What Is It You Do Again?
BNET Australia Contributors
Aussie Rules
Biography
BNET Australia Contributors
Brian Haverty is editorial director for CBS Interactive Australia and is responsible for the company's BNET and ZDNet Australia sites.
Robert Gerrish is a coach, author and professional speaker and the founder of Flying Solo, an Australian online community for solo business owners.
Melissa Lourenco is the HR manager for CBS Interactive in Australia.
Chris Golis is the author of The Humm Handbook: Lifting Your Level of Emotional Intelligence. He runs seminars and workshops on EQ.
Suzi Dafnis is Community Director of the Australian Businesswomen's Network.
Yvonne Adele helps organisations build a culture of ideas by teaching people at all levels to access their untapped creative thinking skills.
Okay, hands up, who knows what “transformational change” means? Thought so. Not many of you and those who do grasp it are probably in the business anyway.
I don’t profess to know exactly what it means, but I suspect it has something to do with changing the way you operate — a kind of business-not-as-usual proposition.
I came across the term most recently emblazoned on a roadside poster between Brisbane Airport and the City. The massive poster read: “We deliver transformational change” and under the headline was probably the name of the organisation that does just that. Probably. I didn’t look.
I was on my way to a conference where I was to be banging on about how to get the attention of Australian small business and my audience were computer hardware vendors, so the sighting was quite timely.
The poster sums up perfectly one of the classic behaviours that marketers make: failure to engage potential customers due to muddled messaging.
We cannot expect our target market to give a damn about who we are and what we do if we don’t allow them to comprehend it in the first place.
Imagine if the poster had said something like: “Change your thinking. Transform your business”. Maybe then I would have taken a split second to see who the advertiser was, rather than being blinded by a big fat question mark in my mind.
As I’ve said before, I reckon that if our key messages are not readily understood by a child of eight, we risk missing a lot of passing traffic. Traffic that doesn’t care because we haven’t permitted any level of connection.
Anyway, enough of all this I must focus on the facilitation of some hot beverage sustenance. Yep, time for a coffee.
