Nobody Cares About “What You Do" But Do Care “Why You Do It"!

I spotted an advert from a retailer the other day, but it could be any company that advertises.

This advert told me about the companies products and the price.Let’s take a simple case study from history.The company that invented the .MP3 player was Creative Technology Ltd. They had 22 months first mover advantage and their new .MP3 player was advertised as “5 Gbyte .MP3 Player”.At this point you are going to be thinking that you have never heard of “Creative Technology” and that “5 Gbytes” is meaningless to you. Exactly. Of course, this is a feature and function of the product.Now, it was at this point in history where Apple came along and said “1,000 songs in your pocket”.Apple were a new entrant, they had no track record in the .MP3 market, the product was more expensive than Creative Technology and had less functions. But you have never heard of Creative Technology, why?

Creative Technology had a “what” and Apple had a “why”.

This is the same for many companies who say “we are not feature and function sellers” we are more strategic than that. Say you are a “cloud” vendor, that is a “what”, not a “why”. The same with the terms ERP, CRM, Customer Experience, Martech, Adtech, Sales tech, Fintech, it does not matter what those terms mean. In most cases, nobody cares.But they are all “what you do” and not “why you do it”.It’s not good enough in the 2020s!

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