Tuesday, 9 June 2009
The Power of 'Tweaking'
I was relaxing yesterday watching a nature documentary on the animals of the African Savannah.
It took me a few minutes to realise, but something seemed quite different about this nature documentary. Sure the pictures were stunning, the coverage of the animals was intriguing and informative, and there were even some cute animal youngsters. But that wasn’t what made the difference.
I finally noticed it, the guy that was narrating the documentary was African. His soothing voice and musical accent, coupled with his excellent command of the English language added a whole new flavour to the documentary. How nice and how logical to have people talking about animals from their own region. I have never thought this could have made a different to my experience watching a nature documentary but it did.
The guys producing this show didn’t completely revolutionise nature documentaries, but they made a powerful and effective ‘tweak’ that made a difference.
Sometimes you can’t revolutionise your industry, or launch a ground-breaking service. Even power-houses of innovation like Steve Job’s Apple spend a huge amount of time ‘tweaking’ their products. The new iPhone 3G S is a great example of this. It’s still an iPhone, just tweaked.
I’m not saying that we forget about creating genuinely new and ground breaking products, but there are countless opportunities for us to tweak our products and services to make a real difference.
Here are a few examples:
1. Can you change your colours to distinguish yourself from competitors?
2. How can you tweak your website to make it noticeably different?
3. Can your customer services ‘tweak’ the way they answer customer queries (faster, friendlier, more effectively)
4. Can you target a different market for your services (one your competition might be ignoring)
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