If you want to unlock the full business potential.
You know the expression "déjà vu," which means feeling like you are seeing or experiencing something you've seen or experienced before.
You pinch yourself, wondering for a brief moment if you've become clairvoyant.
In French, you can also reverse the words to say "vuja de," which means the ability to look at something existing with fresh eyes.
Vuja de is an approach that should be an integral part of all strategy processes.
If company leadership cannot see how the company can achieve something greater in the future, they often end up maintaining the current business.
Strategies that do not include the localization, exploration, and realization of new business potential are strategies that essentially keep the company stagnant in changing markets.
How to reinterpret your company's potential
I have created a simple yet systematic method to reinterpret a company's business potential.
The biggest obstacle to seeing many new business opportunities is a static self-perception – what I call the company’s false core.
The false core: The belief that the company's stable and secure foundation is all that has created today’s business success.
Typically, it is so simple that many companies’ self-perception centers on the specific product they produce and deliver to customers, down to details such as the product's functionality, quality, style, price, and related production and distribution forms.
A core that, at some point, will certainly lose relevance and competitiveness.
My simple method to reinterpret the company's business potential starts by establishing a more dynamic self-perception – what I call the company’s true core.
The true core: The ability to ensure differentiation and create customer value at the most universal, fundamental, and timeless level.
In reality, it almost always boils down to shifting the company from being product-driven to being more purpose-driven.
The brand transformation for the companies I work with almost always involves building a unique brand with a clear mission around the company’s outstanding products.
It is this mission-driven, unique brand that can unleash the emotional and self-expressive consumer benefits that future competitiveness and growth can stand upon.
Just think of how brands like NIKE and Apple have stretched their business activities far beyond their original products like running shoes and PCs over time.
Functional benefits: The actual, physical needs that the brand's products fulfill.
Emotional benefits: The positive feeling one gains from purchasing and using the brand's products.
Self-expressive benefits: The story one tells about oneself by associating with the brand.
NIKE and Apple own brand associations and recognition that, in reality, can be applied to almost any product category.
If companies like NIKE and Apple had confined themselves to their original core products, one might wonder if they would exist today. Their business value would certainly be significantly smaller.
The real risk associated with a static self-perception is the company's stagnation, decline, and potential end. At the very least, the company loses the opportunity to realize its full growth potential by locking itself into all the concrete successes it has had and continues to have.
A company’s full growth potential can only be located and realized through a dynamic self-perception. It is the relevant and valuable mission that can inspire the company to leverage the many changes in society.
NIKE would never have become part of the fitness or skateboarding wave if it had confined itself to running shoes.
Apple would never have created the iPod, iPhone, or become the digital focal point in many people's lives if it had solely thought of itself as a PC company.
What about you and your company – have you locked yourselves into your current products?
Are you ready for a strategy process where we establish a vision for the development of your business over the next 10 years?
A vision that includes expansion to new customer groups, new geographic markets, new product categories, and perhaps even entirely new business models?
A vision that, of course, must be realized with relentless, targeted, and innovative work year after year, with respect for achieving good business results in both the short and long term.
