Later Saint Thomas Aquinas ordered them and thus defined the popular list of 7 sins, which would have been taken up by the poet Dante Alighieri who included them in his work ‘The Divine Comedy’ and in part there it is explained that it has gained such popularity even outside the circle of Catholicism.
What happens if we turn some of these sins into behaviors that must be avoided at all costs in the Marketing environment? As always, I add for you the particular vision of the agricultural industry.
Note: Next to each sin, you will find the definition that appears in the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.
PRIDE: “Haughtiness and inordinate appetite to be preferred to others / Satisfaction and vanity by contemplating one’s own clothes with contempt for others.”
Phrases such as “we have the best service in the industry” or “the lowest prices in the market” are provocative statements that are intended to attract attention, however, they can be much more than an advertising strategy and dangerously reflect the thinking of brands and their executives.
“The only thing you have is the best portfolio of products” a farmer once told us, and he concluded his criticism by saying “but as soon as a product comes a little closer to them, I will change them” and he did so because of the arrogance with which we operated At that time, knowing that we had products with a great distance in results compared to what was found in other offers on the market, was what led us to lose sales.
Proposed penance: Identify those superb behaviors of your brand, work group or personal and review the cases of Kodak, Olivetti or Blockbuster. You will learn a lot.
AVARICE: “Excessive desire to possess and acquire wealth to hoard it.”
What does it mean to be the market leader? We are set up to always go for more and very rarely do we pay attention to maintaining a level of profit or market share. If we are not clear about our “enough”, we will not be able to achieve our growth goals, but even more so, we will fall into the temptation of seeking better financial returns at the cost of impacting the quality of our services.
“Tools” such as raising prices as the main mechanism for generating profits instead of first improving our value proposition, can have serious consequences. The prices of commodities in agriculture suffer from the attacks of the law of supply and demand in addition to the exchange rate, but if our quality of care does not improve, a vicious and unsustainable circle is created.
proposed penance: Amazon has grown tremendously, but has kept its initial value proposition intact, such as competitive pricing, seamless logistics, and a simple and efficient return policy. On the other hand, do you remember Uber at the beginning with the bottle of water when getting into the vehicle, opening the door and cleaning the units? Pray to be more like Amazon and deliver what it promises.
LUST: “Excessive desire for sexual pleasure. / f. Excess or too much in some things”.
And if we talk too much, when was the last time you reviewed your product portfolio? Do you have the correct amount of SKU’s? or how about the number of branches?
A good friend from Sinaloa used to say that in many regions of Mexico, there were an excessive number of facilities to receive grain resulting from the harvests, but there was little infrastructure of train tracks and even highways to get the products from the centers of origin.
It is not enough to have a lot of everything to satisfy a market, but to meet its needs, it is necessary to make a business plan in accordance with the requirements and the commercial and financial reality in question.
proposed penance: Talk to your product development team and challenge them to review 80-20% of the products you have. Many surprises will reflect that analysis.
LAZINESS: “Negligence, tedium or carelessness in the things to which we are obliged.”
The only thing worse than not knowing that we are making a mistake is knowing it and not acting. Due to carelessness or negligence, as the definition says, we are likely to fail in our attempt to generate a memorable experience for our customers and even more so when we are part of the Marketing team.
The lack of maintenance of our website, the inconsistency in the publication of content on social networks, our unexpected silence before the news of the sector where we participate or the little use of our clients’ databases, are some examples where laziness or the lack of agility, cause us to remain dangerously inactive in front of our market.
A recurring mistake in the agricultural sector is that we put all the focus on making the first contact (a visit, an email, an event) but follow-up is usually the grave of countless good strategies that die trying.
Proposed penance: Take a look at how American Express responds to its cardholders compared to following up with a conventional bank or airline when you lose your bag or oversell a flight. Same situation, different capacity (and speed) of response.
SOWING REFLECTION
Gluttony, anger or envy complete this list, but the most important thing is that we empower our teams to ensure that these undesirable behaviors do not occur in Marketing management, since the collaboration of an entire work group is usually more efficient than detection. isolated from problems and even more, preventing disastrous consequences is usually more valuable than a correction process that can be very expensive.
I hope that these analogies have been to your liking and if so, I appreciate you commenting and sharing this content. See you next week.