What You Can Learn From Clark Kent

Welcome back!

Richard Dennis

Do you remember back in the day - maybe 15 years ago - when the coupon in a magazine ad would end with the following words:

Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery.

Can you imagine the threats of violence and - maybe - actual bloodshed, if you tried to take that long to deliver a product today? Technology has changed. Expectations have totally changed. Consumers expect delivery in seconds, or at worse, a day or two. Weeks or months is totally unacceptable. You’d lose all trust & goodwill with your market.

Stephen M.R. Covey titles his outstanding book, The Speed of Trust. Speed is in that title for a reason. For instance, the faster you produce a result, the more trust you’ll generate with your stakeholders. But that is only half the equation. The other half is your stakeholders.

Customers, vendors, prospects … they have technology now, too. They can move or change in a hurry.

Great recent example: Motrin ran an online ad that amazingly insulted mothers. In minutes, some mothers had shot & uploaded videos to Youtube, ridiculing the makers of Motrin and the product itself. The Motrin website was offline for a day while they changed their ad.

Remember when Clark Kent whirled his body and presto! Superman! That is what today’s technology allows anybody to do. We can react immediately and we expect immediate reaction from others, too.

In the Motrin example, a link to the first video got copied & pasted into blogs all over the internet. Can you say, “wildfire”?

To create & enhance trust, you need to react quickly, because that is the expectation these days. The faster you are, the more you grow the trust level. The slower you are … well … that’s obvious, isn’t it?

Take care,

Richard Dennis

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