The following is an excerpt from Jeffery Hayzlett’s new book Think Big, Act Bigger.
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The speed of business today makes adaptation more essential than ever. You must strike a balance between satisfying demand for who you are and what you offer now and adapting.
Just ask Jaycen Thorgeirson, founder and CEO of UviaUs. At first, the company focused on unique direct marketing print material for organizations like the Washington Nationals baseball team. Then, in 2011, Thorgeirson saw a tool for embedding video technology in marketing being used in Europe and started investigating it. Today, UviaUs is 100 percent focused on its Uvideo as a dynamic marketing tool that fuses audio, video, and print.
What’s interesting is that UviaUs got more resistance internally than externally for this change, which reinforces the importance of adapting with your people in alignment. In the case of UviaUs, the salespeople faced price resistance: Uvideo was much more expensive compared to the traditional print media customers were doing. But the company pushed forward without excuses. Sure, it required a higher investment, but they also attracted a higher level of clientele that saw the value in the delivery method and its adaptability for more targeted marketing.
In the end, UviaUs found the brands it worked with expected the company to do something different to help them stand out. What mattered most to UviaUs and its customers wasn't the product but delivering on the promise of what they sold. Products must change; the goals for those products do not. “We are still you-via-us. This is still printed collateral and marketing,” says Thorgeirson. “This is about brand experience, and our customers get how valuable it is. They've come to expect that we're going to do something different. They don't want to be a one-trick pony, and neither do we. Otherwise we're not differentiating ourselves.”
