they focus too much on quality! Quality is important right? So wouldn’t it make sense to make that doggie pooper thing as good as it possibly can be before putting it out there?
Sure, you can do that, but what would your customers use in the meantime? Since things can always be improved, if you don’t ever send anything out until it’s perfect, then you’ll never send anything out! Then there would still be dog poop on the ground, which you’ll probably slip on your way to get material for your poop scooping device.
One thing to remember about quality though is that it’s not a static thing. Your product can be satisfactory today, but be completely outdated and useless tomorrow. Just think of computers. Wasn’t a 6 M hz 386 computer really “quality” in like 1985?
Quality is more a dedication to improving your product for your customers and continuously adapting to their needs. The world is a ever changing place, as are people’s fluctuating needs. As long as you continuously listen to your customers and improve your product to satisfy your needs, you’ll be one step ahead of your competition!
So if you want your business to succeed, dedicate yourself to improving your product to give your customers more of what they want, and they’ll reward you by coming back – and they’ll bring their friend along too!