What’s the Product the Product of?

The industrialised West survived three World Wars – two hot, one cold – and met its shortages and rebuilt its wealth by means of an unblinking concentration on productivity. Chris Radley says it’s no surprise then that our business default-thought remains the Product.

What we do is create products to fill gaps, then create gaps to fill with products. We don’t think product, we assume it. Even services are packaged and presented like products. Even academic and intellectual properties are thought of as products. The point about products being that once you have them, you have to shift them.

Now though, things are changing. We have reached the Age of Access.

That’s where access to compatible businesses and cultural networks capable of forging long-term alliances becomes the organisational priority. By this strategic focal shift, salesmanship is revealed for the short-term expedient it always was.

Buying decisions cease to be regarded as victories or defeats for the seller and times of career risk for the buyer, they become the sensible and progressive outworkings of much more important earlier stuff.

Of course suppliers want to do business. It’s just that enlightened suppliers will want to link their success to the advancement of their clients. So short-term sales targets must be seen as stages along the full course, not as some handicapped steeplechase where the fences get set successively higher.

It also becomes important for suppliers to see that every inappropriate sale secured is as damaging to them as it is to the buyer. For them, the place to be sitting at the table is not opposite, leaning adversarially forward, all set to issue the well-polished spiel, but right along-side, thinking future, working out a mutual success.

For grown-ups only

There are buying and selling relationships where such mutuality already happens, like at times of national emergency when shared danger can concentrate minds wonderfully. It happens too in ‘idea industries’ like advertising where the product or service to be promoted needs continual re-presentation to its public. Because what is being sold here is not so much a product as the constantly adjusted re-perception of it.

The client company supplies the data, testings, predictions and projections of what its market wants, while the agency supplies its analyses, audience researches and creative insights into what the public is ready for. Both partners to the process understand that it’s not merely a bright idea that’s needed. To the client, the agency is a network of talents and connections out of which a progression of over-arching bright ideas can be expected. With that expectation their two networks can connect to mutual advantage and the buyer–supplier relationship can evolve into something more grown-up.

There are beauty contests still held by marketing companies with a product to sell, with four – six – ten – agencies called in to offer bright ideas on a winner-takes-all basis. That’s when the default-thought wins and nobody thinks further than ‘the product’.

Before the getting-to-know-you phase, there should be a getting-to-know-what-we-really-want phase where the prospective supplier objectively participates. Sharon Drew Morgen calls this 'Buying Facilitation'. Think of it as a way of organisational life, not a product.

My pick for the Leadership Library

The Age of Access by Jeremy Rifkin is much more a reality check than a management how-to-do-it book. He describes a rising new global hypercapitalist culture that is based on private customers who put access to experience before the traditional ownership of property and things; and business customers who will be buying in entirely new cross-market ways involving long-term alliances.

Affluent younger people living the international life want someone – some company – to worry about the arrangements for them; they want to be able to switch the game at short notice. And if there’s a supplier who already provides some part of their lifestyle experience, that ‘savvy’ supplier is going to offer them whatever else it is they may want, regardless of traditional business supply lines.

In this networking world, suppliers of experiences will run the markets not the makers of products as before. We’ll need to be careful not to end up, as his subtitle says, in a place ‘Where all of Life is a Paid-for Experience’.