Focus on What Doesn't Change - Christopher S. Penn - Marketing Data Science Keynote Speaker

One of the most insightful pieces of business advice I enjoyed recently was reading the business strategies of top executives. One piece stood out among the rest, from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos:

Focus on what doesn’t change.

When we think about this advice, this focus, it makes total sense. Amazon doesn’t attempt to change the core motivations of its customers:

People want faster delivery.
People want the convenience of shopping anywhere, any time.
People want lower prices.

These motivations don’t generally change. Amazon’s entire ecosystem has been built around serving these unchanging needs.

Prime Shipping offers faster delivery.
Amazon’s arsenal of shopping methods, from Dash buttons to Alexa, offer shopping whenever we want.
Amazon’s pricing is competitive for a solid set of core products people want.

Consider any market leader and they work without compromise on serving basic, unchanging needs, from serving the ego (status symbols) to convenience to lower prices. People want fast, cheap, and good. People want to feel safe, secure, happy, and important.

Consider our products and services. Which unchanging motivations are they built around? How have we adapted our products and services to double down on these motivations?

Consider our marketing. How well do our messages reflect the unchanging motivations our product serves? If our product saves time but all our messaging is about low cost, then we’re setting ourselves up to fail.

Bezos’ mantra makes sense for businesses of just about any kind: focus on the things people want that don’t change. Apply this mantra to your business, to your marketing, and see where you fall short – then fix it.

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