Whoever thought that peer pressure was over once you graduated from high school or even college, they were sadly mistaken. 

• It happens in the workforce from your co-workers
• It happens from your adult friends.
• It even happens from your industry peers. 

If you are a retailer who didn’t have an e-commerce site in 1998 because your relationship with the customer was always one-on-one, and face-to-face interactions were core to your culture and values, by the end of the first decade of this century you probably did. 

Did your belief change or did you have no choice?

If you didn’t ever offer Black Friday or Cyber Monday Tuesday Wednesday Week sales, you probably do now.

If you didn’t decorate for Christmas until just before Thanksgiving while others started selling Christmas gifts and decor in August…you may have been thinking that they were crazy, however, by the time November rolled around you had excessive inventory. Then you had to sell it at a deep discount just to get it off the books and out of back stock. 

It’s things like this and so much more, that are everyday challenges you have to face in business and in life. Looking back on it now, you’re probably thinking high school sounds like a pretty good deal. (I’ll suggest this instead, have a child and you can help them through it, hopefully with more grace and dignity than you were able to muster.)

Yes, peer pressure is very real and still can be very detrimental regardless of whether you’re 15 or a 50 year old brand, just trying to make it until Amazon wants to pay a premium to buy your customer list…maybe there is another way to handle it. Stand up, be different, never give in. Find a different way to be competitive if you really want to stand out.

~ Dawn aka Hat Girl