6.3 Customers lost to other Business Orientations

A change in customers’ behavior or situation can lead them to change the Business Orientation through which they satisfy their need.

For instance, a customer can no longer afford expensive tailoring and starts buying ready-made clothes instead. For the same price reason a business stops buying periodically new versions of accounting software Products and connects to the online Self-Service of an accounting applications provider. On the other hand if a business gets bigger and more complex, the company may again buy expensive business software Products and/or outsource its IT operations to external IT and accounting Experts.

In unsophisticated societies people themselves satisfy their needs using natural commodities. In sophisticated societies people don’t cut trees in the forest to make their homes and furniture. They get them in the form of Products or an Expert’s solutions.

The Commodity Orientation may cease to exist if there is no more need for the commodity itself. If people stop smoking, the tobacco plant will not disappear, but the business around it will.

The paradigm change occurs when the same need starts to be predominantly satisfied by other (new) Business Orientation(s) thus causing existential difficulties to the traditional orientation. As in the case of industrial shoe makers who replaced individual cobblers.