One might think a notion of forced marriage has vanished, and marriage is supposed to be union of loves, after acquaintances and long enough get together. Still, some parents might trade their children marriages to climb the social ladder; or in some parts of the world with feudalism diehards, forced marriage is still a common practice.
FingerTec however leaves the marriage open, very modern, bold choice of a relationship. For the uninitiated, open marriage is a relationship in which the partners agree that each may engage in extramarital relationships without this being regarded as infidelity.
When our partner, Hisham Aki, the boss of Technology Line in Egypt, told me that he would place our products in mid range, sandwiched between Korean fingerprint product on top, and China product at the bottom, I had no problem with his idea. I told him teasingly, “While your religion doesn’t prohibit polygamy, who am I?”
Hisham Aki at a trade show in Cairo
That was when I first met him in Cairo in 2006. After a year or so, during which he brought his beautiful wife to visit us in Malaysia, he told me that he had dropped the other brands and now focus on FingerTec. “To reduce all the unnecessary troubles”, he said, looking at his wife.
The same went with our South Africa partner. They were selling China products too for a year, and decided to shift the focus on FingerTec only. My point is, why should we deny them fair assessment when they yet to know who would make a better partner? Flirt around before you commit to anything. I am confident of my product and if you decided to go with other brands, it’s your lost. And so far, majority of our partners stay.
In the business world, having two willing parties are more important than forced (faked) loyalty. If our customers fall in love with our rival’s products and decided to drop us, we let them go, no hard feelings. After all, it is just business. But FingerTec will always learn our lessons if that ever to occur in our business. This is the free world that we live in. To prevail, we have to keep improving ourselves in all aspects, not only to keep our existing customers but also to lure the new ones.
We practice the same in our marketing activities such as emailing. Instead of flooding customers and target potentials with irritated spam mails, we opt to send monthly eNewsletter; keeps them informed on our latest developments. Some of our competitors are stalking us through our newsletters and Tweets. We have no problem, the more the merrier. If they’re ready to take the leap, they’re more than welcome to join us.
Permission Marketing, a book by Seth Godin
Seth Godin, a marketing guru, proclaimed in his book Permission Marketing, “Rather than simply interrupting a television show with a commercial or barging into consumer’s life with an unannounced phone call or letter, tomorrow’s marketer will first try to gain the consumer’s consent to participate in the selling process. Perhaps the consumer will give his permission because he is volunteering to learn more about a particular product or class of products.”
Forced marriages have the high probability to produce unhappy couples, and nobody should be forced to be loyal; it has to come naturally. In FingerTec, we believe in “love at first sight”. Why? Because it happens to our customers quite frequently, when they first set their eyes on us!
by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ
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