Blinkers are those things that are often put on horses so that their peripheral vision is cut off. That way they can’t see what’s around them and all their attention is focused in front, where the rider/driver wants them to go. There’s a comparable mentality when someone says about their business ‘this is what we do’ and define it in terms of your main successful product. There’s a customer base that repeatedly comes to the site and does X and Y, so putting all effort into optimising X and Y seems the best thing to do.
Here’s the problem with this approach: First or second time around you should have made X and Y effective to around 90% (if you can’t achieve that you’ve got some other issues to solve). After that, if you keep working on X and Y, you will be putting in a lot of effort in trying to squeeze out a few extra percent. It’s likely that a better approach is to take off the blinkers and look around at what else your customers may want to do, identify opportunities and unfulfilled needs, and go after those. You’ll find new revenue streams and maybe even new markets.
Spending time and energy on the things that are not ‘the most important’ will seem hard to justify, but a good way to position it is in terms of your customers – you want to know your customers better, and seek out the best value in both the core market and the peripheries.
Filed under: folly, general , base, blinkers, blinkers syndrome, core business, customers, mentality, periphery, strategy
