Fred Wiersema’s New Realities

In his book The New Market Leaders, Fred Wiersema offers six new realities that he says are causing a supply glut and customer shortage in most markets.

• Competitors proliferate—Like George Day,Wiersema notes that most companies are facing increased competition. He adds that this competition often comes from unexpected sources. For example, Boeing is now loaning money to customers to buy its planes, thus making Boeing a competitor of banks. In turn, banks are selling stock and
  stockbrokers are becoming financial advisors.
• All secrets are open secrets—Don’t expect your best practices to remain proprietary very long.Your competitors are becoming more adept at learning your secrets and adapting them for their own purposes. Everybody is imitating everybody else shamelessly.
• Innovation is universal—Product life cycles keep getting shorter and innovation is now
  commonplace.Wiersema says it has gotten so frantic that customers are inundated with
  products (twenty-three thousand new packaged goods last year alone) and suppliers are
  dizzy from pursuit of the next best thing.
• Information overwhelms and depreciates—We are all swamped with information, writes Wiersema.“Junk mail fills mailboxes; magazines stuffed with ads run as long as five hundred pages. . . . Advertisers stamp their logos on every conceivable surface, from
  cruising blimps and ski-lift towers to e-mail screens and bus roofs. Some television markets offer two hundred cable channels.An Internet surfer discovers a Milky Way or random data,much of it conflicting and some of it stupefying.” Our problem today isn’t how
  to generate information, it is how to digest it and make sense of it.
• Easy growth makes hard times—Carmakers produce 30 to 40 percent more cars than can be sold.Airlines keep adding seats and packing more passengers on planes.The telecommunications industry invests frantically in network infrastructure to such an extent that bandwidth vastly exceeds demand. In industry after industry, technology makes it possible to make more things faster. In business today, writes Wiersema, growth is sacred. It also leads to overcapacity, a shortage of customers, fewer sales, lower prices, and falling margins.
• Customers have less time than ever—“Of all the realities,” writes Wiersema,“this may
  be the most important.” After working, sleeping, eating, and doing chores people just have
  very little time left for such things as listening to your ad or even shopping for your product. Your biggest competitor, says Wiersema, might not be your rival but the demands on your customers’ time. Pressed for time and overstimulated by too many choices, people cope by tuning out.Your marketing message has to catch their attention in a nanosecond because that’s all the time they will give you.They are not paying attention.They are scanning.

Source: Fred Wiersema, The New Market Leaders:Who’s Winning and How in the Battle for Customers (New York: Free Press, 2001), pp. 48–58.

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