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The Essential Secret of Effective Value Creation and Delivery
Right now, there’s a buzz out there around the term Value Creation. But there’s also a lot of fuzz. Far too often, companies send out mixed messages about the focus of any Value Creation initiatives. Is the Customer the primary focus? Or the Shareholder? Or the Employee? Or all three? Sorting this quandary out is critical for any business that intends to stay vibrant and profitable. And, as we hope to convince you, it all comes down to a consideration of what happens at the Customer-Supplier interface. That’s where everything that you plan, everything that you produce, everything that you hope for meets the real world. It’s where your business wins or loses. And it’s where, hand on heart, the Value Genie team has world-leading insights, tools and methodologies that are researched and prove...
The ultimate Outside-In lesson for us all
When companies talk about Customer Centricity it is often from an Inside-Out perspective. A “Look, there are our target customers – go get ‘em” approach, supported by a “Buy what we’ve got, now” marketing and sales stance. In truth, this is a parody of Customer Centricity. Genuine Customer Centricity only happens when an company organises with and around its Customers. This requires, first and foremost, the adoption of an Outside-In perspective; recognition that Customer Value is the value perceived by a customer. In fact, our interconnected, always-on world has made this Outside-In, Customer-perceived-Value-led approach a ‘must have’ capability if sustainable success is to be achieved. The Outside-In view allied to “pull” marketing is the only way that the virtually unlimited opportunitie...
Value? Who decides?
Hello. I recently received a letter informing me that UK vehicle registration number P117 DER is for sale, and that this can be arranged to spell out my surname. You can see the idea from the photo. The letter says: “For the above number we are currently looking for offers in the region of £5750 ono (around $8,600); a price that we believe represents excellent value for money when you consider that this is THE perfect plate for your surname.” The letter illustrates two important points: One: Value – like beauty – is in the eye and mind of the beholder. The idea of owning a personalized number plate doesn’t hold the slightest appeal for me. I couldn’t even be bothered to gamble on the investment element. I don’t write this in any pejorative sense: for other members of the Pinder tribe, owne...
Value in Use, the new foundation of business success
We all recognize the astonishing technological advances of recent years. After all, we all carry supercomputers around in our pockets and purses. And we routinely use the internet, “the largest experiment involving anarchy in history”[i]. And terms such as ‘Big Data’, ‘digital world’ and the like are part of everyday business discourse. And yet, and yet, many companies fail to grasp the profundity of a fundamental change that these advances have both enabled and empowered: the power shift from Producer to Customer. Or maybe it’s just that a lot of folk don’t want to see it. For the leaders of enterprises that thrived in the top-down-drivin’, product-pushin’, profit-hustlin’ milieu of 20th century business, the need for fundamental change may not be greeted with wholehearted enthusiasm. Or ...
The 4Ps of Marketing. RIP.
There’s a lot of stuff out there about the 4Ps of Marketing. Fact is, the best thing to do with the 4Ps model is bury it. To borrow from the Monty Python team, “It is a late model. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life it rests in peace”. Let’s take a step back. The 4Ps model – Product, Place, Price, Promotion – was created by Jerome McCarthy, a marketing professor at Michigan State University, in 1960. That’s a long time ago: the year that John F. Kennedy became President of the United States; a new band called The Beatles played their first gig, in Hamburg; and the Pentel Corporation demonstrated the fiber-tip pen. The business mindset back then was all about Products. In the September 2014 McKinsey Quarterly, in an article titled Redefining Capitalism, authors Eric Beinhocker and Nick Hanauer pu...
What’s a Customer Worth? (A lot more than you think!)
Most businesses evaluate Customers exclusively in terms of their actual and potential spend on products and services. But many Customers are worth more. Some are worth much more. So it is important to understand which of your Customers fulfil the basic ‘money for product’ role with no desire for any involvement beyond that. And even more important to understand which of your Customers are willing to participate further. Customer as a Customer The basic Customer contract with which we are all familiar is where a supplier makes or sources a product or service and puts a price ticket on it. Prospective Customers then make the ‘product versus price ticket’ evaluation (often nudged along by some marketing activity) and either buy or don’t buy. In today’s parlance we can label this the Customer ...
