What to take from Zildjian's 400-year old strategy

It's the brand you see in front of rock legends like Metallica's Lars Ulrich. Zildjian cymbals are considered to be 'the best piece of metal an angry percussionist can smash', but few outside of the music world know that the brand is over 400 years old.

Dating back to 1623 when Avedis Zildjian was invited by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Osman II, who was so impressed with the quality of the product being made, to set up a foundry for manufacturing cymbals in his kingdom.

To this day, the company - now being operated out of Norwell, Massachusetts and is still run by the decedents of Avedis Zildjian - commands a 65% marketshare of the global cymbal market.

Zildjian's Strategy?

The brand's strategy is one that they have followed religiously since the beginning: their complete trust in a 400 year-old approach to metallurgy and strict focus. All they do is make cymbals and they do that by trying to make the best in the world.

That's not to say that the brand rests on their laurels, in a recent HBR interview the CEO said that they have 'a focus on continuous quality improvement, innovation, craftsmanship, customer collaboration, empowering employees, avoiding complacency, and reinvesting in the company.'

Superior quality and extreme focus drives differentiation and success

What's of use here is that Zildjian know that their success comes from customer demand. And what customers want is quality.

They do just one thing and they dedicate themselves to doing it the best.

Brand-led growth vs. Efficiency-led growth

At the expense of investing in brand-led growth, some brands can be found guilty of being distracted by new technologies that optimise costs, or fine-tune value chains to be hyper-efficient. Margin growth thanks to cost savings looks good in the short-term, but can irreparably damage the long-term reputation of a brand.

Outsourcing critical functions to cheaper providers might reduce costs, but this also makes a business dependent on key factors that are outside of their control. What ends up happening is that a business, and its people, become less resilient in the face of change.

Diversification (a lack of focus) risks a dilution of reputation. What might be good (adding additional product lines and stretching the category boundaries) in the short-term, becomes a management nightmare of complexity given a long enough timeline.

FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS

The message here is simple - ruthlessly cut out everything that distracts you from the one thing that makes you unique. With so much noise around that can be an incredibly challenging thing to do, but adding distraction weakens your potency.

Here's to another 400 years of crashing cymbals.

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