Market change challenges all of us . . . By Director Wayne Hall

April 30, 2007

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The degree to which market expectations are changing is really starting to gain momentum, with all sorts of repercussions for business.

Customers are actively exploring ways to get more from services. For a juke box operator this may take the form of adding advertising features to their box; for a background music supplier it may mean adding online voice messaging to their services, and to a video supplier it could mean adding a much greater scope of programs – music and general entertainment. The “fall-out” has been that for all of the parties involved in events - the customer, the manufacturer/developer, the operator and (in our case) the content supplier – market considerations have become a much more complicated issue.

As market’s become more sophisticated, one of the resulting challenges for businesses involved in the chain of creating and managing services is that of ensuring that new market “needs” don’t lead to a destructive loss of focus on core business.

When is a new “feature” a new service altogether? It’s often a hard question to answer upfront. For example, while the juke box manufacturer may introduce advertising management software and the operator enthusiastically introduce it to the publican, who is going to manage the service? As many operators have found to date, displaying an advertising feature to a publican is one thing….. supporting the process, however, requires production, pricing, 3rd party sales and scheduling solutions – none of which represent current core business (in most cases), and all of which can burden a business with unplanned cost and cultural change.

As markets have become more sophisticated, it has been interesting to see how different businesses react. Our observations are purely that – observations of situations occurring within the markets we service – however, it would appear that those businesses who have defined their core services and who have set up strategic relationship with 3rd parties to assist them manage additional associated services (eg in the case of the juke box operator above, engaging an advertising specialist to manage & sell space on the box), have done much better then those which have tried to manage all of the opportunities themselves.

One thing is certain…. there is a lot more change to come in our market (I think we can confidently add  “change” to “death” and “taxes” at this point !). For many it will present an opportunity to change their focus and pursue business in a different way. For many more it will be a time to sell up and move on.

All the best when determining your strategy.


Wayne Hall
Director

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