Jeremy Miller's Blog, page 31

6 Inspiring Vision Statements that Built Iconic Brands

In 1880 George Eastman founded Kodak with a bold vision: to make photography as simple as using a pencil.

In terms of vision statements, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Eastman’s vision was aspirational, especially for the time. In the late 1800s photography was anything but simple. It was a considered a “wet art.” Photographers used water, chemicals, and metal plates to capture an image. Not only did a photographer have to be a chemist to develop a photo, they had to be one to take the photo too.

Eastman became obsessed with the idea of making photography simple, and he expressed his vision with childlike wonder. “Make photography as simple as using a pencil.” It was an idea he built a company around, and for over a century Kodak strove to simplify photography.

A Vision Statement With Childlike Wonder

Inspirational vision statements stretch and motivate you. They paint a picture of something that’s outside of your reach, but at the same time make it accessible. They create a what if moment, “What if we achieved this bold goal?”

Let’s look at some iconic examples:

Microsoft: A computer on every desktop and in every home.

Charles Schwab: Helping investors help themselves.

Instagram: Capture and share the world’s moments.

John F. Kennedy (for the United States): Landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth (before the decade is out).

Wikipedia: Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

These vision statements have an element of childlike wonder. They are bold yet accessible. You can picture exactly what the company is striving to accomplish.

The vision may be hard or audacious, but you get it. For example, “Landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” tells a story. The goal isn’t simply to go to space. It’s to go on a journey with a successful conclusion.

These are the kinds of vision statements you want to aspire to for your business.

Vision Statements Are Not Timeless

Inspirational vision statements focus on a moment in time.

Microsoft fulfilled its vision of putting a computer on every desk and in every home well over a decade ago. That vision no longer shapes or informs the brand, because it was accomplished.

The same is true for John F. Kennedy’s goal to go to the moon and back. Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon on July 20, 1969 — five months ahead of the deadline.

It’s a mistake to think a vision statement should be timeless. Visions and missions change, because if you’re successful you’ll achieve the goal. It’s not to say the vision should be easy — that’s definitely not the case. But the vision does not have to outlive the company.

As a company grows and the industry changes, the vision has to keep pace. A strong vision will push you forwards. And when it stops being relevant, change it.

Stretch Until You Smile

An inspirational vision statement will put a smile on your face. The audacity of it will motivate you. The clarity will inspire you. And the relevance will drive you to act.

These vision statements are not easy to craft. It takes effort to distill a big idea into a simple phrase that inspires action. But it’s a valuable exercise. An inspirational vision statement will guide your team, give them purpose, and propel them to do something audacious.

Webinar: Build a Brand That Drives Action

Join me for a free webinar tomorrow: Wednesday, April 20 at 1pm EST.

On Wednesday I am hosting a live webinar with Pardot / Salesforce.com. It’ll be an interactive discussion on how B2B companies engage their customers and grow their brands.

Register for the webinar.

(The talk will be recorded if you’re unavailable to attend. Sign-up to watch it live or the recording later.)

Webinar Overview: How to Build a Brand That Drives Action

Do customers choose your brand first? This question is the essence of branding.

Branding isn’t about logos, taglines, websites, or colors. Branding is about the bond you form with your customers — a bond where they choose you first.

This is what separates average companies from Sticky Brands. When you have a brand that works, your customers think of it first and come back again and again.

But here’s the challenge. The pace of marketing is changing rapidly, and your brand must evolve to keep up.

In this talk, I will show you how to transform your marketing to create a first choice advantage. I’ll show you the tools to use, the content to create, and the strategy that makes your brand stand out.

Learning Outcomes:

How to adapt your marketing for active and inactive buyers
How to build relationships early and often
Always Be Converting

Register for the webinar.

3 Reports to Identify Active Buyers

When a B2B buyer has a major purchase to make, they binge. They read your blog, watch your videos, download your white papers, and check out your social media. They consume everything.

It’s like Netflix. B2B buyers binge before they buy.

The neat thing is you can spot the binge. You can see it in your metrics, and that gives you an opportunity to pounce.

In this post, I will share 3 reports I use to identify active buyers. The first two reports are low-to-no cost options, and the third is an advanced option.

Email: Engaged Subscribers

Engagement on your email lists can fluctuate, but subscribers tune in when they have a need.

