The Changing Landscape of Life
May 7th, 2020 by Diane Conklin under Business - General, Marketing. No Comments.
Do you ever see something and have a lightbulb go off in your head?
That happened to me Monday. I was doing my mid-morning Facebook check and saw a post about things that I grew up with that aren’t around anymore and it struck me how so many times we’re surprised when change happens.
In fact, change is a constant in our lives…always!
Here are a few of the pictures that were in the post I saw.
These were at drive-in theaters. You pulled your car up to them and rolled (yes, with a hand crank) your window down half to three-quarters of the way, placed this on your window and rolled up back up. Then, the sound from the movie came through this – it’s a speaker. One thing you had to remember was to put it back before you drove away at the end of the night…lol. There are still a few drive-in movie theaters around theses days, but they don’t use these as speakers anymore – you tune into a radio frequency to hear the movie sound now.
This is a picture of shorthand. It was a way for people to take notes that was quicker than writing the whole words out. Classes were taught on this subject. Can you read this? Do you have any idea what this says? (I don’t have a clue).
Freshen-up gum. It came in mint and cinnamon, as I recall. When you bit into it, the liquid/gel middle popped in your mouth. It was sort of like getting a squirt of mouthwash in your mouth when you started to chew the gum.
This is an eraser you used on a typewriter (long before white out was invented) and then you used the green end to brush the eraser off the paper. They were messy and didn’t work very well.
Those are just a few of the items that took me back…I could share a lot more.
Now, you might be wondering what all this has to do with you, business, or marketing…
Well, we all tend to go along in our businesses, happily doing the day-to-day things. We keep doing our thing and we don’t always pay attention to the bigger picture.
We’re often surprised when things happen – when things change.
I would guess the makers of the typewriter eraser thought typewriters would always be the way written words were expressed AND that there would always be a need for the eraser. Yet, I’m writing this on a computer where I can transmit this without ever printing it, you can read it and never use a piece of paper, AND if I make a mistake I simply delete or hit the backspace button.
And, before typewriters were no longer being used, white out was invented and once that was a thing, nobody ever wanted to use one of those messy erasers again.
I could tell you similar stories about the other things pictured here. Just like we could talk about fax machines, rotary phones, and more.
What’s the point? You have to think ahead. You have to consider what if…what if what I’m doing now doesn’t exist in a year, 2 years, 5 years.
Will you adapt and keep moving? Or will your business go away?
As a small to medium sized business owner you have the ability to be flexible and to move quickly. Do you need to do that now? Or are you ok in the present, but need to keep your finger on the pulse of what might be coming down the road?
Need some help looking at all this? Email me at info@completemarketingsystems.com and let’s chat about it…
To Your Success –
