Coloring Outside the Lines to Expand Market Share and Profitability

By the Gonzales Group

RISMEDIA, July 10, 2008-What does it mean to “color outside the lines?” It means moving beyond and outside the doldrums of the norm. It does not mean being defiant and anti-institutional. It means finding the strength of an organization and leveraging it, even if it means you color outside the bounds of your defined goals and objectives.

Companies with the greatest strength in a mature industry or technology tend to be the least successful in mastering new ones and suffer from “Innovator’s Dilemma.” We see and hear about organizations like GM, Polaroid, Timex, IBM, and others who were innovators by all accounts and “used to” lead in their fields, but their culture hardened and they “colored only within the confines of the lines” to make things stay the way were.

Many organizations utilize this same approach when it comes to multicultural consumers. They elect to maintain the same approach and marketing methods that have worked for them in the past but that have no relevance to the changing home buying and multicultural consumer base.

Coloring outside the lines is an individual thing and starts with a little self-analysis. Don’t start by blaming the decision makers but try to understand what play book they are reading from and color accordingly. Our experience at the Gonzales Group has found that more often than not, the intelligence and the know-how for multicultural outreach begins on the front lines and at local levels and migrates upward. It is these front-line individuals that see the opportunity in the multicultural consumer segment long before the folks at the top.

No matter how successful we are in whatever we do, it is vital to keep learning to color outside the lines and learn from other people and other industries.

An Evolving Environment

The twenty-first century broker, agent, employee, and manager will need to know more about leadership and management than his or her twentieth century counterpart does. Successful organizations in the twenty-first century will have to become more like incubators of multicultural leadership and this includes accommodating the rapidly changing demographics we have discussed in past issues. Wasting talent will become increasingly costly in a world of rapid change.

The problem for us today is that stability is no longer the norm. In addition, most experts agree that over the next few years the business environment will become more volatile.

Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” As the home buying consumer base changes to multicultural, so must the marketing, advertising, and outreach we utilize to increase our market share and profitability.

Coloring outside of the lines only helps to move us and the organizations we represent forward.

For more information, visit www.thegonzalesgroup.com.

Recognizing the increasing opportunity presented by the staggering growth in multicultural markets, The Gonzales Group and RISMedia have come together to compile and present a groundbreaking White Paper entitled, The New Economic Power Source: Increasing Profitability with Multicultural Homebuyers. For more information and to order your copy, please click here.

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