In your email platform look for the subscribers with the most opens.

For example, the Sticky Branding blog is distributed by MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email service. In MailChimp I track the subscribers who open a post 10 or more times.

Each report on its own isn’t that insightful. What I am looking for are trends:

Who are the most active subscribers over a three to four week period?
Is there an opportunity for one-on-one dialogue?

Website: Pages / Session

Google Analytics is a wealth of knowledge. There’s so much data, but it can be overwhelming. I tend to drill down to a few select reports, and then track them weekly.

One of my favorites is the Network report (Audience | Technology | Network). I sort this report by Pages / Session.

The Network report shows me the active service providers on my site. Sometimes there is gold in this report, because larger companies show their domain name.

We use this information to identify companies and potential opportunities. We go through a two step process:

Check Salesforce.com. In our instance of Salesforce we verify if we have a relationship with the company. If there’s an active prospect or account, I’ll see who owns the relationship on my team and let them know.
If we don’t know the company we do reconnaissance. We’ll look up the company in LinkedIn and Google to see if there’s an opportunity to prospect the firm.

Marketing Automation: Activity Reports

The reports above are free and available to any business. The next level of reporting and engagement occurs when you implement marketing automation.

Marketing automation — like Pardot or Hubspot— connect your website, email, and CRM all under one platform. Sticky Branding uses Pardot, because it’s intuitive, insanely powerful, and integrates seamlessly with Salesforce.com (my preferred CRM platform).

In Pardot I have been able to really exploit the B2B binge. Instead of looking at reports from MailChimp or Google Analytics in isolation, I am able see them all in one place with far greater granularity. We can see which prospects are active on the website and proactively engage them.

This is a screenshot of a prospect that is engaging in my Keynote Speaking services. Based on his engagement the system is configured for two actions:

Notify my sales rep that a prospect is in a potential B2B binge, and trigger a task in Salesforce.com to contact the individual.
Profile and segment prospects. We tailor our content marketing efforts by tracking the types of content prospects are engaging with.

Data Drives Behaviors

Spotting the B2B binge is interesting, and the reports reveal a lot of information. But they’re useless if you don’t act on them.

When you spot a B2B binge it’s an opportunity to proactively engage a customer. You don’t have to wait for them to call. You can pick up the phone, build a relationship, and maybe it’ll turn into a sale.

There’s lots of opportunities to spot the B2B binge. You can use free reports in MailChimp and Google Analytics, or can you invest in a marketing automation system like Pardot. The data is there. You’ve just got to use it and act on it.

Happy to answer questions if you want me to go deeper on these reports or the concept in general.

The ABCs of Digital Marketing: Always Be Converting

Always Be Closing is classic sales advice.

The ABCs of selling were popularized by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. Baldwin’s character, Blake, is my favorite. He’s such an ass :)

Blake shouts at the sales team,

A, B, C.
A, always. B, be. C, closing. Always be closing.
Always be closing!
A, I, D, A.
Attention, interest, decision, action.
Attention. Do I have your attention?
Interest. Are you interested? I know you are, “cause it’s [bleep] or walk.” You close or you hit the bricks.
Decision. Have you made your decision for Christ?
And Action.
A, I, D, A.

ABC and AIDA are almost folklore for salespeople. But Alec Baldwin’s ABCs are wrong.

Always be closing may have worked in the good ol’ days of belly-to-belly and knee-to-knee selling, but in the era of social media and search engines it’s a surefire way of driving customers away.

The ABCs of Digital Marketing

The anxiety of the ABCs are the same, but the meaning has shifted. Instead of always be closing it’s always be converting.

Converting is the name of the game:

Convert followers into engagement
Visitors into friends
Readers into subscribers
Prospects into customers

Closing is definitive, but converting is fluid. Think of conversions like steps in a relationship. You are converting strangers into friends and ultimately customers.

Always Be Converting on your Website

The first place to focus on the ABCs is your website.

On every page ask one question, “What do we want the visitor to do next?”

Ask a question
Share the content
Request more information
Visit another page
Download a white paper

There are lots of choices, but each page should have one logical next step.

Too often websites are cluttered with multiple calls to action, but that dilutes the impact. The ABCs focus on one conversion at a time.

