Jim Collins, in his book “Good to Great”, speaks about Isaiah Berlin’s “The Hedgehog and the fox,” and applies it to the agriculture business. This thinking is about taking it one step further and applying the concept to not just business, but more specifically marketing.
In short, imagine a fox running from one source of food to the next compared to a hedgehog slowly grazing along. When the fox comes and tries to eat the hedgehog, it simply curls up in a ball, and eventually, the fox moves on to an easier source of food. When the fox leaves, the hedgehog goes back to its business.
In “Good to Great,” the example company that applies the concept of the hedgehog is Walgreens. The company had over 500 restaurants in its early days and even invented the Malt Milkshake. Consciously, the company decided to focus on becoming the most convenient drug store.
They sold all of the restaurants in four and a half years and used the revenue to finance drugstore expansion. They narrowed in on the fact that they want to be the most profitable store per customer visit and used that to guide them in their decisions.
Even though the restaurants were performing okay financially, the company still decided to get rid of them to focus on one and only one thing. It’s easy to get distracted by all of our fresh and flashy “marketing activities” and forget that we are in charge of one thing: Create and sustain demand honorably and profitably.
We may have a million followers on twitter or a 99% response rate to a direct mail piece, but there has to be an unyielding focus on creating and sustaining demand honorably and profitably.
In marketing, it’s really easy to become like the fox going from one marketing initiative or idea to the next. When one food source is depleted, we move on to the next thing that sparkles.
We go from a new trade show booth to a new website to an email campaign to firing the marketing manager to getting a new marketing manager who says we need a new trade show booth. All the while we are expending resources running all of our marketing initiatives that are getting mediocre results.
In marketing, we can channel our energy and begin to focus the same way. First, we have to discover if success in marketing is something that is really important to us. It’s entirely possible that it is something that is not important yet.
There could be other hugely important objectives that need more focus, but the first thing is to make a conscious decision of whether we care about marketing or not. The truth is that some organizations and people aren’t ready to picture themselves as a hedgehog. They are satisfied with the freedom of being the fox.
Next, we have to discover what works in marketing. This is so critical because once universal principals are discovered, the answers become obvious, and potential is realized. We can begin to see the prosperity that comes from creating and sustaining demand honorably and profitably.
With principals, we have the ability to amputate our own leg if necessary. We seize the opportunity to be like Walgreens and become the best at something.
The third and final step is to apply the principles to our marketing planning. We are ready to conduct the analysis, build the strategies, set plans into action, and look for marketing success.
With this kind of principled approach, marketing happens on purpose. The right marketing activities become more focused and polished. Marketing initiatives can actually stand up for themselves instead of being just another expense. When initiatives aren’t meeting their goals, we are forced to examine what is not working, where they are clashing with marketing principals, and fix them.
Is success in marketing something that is important to you?
