{"id":14,"date":"2006-01-09T08:52:50","date_gmt":"2006-01-09T00:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=14"},"modified":"2006-09-18T06:02:27","modified_gmt":"2006-09-17T22:02:27","slug":"why-monitor-customers-at-the-fringes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"Why monitor customers at the fringes?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the break I have been reading a book called Blindsided by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jimharris.com\/index.html\">Jim Harris<\/a>.  It tackles the issue of how companies can miss crucial changes to their markets.  One of the more interesting examples deals with how a chocolate manufacturer started losing revenue for the first time at the end of the nineties, but could not understand why.   It turns out that one of their biggest markets &#8211; teenagers &#8211; now were spending their pocket money not on sweets, but on pre-pay mobile.  They were &#8211; to use the phrase of the book &#8211; blindsided.<\/p>\n<p>However the quote that interested me the most concerned the breadth of scanning that a company needs to undertake these days in order to prevent being caught out by changes :<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Move and explore in a direction you know the least.  The principle is critical for businesses today.  Send some people out to move in a direction you know the least. In other words allow some individuals to explore new areas that individuals and the organisation don&#8217;t currently understand as being related or relevant to your business&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the break I have been reading a book called Blindsided by Jim Harris. It tackles the issue of how companies can miss crucial changes to their markets. One of the more interesting examples deals with how a chocolate manufacturer started losing revenue for the first time at the end of the nineties, but could [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-fringes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}