Start With the Ask

Salespeople are trained to close every meeting by asking for next steps. The ABCs of digital marketing follow a similar mantra.

What’s the next step?

ABC: Always Be Converting

Always Be Closing is classic sales advice.

The ABCs of selling were popularized by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. Baldwin’s character, Blake, is my favorite. He’s such an ass :)

Blake shouts at the sales team,

A, B, C.
A, always. B, be. C, closing. Always be closing.
Always be closing!
A, I, D, A.
Attention, interest, decision, action.
Attention. Do I have your attention?
Interest. Are you interested? I know you are, “cause it’s [bleep] or walk.” You close or you hit the bricks.
Decision. Have you made your decision for Christ?
And Action.
A, I, D, A.

ABC and AIDA are almost folklore for salespeople. But Alec Baldwin’s ABCs are wrong.

Always be closing may have worked in the good ol’ days of belly-to-belly and knee-to-knee selling, but in the era of social media and search engines it’s a surefire way of driving customers away.

The ABCs of Digital Marketing

The anxiety of the ABCs are the same, but the meaning has shifted. Instead of always be closing it’s always be converting.

Converting is the name of the game:

Convert followers into engagement
Visitors into friends
Readers into subscribers
Prospects into customers

Closing is definitive, but converting is fluid. Think of conversions like steps in a relationship. You are converting strangers into friends and ultimately customers.

Always Be Converting on your Website

The first place to focus on the ABCs is your website.

On every page ask one question, “What do we want the visitor to do next?”

Ask a question
Share the content
Request more information
Visit another page
Download a white paper

There are lots of choices, but each page should have one logical next step.

Too often websites are cluttered with multiple calls to action, but that dilutes the impact. The ABCs focus on one conversion at a time.

Start With the Ask

Salespeople are trained to close every meeting by asking for next steps. The ABCs of digital marketing follow a similar mantra.

What’s the next step?

Instagram Took the Kodak Moment

The Kodak Moment holds a special spot in our memory banks — at least if you’re over 30.

I remember the excitement of picking up envelopes of freshly developed pictures from the photo lab. Some shots were good, some were blurry, and others were downright embarrassing. But that mix of photos was full of memories. They captured a moment — a Kodak Moment.

Kodak became an iconic brand, because it facilitated an important job. It helped us visually journal the special moments in our life. But as we know, Kodak lost its way.

In early 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy. Ironically, right as Kodak was failing Facebook was acquiring Instagram. Instagram had taken the place of the Kodak Moment.

A Simple Vision

Kodak was founded with a simple vision: to make photography as simple as using a pencil.

In the late 1800’s, photography was complicated. Cameras were big, heavy, and hard to use. Imagine trying to capture a moment with a 150 pound box. On top of that, you had to be a chemist to develop each image. This wasn’t an activity for an ordinary person.

George Eastman became obsessed with the idea of making photography simple and portable — something anyone could do. In an interview he said, “We started out to make photography an everyday affair.”

By 1892 Eastman had transformed photography. He created the roll film and a camera capable of taking advantage of the roll. He launched the product with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.”

Eastman’s invention struck a universal desire. People want to capture the moments in their life, and he created a company that simply and reliably fulfilled that desire. For over 100 years, Kodak was synonymous with capturing life’s moments.

The Vision Outlasted Technology

Kodak invented the digital camera.

In 1973 Kodak hired Steven Sasson to begin working on digital photography. By 1975 Sasson and a team of talented engineers had done it. They had created the first digital camera — an 8.5 pound box with the resolution of 0.1 megapixels.

Put that into context. The iPhone 6s camera is 12 megapixels, and the whole phone weighs 5.04 ounces.

In 1975 the digital camera was not a replacement for film, and not something that Kodak’s executives were willing to bet on. They had a cash cow in film, and they knew it would take years for digital photography to catch up.

Technology waits for no company. According to Moore’s Law the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years. And the same law applied pretty closely to megapixels.

By the mid-2000s it was obvious Kodak had made a strategic error. They had focused on profits over their founding vision: making photography simple.

A Cautionary Tale, Easily Repeated

The Kodak story is a cautionary tale. The advancements of technology are rapid and unforgiving. If you don’t keep pace you will be displaced.

