I’ve never really been a huge fan of the word diversifying. As an in-house marketer, it meant something totally different than say…an investor.
The concept behind diversifying is to prevent significant losses if one stream of income dries up. Who wouldn’t like that? It’s like the antithesis of putting all of your eggs in one basket. Sounds good enough.
My main concern is that the term is often used (or mis-used) in the AEC industry to describe frantic chasing of any and all opportunities that involve “work that we can do.” In the past two years especially, it seems like a lot of firms are diversifying. In fact, I just attended a wonderful SMPS CEO panel discussion a few weeks ago in which the word was thrown around a lot. I left thinking to myself, when is someone really going to explain how they decided to diversify though, and how did they incorporate strategic marketing to make those decisions?
The truth of the matter is that far too many firms (not necessarily those on the panel) aren’t actually diversifying. Most are just chasing after jobs outside of their target market because the ones they usually win aren’t coming in the door. Imagine an investor that saw their stock start to dip, so they took all of their resources (money) out of that one stock, and spread it around to four other stocks evenly. Unfortunately though, they knew nothing about those four stocks except what they saw in the past week in the news…no 52 week range, no market cap, no P/E. Would you call that diversifying?
Marketing is the same way. Firms have a fixed amount of resources (people, time, money) and diversifying isn’t as simple as going after the latest RFP that comes out. The differences between a shotgun approach and actually diversifying are research and strategy. Firms that successfully diversify find markets that make good business sense for them, not just ones that have a new job opportunity.