”The factory that started the century providing a range of footwear for men will go into the next century providing footwear for… a range of men.”
Charlie Prince -describing his plans to make boots for drag queens, Kinky Boots (Public Library)
Change is inevitable. Change is a great opportunity for better and new things to come. Change can lead to re-imagining your offerings and your brand. When it’s time for you to tweak what you offer, how you present it or who you serve, alway, always, keep your audience in the know.
There are times when change in our businesses is inevitable, this is when we need to take a step back and plan out a new strategy for the new times to come. At this point, you might consider rebranding.
Often times rebranding is synonym of new developments, new functions or addons to a product or service we have chosen to use from the vast variety in the market. Other times, when the result is not as happy as expected, all we want to do is to go back to that product or service we loved and now looks so unfamiliar that we need to learn how to use it all over again.
You don’t want this happening to your brand. You want your audience to feel part of this new stage, you want to make it about a better service served to your audience with brand new benefits for them.
Kinky Boots, a Broadway show based on a british movie with the same name presents us with the journey of an young man that finds himself taking the lead of the company Price and Son, a traditional men’s footwear factory in Northampton, England, after his father dies. Charlie, our new entrepreneur in traditional men’s shoe ware takes charge of the company reluctantly when he sees himself forced to leave his live in London and while learning that the most important client of the family business has been lost and the factory is in great danger of closure. Until great opportunity presents and our dear Charlie meets Lola, a drag queen, and see the opportunity of changing his product to serve a more specific group of men that need his services when he complains to Charlie that his coterie —men with a feminine flair but a solid gait— can’t seem to find a pair of high heel stiletto boots that won’t break.
This is when Charlie, sees a great opportunity to take a risk and create a specialized product for this smaller group of men. How’s that for pivoting? and how’s that for rebranding?
The new product we see is a new version of Price and Son; bolder colors, long higher heels, luxurious fabrics and a happy group of new ideal customers that didn’t have a product special for them.
Prasad Kaipa, who coaches and advises CEOs all over the world and is a co-author with Navi Radjou in From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading with Wisdom says: “Not pivoting is often the result of blame and self-deception”.
The decision to pivot is scary business, but when its not done blindsided and we use analytics and data to support and study the possible changes, we will see great results. Take small steps, announce these new changes to your Social Media and see how your customers react to them. Based on those results, you can now analyze what are the next best steps, iterate and implement again. This is known as Design Thinking in our western culture, in India and other emerging cultures is known as Jugaad Innovation.
This type of dynamic will allow you to zag when everyone is going zig!