Kodak had plenty of warning. It took thirty years for an innovative new technology to take down the company.

Thirty years to be displaced almost sounds quaint. The pace of change is only accelerating. This means you have to compare your brand’s vision to its environment frequently. What you are looking for are signals. Are there better ways to fulfill your brand’s vision than what your company is currently doing? If so, then all the alarms should be blaring.

These are the moments to re-evaluate your business model, because a flawed business model can tear your company down. Kodak’s brand is still iconic, unfortunately the company is gone. It had the wrong business model for the environment.

Technology empowers competitors to act. Instagram saw the opportunity to make sharing moments easy, and they took it. The Kodak Moment lives on in Instagram.

Why Your Company Needs a Compelling Purpose

One of my favorite movies is Football Factory. It’s a rough, vulgar story of football hooligans in the UK.

The film contrasts how soccer violence is a release from the pressures of work and life. In one biting scene, Rod, the protagonist’s best friend, describes what work really means to him, “Most of the time I just sit around the office waiting for the weekend. Don’t get me wrong, I love the money the job pays. But my real passion lies in [a bunch of bleeps] football.”

The statement, “waiting for the weekend,” has stuck with me. When employees don’t have a compelling purpose there’s a high probability they’re working for the weekend.

A Reason to Work

The biggest value of a compelling purpose is it provides a reason to work.

Lots of people don’t have a defined personal goal for their career. Instead, employees gravitate towards companies and leaders that have a defined vision for the future. The company’s purpose becomes the employee’s purpose. And the employee gains a great deal of pleasure and pride by helping someone else — whether it’s the entrepreneur or the organization — fulfill its purpose.

This may seem like a complex idea, but it’s not. Dan Pink, in his book Drive, demonstrated that people are motivated by three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy: Give people control over how they work. Let them figure out the best way to get the job done.

Mastery: Encourage people to become experts. Help them get better at what they do.

Purpose: People thrive when they have a sense of connecting to something bigger than themselves.

Purpose intrigues me, because the organization can provide a compelling purpose. It’s the brand:

What does the brand stand for?
What is it trying to achieve?
Why should I (the employee) work hard and make it a reality?

A compelling purpose gives a job meaning. It gives everyone on your team a reason to work.

Making Progress Every Day

Pink argues that purpose has two major components:

Making a positive contribution to others
Making progress every day

The second component — making progress every day — is the interesting one.

The difference between your company’s values and its purpose is progress. Your values are static, but your purpose is a target. Your team is working towards a destination, and they’re struggling to get there. And they need to know their efforts are making a difference.

Purpose is measurable. You can see the impact of your effort. You can see the lives you’re helping. You can see the results of your work. You can see how you’re making progress every day.

When your brand’s purpose is visible, tangible, and measurable it’s highly motivating. It gives your team a reason to stay late, make another call, think deeper, and work harder. It gives them a reason to work.

Your Brand Is Your Purpose

Your brand and your company’s purpose are intrinsically linked.

It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. A compelling purpose gives your team a reason to work, and that motivates them to go above and beyond the call of duty. Their efforts in turn make your company shine. Your team’s efforts energize the brand and gives it form and function.

Customers are drawn to people with purpose.

Strategy Without a Map

The Sahara is the largest tropical desert on earth. It spans over 3,000 miles, and covers a space approximately the size of the United States. And it’s constantly changing.

Steve Donahue writes in the Shifting Sands, “On a map, the mountain peaks have names but individual sand dunes don’t. If you named a dune, the map would be out of date before the ink was dry.”

The dunes are constantly shifting and changing, and this means you don’t use a map to cross the Sahara. You use a compass, landmarks, and local resources to navigate the terrain and get to your destination.

This is an excellent metaphor for growing your business. In a changing marketplace you don’t have a map to guide you to success.

Baby Boomers Climbed Mountains

Business wasn’t easier in the eighties and nineties. It was different.

The playing field was different. The economics were different. Customer needs were different. The factors for success were different.

Boomers weren’t crossing the Sahara to grow their companies. They were climbing mountains.

Mountain climbers have the advantage of seeing their goal, the peak. They know where they’re going, and they have a pretty good idea of how to get there. And if they’re lucky, other climbers may have already mapped the route.

