Wild turkeys greet me on our porch when I step out for a cup of coffee and soak up the morning air. I live in a quiet country neighborhood 45 minutes north of Boston. But, my daughter’s urbane friends like to say that we live in cow-tipping country. That’s not exactly true. Yet, we have our fair share of wildlife here. Deer wander across the yard in the evenings, a fox borough borders our bed of flowers, raccoons scrap for their share of the garbage at night and the turkeys arrive in the morning. I wonder what magnet draws them to our place.
If you adhere to the credo of the theory of evolution, all species are engaged in a struggle that allows only the fittest to survive, and the creatures frequenting our place in the universe must instinctively find something alluring about it that assures their longevity. For some instinctive reasons, they trust our place and treat it as a sanctuary. Our place offers the wild animals a safe haven; a place that they trust.
Trust is the magnet that draws the animals to our place in the country just as it is the magnet that draws customers and clients repeatedly to successful businesses. Darwin’s theory has often been applied to the workings of business in a free marketplace. The companies and firms that survive are often credited with developing enduring characteristics – solid products and services, savvy marketing and advertising, ingenuity and imagination – that enable them to fend off all predators and secure a place in the world that consistently attracts customers and clients year after year. But it all comes down to matters of trust. Doesn’t it? The primary ingredient in every business relationship is trust. True enough? We buy products and services that we trust for any number of reasons and strive to build durable, trusting relationships with our partners as well as our customers. Or, is there something more basic at the heart of the matter? Maybe it is simply the price of the products and services that matters most. Perhaps price or the perceived dollar value of the product or service is the primary ingredient that draws customers to one vendor instead of another just as the availability of food in our yard draws the wild animals to our place.
That, in any case, was the question which we faced not too long ago. We were looking for a low priced printer to produce some wedding invitation cards that we had designed and we put the project out to bid. The responses were extremely competitive and the two low bidders were equally capable of doing the job right. But, over the years, we had established a solid working relationship with the higher bidder, The Printing Place. We knew that we could count on his services if we were ever in a jam and needed a job done extra-fast. In short, we trusted The Printing Place more than the lower bidder. So the question was whether to place the job with the printer that quoted the lowest price or the vendor that we trusted the most – even though both were equally competent. We took the easy way out and asked our client to make the final decision. Turns out that the price difference was so marginal that it didn’t matter much to the bride and groom and we ultimately opted to go with The Printing Place for the wedding cards.
Yet the question lingers: Is it the businesses that you trust or is it the price that becomes the decisive factor in the buying decision? In other words, to bring this all back to our opening analogy, do the turkeys flock together at our place mainly because they find safety in numbers and food on the ground in more or less the same way as the bargain hunters all tend to gather together at the same place? Another way of putting it is: Do small outlets ever stand a chance to compete against Walmart?