A Tale of 2 Croissants
It's about perception
In my home city of Melbourne there’s a near-inner-city suburb that’s rapidly changed from working-class to ‘woke-well-to-do’ class. At the outer edge of the suburb there’s one street that seems to divide the two classes. On the working-class side of the street is a popular bakery run by a Vietnamese family. Not quite half a kilometre away (in the woke-well-to-do section), is another bakery.
The Vietnamese bakery sells croissants for $4.00.
The woke-well-to-do bakery sells croissants for $6.50.
Now I’m a croissant lover. There’s nothing better than a warmed-up croissant, lathered in butter with jam. Accompanied by fresh coffee of course. I’ll admit that I’ve cut back on this pleasure once I discovered that croissants are made primarily by folding butter into butter into butter, etc. The waistline was telling me a story which reflected the outcome of such dairy decadence! But I digress.
I’ve sampled, consumed and reflected on both classes of croissants in a very studied and academic way (of course!) I cannot discern any difference in terms of taste, texture, size or ‘yum’ factor. The difference, I conclude, is ‘perception’.
The Vietnamese bakery’s customers who I’ve observed tend to ‘look’ the traditional idea of working class. The bakery fit-out is practical, somewhat crammed, all bakery products behind glass and the family members who serve customers are dressed casually, no uniforms.
The woke-well-to-do bakery (I can’t think of another name for it) is, of course, organic. Customers are casually dressed but you form the sense with many that there’s been a lot of money spent on clothes to look as though there has not been a lot of money spent on clothes—if you get the idea! The bakery has been carefully laid out to look as though it hasn’t been carefully laid out—if you get the idea! Staff are dressed in semi-colonial style outfits but only subtly so. Bread and other great looking bakery products are displayed on wooden boards, some not behind glass. (Goodness, where’s the health inspector!)
Reality is important. I’m quite sure that the woke-well-to-do bakery’s organic croissants are genuinely organic. But is organic better for you than what the Vietnamese bakery produces? Perhaps the Vietnamese family use organic or some organic ingredients? I’ve no idea. And I’ve no idea if organic is better. I’m pretty much a tastebud person myself. Mind you, I totally like the idea of free-range eggs where (I assume) chickens have a happier life. But free-range eggs are much yummier than cage produced eggs. Sorry. I digress again!
Back to perception. What happens so often in business, as in life, is the importance of perceptions. How people perceive a business matters to a business’s success or failure. Big businesses know how important this is and they spend buckets of money trying to get customers to ‘perceive them in the way they want to be perceived’. It’s called ‘marketing’ which is quite different to ‘selling’.
But perception is important no matter what the size of a business. The woke-well-to-do bakery, in my observation, has quite consciously set out to create a particular perception targeting its products and services to a defined potential customer—organic food lovers! It looks to me to be very successful and it commands a premium price based, probably largely, on perception. By comparison, I don’t have the feeling that the Vietnamese bakery has consciously sought to create a perception. It is just ‘doing its thing—producing what it is good at and seems busy and successful. But it is not commanding a premium price.
Perception matters also for ‘us folks’ who are businesses of one, the self-employed independent contractors. In other words, those of us who have sought to become our own boss. The problem we have is that ‘we’ are the product, the service all in one. When targeting perception, we are having to think of how we perceive ourselves, which is an intensely intimate, private and personal thing and consider how other people, our customers or potential customers perceive us. This is a damn difficult task. How people perceive us can and is often different to how we perceive ourselves.
In doing our ‘own boss’ business we have to be good at our craft. We might be a plumber, architect, IT consultant, business strategist, dance instructor, hairdresser, cleaner, musician, sound technician, personal trainer, website builder/manager or one of countless thousands of other ‘crafts’ known or yet to be invented. Our first task is to be damn good at our particular craft.
Our next challenge is to succeed in the business management/administration side of things. That is, to manage cash flow, invoicing, collecting money owed to us and paying our own bills. We need good record-keeping so we know and understand if that we’re profitable (let’s hope so!), pay our tax (yuk!) and comply with stacks of government regulation (boring…).
On top of doing all these things we then have the further challenge of perception. It’s hard. Most often we don’t even tend to think that the concept of perception is something we need to factor into our business activities. But it can be the difference between ‘success’ or ‘failure’ however we define those two events in our lives.
The first step is to realise that perception is something we need to, and should, address. It’s not the beginning and end of business. It’s one factor. But it matters.
The task is seeking to understand how others might perceive us. This is the business bit. Because how people (your customers or potential customers) perceive you, either consciously or unconsciously, is key to your business, no matter what business you are in.