Focus: Adapting your offering and your org chart for conscious commerce

A fundamental concept in the conscious commerce environment is focus. It’s one of the things that a company has to attain if they are going to be successful, and it breaks down into two distinct areas, each worth noting:

The first area in which companies need to attain focus, is in there offering. We’ve gone through a period where companies, in an effort to succeed, started doing lots and lots of things outside of their core area of expertise. This served them quite well during the time where their clients were consuming their products and services unconsciously, but will be their undoing in the era of conscious commerce, if it’s not addressed.

This new era will be punctuated by global competition, and I see clients becoming very savvy, very quickly, to the process of sourcing what they need in the highly competitive global marketplace. And by sourcing globally, they’re able to attain the highest possible quality products and services available – which means that companies who need to compete in this environment – which is nearly everybody – better be REALLY good at what they do, because they’re going to have to be if they want to have any success at all.

One interesting side effect of only working with customers who see you as the true expert in what you do is that you’re going to have fewer local customers. To become an expert in just a few things is going to make it so that companies who used to do business locally will now also have to compete outside of that local market. And they’re going to have to become well-versed in the process of communicating and developing business globally. This is of particular interest to me and it’s the concept that drove me to develop our web-centric marketing process. That program was born out of the premise that said: I have a finite marketing budget that used to be spent locally, but now I need to develop business nationally or globally and compete with companies all over the world. How do I lever the power of the Internet in order to make that possible?

The other area in which companies need to attain focus is their structure. I think the days of large bureaucratic, hierarchical organizations are pretty much gone. First, when a company narrows their service offering to only the things they’re truly expert at their going to immediately find that they need fewer people in their organizations. The overhead and the inefficient staff that made it possible to provide all of the superfluous, peripheral services – the mediocre services – are no longer required (Guess what?!?  Efficiency and profitability just went up!).

The other thing that will change in a successful organization, is the structure itself. The traditional linear hierarchy that we’re all accustomed to is going to be replaced by a network centric structure that allows all levels of an organization some ability to touch and communicate with all other levels. Endless levels of middle management will be removed, reducing bureaucracy and increasing efficiency, and what used to be the top of the organization (now the center in a network centric structure), no longer has the genius within the organization filtered on its way to them – they can get it directly. The benefit for those providing genius in the organization is that now their genius can be known as their own, and they have the ability to benefit from all the things that come from that.

Imagine a small, nimble organization.  Staffed with extraordinarily talented individuals providing globally competitive services or products that they can command top dollar for due to the simple fact that they are the best in class.  Then imagine them possessing the web-centric marketing skills necessary to reach out and develop business across the nation and the world.

That’s a company that can compete and win in a conscious commerce environment.  That’s the company I’m building.  That’s the type of company I want to do business with.