Bulldozer00's Blog

Much of the sage advice given by modern day business gurus like Tom Peters, Gary Hamel, Seth Godin, et al, is targeted at companies that sell to individual consumers. If you sell big, expensive,  complex, and long-lived products to government groups, then much of their advice is not applicable.

The graphic below shows just some of the enormous contrasts between these two customer classes. Obviously, the number of individual consumers dwarfs the number of potential government groups. I think that this discrepancy is the major reason why the modern day business experts don’t try too hard at dispensing advice geared toward big  system vendors.

One thing that both customer classes have in common is this:

If your product portfolio sux, you are in big trouble.

It doesn’t matter how skilled and talented your marketeers and business development people are. You’re doomed if your product doesn’t perform as expected. At best, your business will muddle along forever amongst the ranks of the mediocre. You will be boring, irrelevant, and uninspiring to all the stakeholders involved in your enterprise. Purgatory city. At worst, crisis management is the order of the day and bankruptcy is just a step or two away.

Can you think of other contrasting attributes between these two vastly different customer categories?