By Stephanie McCredie, Contributing Author
John F Kennedy, once said “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
Emerging technologies are continually disrupting our world. Digitalisation is ranked one of the most feared and strongly resisted changes confronting the workplace. Our current processes and procedures have become our comfort zones. We block out the possibility of new innovative practices that can actually streamline our work and make us more productive. The fear of change prevents progress. Change is inevitable but progress is not!
If digital marketers resist change and stop tweaking their SEO, their websites and their social media pages, they risk losing their digital presence overnight. Algorithms are regularly updating, social media rules continually fluctuating, devices constantly changing and technology always progressing, so we need to be willing to change our marketing strategies at any given time to progress with the digital climate. Our online marketing needs to be ready to instantly penetrate a consumer’s mind through the right device, at the right time.
From 1999, Netflix was disrupting the movie rental industry, nudging Blockbuster out of its path. It was offering customers the ability to order rental movies delivered to their door, accompanied by a prepaid return envelope. Ten years later the company recognised that change was imperative; their business model needed a radical digital transformation. So in 2017 Netflix launched its streaming service which now has 139 million subscribers. Adapting to change at the right time is what progressed the company into the future.
Even though embracing change requires hard work and discomfort, it produces new skills and knowledge within us, and according to John Hopkins researchers, it progresses us more than we may realise. The researchers discovered that when we are trying to master a new skill for example, if we incorporate subtle changes into the task each time we repeat it, we will actually learn the skill a lot better and faster than if we continually practice the task over and over without making any changes. Embracing change is a powerful thing.