Africa and the World – The Timeless Fact is “You Get Out of it what you Put into It!”
Sometimes you get overwhelmed at people’s success and wonder why you’re not reaching their level of success. The simple strategy is putting in quality inputs and work at it to receive quality outputs. There so many examples I can use to make this point even clearer. The fact of the matter is that it will cost you something and in most cases it is to a great deal your time and money.
I want to take the case of Toyota as Perreault, Jr. D. et al put in their book ‘Applications in Basic Marketing’ in an article by Andrew Tilin. This is a 2005-2006 edition. Toyota was the number 1 automaker with profits of about $11.1 billion. Toyota was surely faced with tough competition from other manufacturers. The only strength that made Toyota get to this level was strategically putting in value adding inputs to their effort.
Toyota’s Unique Marketing Input
Toyota’s John Winson says, ‘you have to be who you are’ to win and ‘if you are going to switch directions, you’d better start afresh’. This was with respect to Toyota having launched a targeted niche, the 35 year median age that liked the Scion range. This targeting pushed sales to 63 millions for the company. The strategy was to start afresh on a different approach to selling their new brand. For Toyota, it meant doing a lot of tests with real customers with the new brand, which resulted in added ‘roll-up sunshades’ on the second and third row window.
For you and me, it definitely would mean taking a few steps back and see if our product reaches and satisfy our target market. Do you really provide a service or product that people are looking for? You may have to spend some time doing the basic diagnosis before you go out to your market. Let the experience of your customers dictate what you must offer and then they’ll be happy.
Taking the Lead Over the Years
Toyota acts, improves and repeats whatever has worked for them, ‘if our solution don’t work, we try something else’, says Cho, the company representative. To me it seems like Toyota is not afraid to get their hands dirty. It is Toyota’s the results of their work that dictates what to do next. In other words, their main focus is finding out what is happening in the field. To me, this defined quality.
In all business, you must never try to be a copycat and do exactly what your rival does because you may not succeed but bring shame to yourself. ‘some people think that if they just implement our techniques, they can be as successful as we are. But those that try often fail. That’s because no mere process can turn a poor performer into a star’, says Cho. Toyota looks at where they could be wasting resources like time, people or material and device method of reducing the waste.
Our Lesson
The obvious lesson we get from Toyota is that a winning culture does not shun halting production until everything works according to plan. It’s the same for me and you, we must make our plans right before we take action and if we fail, let’s not be afraid going back to the drawing board.
“for students of success, every company can be a teacher” (Perreault, Jr. D. W.; pg. 9)
This post has 1 comments
July 2nd, 2009
Hello. I was reading someone elses blog and saw you on their blogroll. Would you be interested in exchanging blog roll links? If so, feel free to email me.
Thanks.
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