Do Business Well

Bill Ashton, vice president of corporate accounts, explains how educating doctors and nurses works: “We have what we call an Anemia Management Institute, where we train nurses and health care providers to be better at everything associated with managing anemia of a dialysis patient,” he says. “For example, when you go into a dialysis center, and the patient’s hematocrit [the ratio between red blood cells and white blood cells] is not going up as it should be, and you are increasing the dose, what’s the cause of that? Well, it may be they have an infection. It may be that they’ve got hemorrhoids and they’ve got bleeding. They may just be nonresponders, and they have low iron levels—we’ve done a lot of research around that particular area. In fact, we have almost written the book on quality guidelines about how to treat anemia, basically through our own research and our own data-bases. So we’re actually training nurses—we put them through a two-day training program that teaches them how to treat the anemia better.” Continue Reading »

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If the first strategy with streamliners is making sure your operations run dependably and consistently, the second is getting your customers to behave consistently and predictably as well. This strategy taps into streamliners‘ craving for routine by creating and reinforcing their habitual, or “sticky,” behavior—in other words, making routines routine.

In a recent speech, Bill George, chief executive officer of Medtronic, Inc., the world’s leading medical technology company, advanced the thesis that as a maker of pacemakers and other electronically based products for people with chronic diseases, Medtronic should be a part of a patient’s life for a quarter of a century or more. Now, there’s a vision of stickiness. Continue Reading »

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One thing it takes is a strong presence at industry shows such as COMDEX—annual events that display the wares, show off innovations, and provide opportunities for networking and job hunting. In most industries, only a few of these shows can garner a huge turnout, while the rest attract a fraction of the potential audience. The leaders, of course, are the companies that sponsor the successful show.

For years SAP AG, the big software company, has been organizing enormous events—Sapphire Conferences—all over the world, from the United States to Japan and Australia. Attracting nearly everyone seriously looking at systems and software solutions, the conferences bring in outside speakers and display new technologies. But the events’ implicit message is that SAP is the leader, and customers don’t forget it. Continue Reading »

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Another means of attracting streamliners is by asserting leadership. As a group, they require reassurance, and as stated earlier, they are comforted by the fact that their suppliers are market leaders. Streamliners tend to be other-directed, to use Harvard sociologist David Riesman’s well-known term, which refers to people who take their cues from watching others and make decisions based on what their neighbors and friends do. They are risk-averse, so one way to diminish their anxiety is to team up with companies that are synonymous with reliability and service and will be in business tomorrow and the day after. Continue Reading »

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