Quote: Alexs Dad "Paul, I wish it was so straightforward mate.
I'll be honest and say I rarely come across customers who say 'you are more expensive than the others but you are better - here is the contract'.
I'm sure it happens, but the person doing that job (getting the best/cheapest deal) isn't always the person who has to deal with the poor serive or product when it arrives. The thing is though, he rarely cares - he's got a tick in his box under 'work procured within budget'.
Tides will turn in the next generation when the far east folk currently living 10 to a hut decide they want proper wages, satelite telly, and running water like the rest of the world has. Add rising fuel (shipping and haulage) costs, the continuing inflation within the far east economy and before long that £300 42" plasma telly might not be as cheap as it once was because the fella once making it can't work for tuppence a month any more.'"
Oh indeed - didnt say it was easy.
it took BMW 35 years.
And youre right, in B2B - there are several people who influence the buying decision....but as the saying goes "no-one ever got fired buying IBM".
So the procurment person buying the cheap crap isnt the person you need to influence to get the price up...you need to find the REAL customer and scare the crap out of them about buying the cheapo shonky rubbish - that will change thier buying policies! Still very hard to do, mind.
Just if you compete purely on price...you're definitley screwed...so what's the alternative? In developed, commodity markets, its just a race to the bottom... why go there?
The point about Waitrose and Apple is that somehow, they HAVE managed to get their prices up and sell loads - it takes the whole organisation to do it well.
and the worst people to use to find out about the customer are the sales force...cos youre right...all they care about are sales volumes every month....any mug can give stuff away.
Consumer electronics is interesting.....
What an earth made people queue up all night to be the first to get the iPad, when two weeks later they could have just walked in an got one?
If we could work that out and stick it in a bottle - we wouldnt be having this discussion ole bean!
i've just done some work looking at sony - they're screwed because we dont care about technology anymore and all they want to do is sell us cleverer boxes - not enough nowadays. all that technology does is allow you to enter the market - we want services, a community network, upgradablility, repairability will come back because our devices will have our lives in them and we wont want to have the hassle of moving everything over to the next device every 6 months.
TV's are dead soon anyway they'll be killed of by broadband speeds and free content..we'll have a box and several different kinds of displays around the house - monitors, projectors, goggles, skull caps to zap the image straight to your brain, whatever etc. etc.
