Coloring Outside the Lines to Expand Market Share and Profitability

Source: The Gonzales Group

What does it mean to "Color Outside the Lines?" It means moving beyond and outside the doldrums of the norm. It does not mean being defiant and anti-institutional. It means finding the strength of an organization and leveraging it, even if it means you color outside the bounds of your defined goals and objectives.

Companies with the greatest strength in a mature industry tend to be the least successful in fostering new ideas and processes and often suffer from "Innovator's Dilemma." We see and hear about organizations like GM, Polaroid, Timex, IBM, and others who were innovators by all accounts and "used to" lead in their fields, but their culture hardened and they "colored only within the confines of the lines" to make things stay the same.

Many organizations utilize this same approach when it comes to Multicultural consumers. They elect to maintain the same approach and marketing methods that have worked for them in the past but that has little relevance to the Multicultural consumer base.

Coloring outside the lines is an individual exercise and begins with a little self-analysis. Don't start by blaming the decision makers but try to understand what play book they are reading from and color accordingly. Our experience at the Gonzales Group found that the market intelligence and the know-how for Multicultural outreach begins on the front lines and migrates upward. It is these front-line individuals that see the opportunity in the Multicultural consumer segment long before the folks at the top take notice.

An Evolving Environment

The twenty-first century broker, agent, employee, and manager will need to know more about their customer base than his or her twentieth century counterpart does. Successful organizations in the twenty-first century will have to be more in tune with the Multicultural consumer. This includes accommodating cultural nuances that accompany the rapidly changing demographic profile we see taking place in our respective communities.

Stability is no longer the norm and most experts agree that over the next few years the business environment will become even more volatile. Albert Einstein said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." As the profile of the home buying consumer changes, so must the marketing, advertising and outreach we utilize to increase our market share and profitability.

Coloring outside of the lines only helps to move us and the organizations we represent forward!