In business, always ensure to deliver on your promises. Do not promise what you can not deliver, when you do, you damage your brand and lose our trust. The old mantra of “under promising and over delivering” is a really safe way to play the game.
The list of businesses that have failed to deliver on their promises is a very long one.
When your services works as advertised without any hitch, excited customers will become your chief publicists and they will spread word about the business even without been asked. Word of mouth is the most effective method of marketing, in this modern times, smart marketers work out how to help satisfied customers spread the word and reach more people.
From the little research several people have done in the Nigerian e-commerce scene, the main challenge is that the promise of e-commerce; which is search, click, buy and get it delivered fast is not fulfilled. A new e-commerce operation can start today and leap frog all the existing players if they can deliver on this promise. But what is really mind bugging is that rather than the business owners to sit up and fix their businesses, they would rather dole out more resources into more publicity, making more noise!
When it is working as advertised, it becomes really hard for competition to blow you away. Google remains king of the search and Facebook remains king of social networking because their services work well and there is no reason to switch. If the goal is to find information quickly and Google Search does a decent job every time I use it, why would the average user need to ever Bing anything?? (Bing is Microsoft’s heavily marketed search engine. It was launched in 2009 and it is yet to make a threat to Google’s search business)
I still think a new Telco provider can arrive in Nigeria and seriously damage the current leaders because people have issues with every telco operator out there over unfulfilled promises. And with the number portability service, the old strings are now cut off. People can port whenever the right ship comes around.
Which businesses around you are not working as advertised and as such has left a gap for you to creep in? Which promises have your made that you are not living up to?
Watching The World
- 1 billion search requests are entered into Facebook’s search box everyday, perhaps this is why Facebook has dropped Bing and will launch their own full search engine soon.
