Sixty to Zero – a brilliant blog post by Seth Godin.
He points out that a lot of work goes into selling the acceleration of a car, but very little into how fast it can brake.
In the same way, much of modern marketing is about taking advantage of fast-increasing business, and little of it is about coping with change, when the braking is hard:
“The newspaper industry is in trouble, but news is not going to go away, just the paper part. Those who are working hard to preserve the paper part are asking the wrong questions and are doomed to fail.
“Prediction: 90% of your sales will come from word of mouth or digital promotion by 2011. How do you change what you’re doing today to be ready for that?”
This is written from a US perspective, but the lessons learned will be universal. As he points out:
“Going fast, doing your best and then slamming into a cliff works best for Wile E. Coyote, not humans.”