Take Pride in Your Product

It takes time,patience and money to develop a new product. Once developed the least you can do is take pride in the product and what you have achieved.

If you do not take pride in the product, the team will treat it as a commodity and eventually it will be sold on price rather than its true value.

I recently came across two scenarios, one where the product was devalued to a commodity product and it was the little things that made the difference.

The product should be displayed in end racks where it is in full view of the customer. The company used end displays, but decided to call them dump bins. What does that mean, the team who were responsible for merchandising were trained in how to fill a dump bin. You dump things in a dump bin and this was the attitude taken by most of the merchandising team. That meant products were not faced properly and the display never was as appealing as it could be.

The second scenario took place at our own farm. Over the years we have had nearly 100 backpackers come to the farm as volunteer. When they arrive we sit them down and go through our values as a business and what the business is all about. Recently a backpacker said that they had worked in many many businesses over the years and we were the first that took the time to sit down with them and talk about our values and product. Why do we do this? We want our backpackers to have pride in the business while they are with us and make sure that pride is communicated to our customers.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I believe we should take pride in our product and entrust the team to take pride as well.