Growing a business in previous generations was more linear and static. This meant the strategic planning process was more stable and akin to following a map.

Abandon the Maps

A key problem we face today is we’re burdened by yesterday’s maps. Businesses have transitioned from climbing mountains to crossing deserts.

For example, Benedict Evans tweeted a fascinating stat on the growth of the smartphone market over the next 4 years.

What happens when you double the number of smartphones on the planet? This is an excellent example of a shifting dune in business.

As Fred Wilson points out, “The first 2.5bn smartphones brought us Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, Whatsapp, Kik, Venmo, Duolingo, and most importantly, drove the big web apps to build world class mobile apps and move their user bases from web to mobile.” The next 2.5 billion smartphones will be deployed to people in the developing world, and give them access to information and resources they’ve never had before.

The deployment of smartphones on a global scale will be transformative. And there’s no map to tell you how to respond to this shift. You can’t even predict what it will do to your business or your customers in 2020. It’s a shifting dune, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Look for Constants

When you navigate without a map, look for constants.

What do your customers want? Low price, convenience, options, advice? You can develop a strong vision for your brand when you understand the constants for your customers.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon summed this up well. Speaking at an Amazon Web Services conference, he was asked what he thought would change over the next 10 years.

Bezos replied, “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two, because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.”

Amazon uses price, selection, and fast delivery to drive its strategy. Bezos continues, “In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. … When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

Start Each Day With a Plan

The goal is cloudy. You can’t see the destination, or how you’re going to get there. But that shouldn’t stop you.

Business strategy is ever changing. It’s the nature of technology and our marketplace. You can’t predict what will happen next, but you can keep moving forward.

Focus on the constants. What do you know is true today, and what will be true tomorrow?

Get comfortable with ambiguity. You aren’t in control.

Start each day with a plan. Some days you will make a lot of progress, and other times you’ll face setbacks. But that’s all to be expected when your business is crossing the Sahara.

B2B Buyers Binge on Content

Social media and content marketing strategies that worked well in 2012 are running out of steam. And in many cases, they just don’t work anymore.

Your customers have changed their behavior.

This was highlighted by a story published by Buffer, a leading social media software company. The company revealed that in late 2015 it had lost nearly half of its social media referral traffic in the previous twelve months.

For any marketer, this was a shocking admission.

Buffer wasn’t losing due to poor marketing or bad writing. Their content is the best in the business. And the company wasn’t alone. BuzzSumo dug into the data and found social media referral traffic was falling across the board in comparable companies like Social Media Examiner, Moz, and Copyblogger.

Mark Schaefer calls this phenomenon “content shock.” He explains, “The volume of free content is exploding at a ridiculous rate … However, our ability to consume that content (the demand) is finite. There are only so many hours in a day and even if we consume content while we eat, work and drive, there is a theoretical and inviolable limit to consumption, which we are now approaching.”

B2B content has hit the critical mass, and our customers have responded. They’re not reading as much. They’re not sharing as much. They’re not following as much.

For brands, that means we have to change our approach. As Mark aptly points out, “The idea that ‘great content rises to the top’ is over.”

B2B Buyers Binge

Content shock hasn’t displaced content marketing, it’s just changed it.

B2B buyers may not be following your posts on a daily or weekly basis — unless it’s truly exceptional — but they still want your content.

When a buyer has a major purchase to make, they read everything!

They download your white papers. They watch your videos. They search your blog. They engage with you on social media. They read the review sites. They binge on everything.

A major purchase decision triggers a fear response. As a result, the buyer works to mitigate the risks by getting informed. Bingeing on content is like putting on armor. The more you know, the more secure you feel.

Automate the Binge Response

The tried and true model of content marketing was methodical: establish an editorial calendar and stick to it.

That’s what I advocated in 2010, Market Like You’re Producing For TV. I wrote, “Producing content is not a hobby; at least not in a marketing context. Treat your content like a TV station. Set a schedule and stick to it.”

I don’t subscribe to that advice anymore. Now I look at two distinct modes of content marketing:

Platform Building to grow your audience and reputation.

Sales Enablement to engage buyers at strategic points in the purchase cycle.

Platform Building is a big part of what I do as a speaker and thought leader, but most organizations focus on Sales Enablement. Their objective is to use content to move the sales needle.

For Sales Enablement, invest in a marketing automation tool like Pardot. Marketing automation provides you the platform to serve customers that are bingeing before they buy. It connects your website, content, email, and CRM to automate workflows while gathering data so you can respond more intelligently.

For example, I am implementing Pardot to drive my keynote speaking business. One of the workflows notifies my sales team to pick up the phone when a prospect is engaging with key pieces of content on our website. We are watching for the binges so we can be more proactive in the sales process.

This is the new era of content marketing. The strategies and tactics that worked well in 2012 don’t have the same impact in 2016. Feeds and drip marketing are rapidly losing their potency. Today we are working in the era of the binge.

How are you responding to the shifting state of social media and content marketing?

The 4 Phases of the Commoditization Cycle

Competitive advantage is being eroded at an astronomical pace.

Jean-Marie Dru writes in The Ways To New, “From the moment an innovation appears on the market, the movement toward commoditization goes at a rate that has never been seen before.”

As soon as you find an advantage your competitors — both direct and indirect — will take action to nullify it. They will copy, duplicate, and build up on it. They’ll take your idea and claim it as their own.

Before you know it, what was once a competitive advantage is simply a standard of doing in business in your industry.

It’s a frustrating cycle, but fortunately it’s predictable.

The 4 Phases of the Commoditization Cycle

There are four phases of the Commoditization Cycle:

Functionality: A company introduces a new technique, tool, or process to solve a problem. Uber is challenging the taxi industry with a new platform and process for hailing a car service.

Reliability: Once there are two or more credible options companies stand out by offering the most reliable service. Customers want innovations that “just work.”

Convenience: Once the category matures customers start to distinguish one option from the next based on convenience. Features and quality are no longer differentiators. Rather customers look for better service, better selection, and companies that are simply easier to deal with.

Price: The last stop on the Commoditization Cycle is price. When multiple vendors offer comparable products and services that are functional, reliable, and convenient customers will shift to price.

Competition is the driver that propels the Commoditization Cycle. As the volume of competitors increase the rate of innovation accelerates, which gives customers more and better choices.

Own Convenience

Many sales reps default to selling on price too soon. They perceive customer resistance as price resistance, which is often a mistake.

True commoditization — selling on price — is the last stop in the cycle, but there is lots of room to innovate in the Convenience phase.

For example, Zappos created a competitive advantage in the shoe industry by delighting customers with exceptional service:

Extensive inventory and selection
Easy to navigate website
24/7 phone support, as well as live chat and email support
Free shipping both ways
Most orders are shipped within 24 hours
365 day return policy

Zappos innovated in Convenience, and continues to do so. The company avoids selling on price by making “service” it’s number one core value.

Price Is a Signal to Innovate

It’s inevitable that an industry or product will eventually be reduced to a number. Once the standards are established, customers will dictate what they will pay.

But that doesn’t have to be a detractor. Price, or price sensitivity, is an early warning system.

When you notice customers are differentiating one product from another based on price it’s time to shift priorities. Use the buyer behavior to trigger an analysis of the Commoditization Cycle.

Which phase are you in?
How are competitors behaving? Are they offering new products, services, or options?
Is there a new competitor that’s changing the landscape for customers?
How are customer needs and behaviors shifting?

Depending on what’s happening in your industry, you can use the 4 Phases of the Commoditization Cycle to determine your response.

You Can’t Avoid Change

Ten years ago, or even five years ago, models like the Commoditization Cycle were simply interesting academic tools. Today, they are highly valuable tools for managers.

Technological advancements are accelerating at an exponential rate. Steven Kotler writes, “For the first time in history, the world’s leading experts on accelerating technology are consistently finding themselves too conservative in their predictions about the future.”

The rate of change has a profound impact on the commoditization of your business. On the one hand, new tools and technologies make it easier for competitors to duplicate innovations and make them their own. And on the other hand, new tools and technologies are rewriting the value propositions of traditional industries.

The idea can be summed up with what’s already becoming a hackneyed phrase, “Don’t get Ubered.”

It’s unlikely you can stay ahead of change, at least not for long, but you can understand that innovation in your industry will move in four predictable phases: functionality, reliability, convenience, and price.

How you manage the cycle may be the difference between profits and obsolescence.