Beyond the Familiar E-Book

Patrick Barwise

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 241

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Strong customer-focused companies have a clear, relevant promise which they obsessively deliver day-in, day-out. At the same time, they relentlessly drive the market by evolving the offer in the face of market developments and opportunities. Because they meet customer needs better than the competition, again and again, they are able to generate sustainable, profitable, market-leading organic growth. The problem the book addresses is how to achieve this. The authors identify five key steps using their framework for success:

• Offer a clear, relevant customer promise
• Build customer trust by reliably delivering that promise
• Continuously improve the promise, while still reliably delivering it
• Drive the market by innovating beyond the familiar
• Support all this with an open organization that promotes frank discussion based on clear facts and market feedback.

Above all the book runs counter to the fashionable claim that the starting-point for business success should be to find a 'blue-sky', 'out-of-the-box' breakthrough innovation. Barwise and Meehan use many compelling cases to illustrate how managers can find ways within their existing network and organization to achieve long term growth.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER ONE: WHAT EVERY CEO WANTS

Global Mobile Phone Handsets: How Nokia Toppled Motorola only to Lose its Way

After the iPhone: Has Nokia Lost It?

Three Recurrent Themes

Brand Equity and Customer Experience

Customer Focus and Insights

Continuous Improvement versus Heroic Breakthrough Innovation

Conclusion: The Structure of the Book and Five Killer Questions

CHAPTER TWO: YOUR PROMISE TO THE CUSTOMER

How Research Now Stood and Delivered

The Brand as a Flywheel of Organic Growth

The ART of Brand Building

How to Build Awareness

How to Build Relevance

CHAPTER THREE: DELIVERING TODAY’S PROMISE BETTER AND BETTER EVERY DAY

Aggreko – Absolute Reliability, Absolutely

The Primacy of Customer Dissatisfaction

You Need a Range of Data

Managing Costs and Customer Expectations

CHAPTER FOUR: DRIVING THE MARKET BY RELENTLESSLY IMPROVING THE PROMISE

Tide: A Textbook Market-Driving Brand

Ambition and Focus

The Range of Sources of Customer Insight

Insights for Incremental versus Radical Innovation

Different Stages of the Innovation Process

Summary

CHAPTER FIVE: INNOVATING BEYOND THE FAMILIAR

Apple – the World’s Leading Innovator

Innovating Beyond the Familiar: the Broader Lessons

Why and How You Need to Look Beyond Your Comfort Zone

Focus on Adjacencies

How to Manage the Risks of Adjacent Innovation

For New-to-the-World Categories, Be a Fast Follower

Conclusion: Do an Apple – Re-interpret ‘Innovation’ and Raise Your Ambition

CHAPTER SIX: OPENING UP: WHAT LEADERS MUST DO

Infosys: ‘Customer Delight’ Beyond the Slogan140

The Vital Flow: Open Communication Up the Hierarchy

Rethink Customer and Front-Line Contact Programs

Reuse 360° Data

POSTSCRIPT

END NOTES

Index

About the Authors

To Catherine, Alex, and Katy – PB

To Gill, Alice, and Emma – SM

This edition first published 2011

© 2011 John Wiley & Sons

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barwise, Patrick.

 Beyond the familiar : long-term growth through customer focus and innovation / Patrick Barwise and Seán Meehan.

p. cm.

 ISBN 978-0-470-97631-9

 1. Customer services. 2. Success in business. I. Meehan, Seán. II. Title.

 HF5415.5.B375 2011

 658.8'12–dc22

2010050389

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978–0-470–97631–9 (hardback), ISBN 978–1-119-99380-3 (ebk)

ISBN 978–0-470-97650-0 (ebk), ISBN 978–0-470-97649-4 (ebk)

Preface

Persistent growth is elusive. According to one estimate, during the 15-year period 1990–2004, only 24% of 6000 large public companies sustained profitable growth over any five consecutive years, only 5% over any ten consecutive years, and just 1% over the full 15 years.1 Even the best companies lose the ability to generate long-term growth from time to time, in some cases irrecoverably. General Motors lost it in the 1970s, IBM in the 1980s, Motorola in the early 1990s, and Procter & Gamble in the late 1990s. GM and Motorola still haven’t recovered.

Long-term growth results from driving the top line organically or through acquisitions, combined with good cost management. Beyond the Familiar focuses on organic growth, but also covers how to prioritize resource allocation and cost reduction. Many of the reasons why sustained profit growth is so hard to achieve are organizational: poor framing, fear, vested interests, complacency, and denial. In our research we have again and again seen how these block the free flow and discussion of the market information and ideas that power customer-focused execution and innovation and, ultimately, long-term growth.

Open organization is, therefore, at the heart of our framework. It is the underlying imperative for firms aiming for long-term organic growth. It enables them to achieve the other four imperatives that directly drive revenue and profit:

Offer and communicate a clear, relevant customer promiseBuild customer trust and brand equity by reliably delivering that promiseDrive the market by continuously improving the promise, while still reliably delivering itGet further ahead by occasionally innovating beyond the familiar

For long-term success, you can’t pick and choose from these imperatives. For instance, in the short term, innovating beyond the familiar is risky and may be optional, but in the long-term, failure to do so is riskier still and can even lead to extinction. At the same time, even a famously innovative company like Apple also needs to put a lot of unglamorous ‘grunt work’ into execution and incremental improvements, most of which never reaches the headlines. It is this hidden foundation that enables Apple and other long-term growth exemplars to innovate successfully ‘beyond the familiar’.

Understanding customers’ varying and evolving needs and preferences better than the competition is a recurrent theme of this book. Seeing the world through customers’ eyes provides an unfamiliar, fresh and sometimes uncomfortable perspective that enables you to focus on what’s actually most relevant to the market, rather than on what you just assume is most relevant.

In our earlier book Simply Better: Winning and Keeping Customers by Delivering What Matters Most,2 we looked at ‘differentiation that matters’, that is, differentiation through the eyes of the customer. We argued that, despite marketers’ obsession with uniqueness, what most customers want are products and services that just work, rather than offering unique features and benefits.

We build on this here by showing what managers need to do to ensure that valid, actionable customer insights are not only generated (from a wide range of sources, not just formal market research) but then reach those with the power to act on them and that they then do so. We see growth as an outcome, a consequence, of promising and consistently delivering better and better customer solutions and experiences. Further, we see this process as building a valuable long-term asset, the company’s reputation in customers’ minds (brand equity), which is then the platform for further growth.

To illustrate the framework, we have used a wide range of real-world cases of companies that have beaten the odds with sustained organic growth. Our examples aim to show the universality of the framework: they cover the spectrum from start up to mid cap and blue chip, both new and established markets, both B2B and B2C companies, and both products and services.

In summary, Beyond the Familiar offers a practical framework to help executives master the challenge of achieving long-term organic profit growth by building strong brands based on actionable customer insights flowing freely through the business and ultimately leading to consistently great customer solutions and experiences.

This is an optimistic book. It offers no single silver bullet but, true to its message, it has a clear customer promise – a strong one: If you read this book and really apply the recommendations, you’ll load the dice in favour of your business’s likelihood of delivering long-term, market-driving organic profit growth.

Acknowledgements

Beyond the Familiar would never have seen the light of day without the help of many people. We wish to offer a special ‘thank you’ to a few in particular.

This is a practical book for practical managers, so the case studies play a central role. We use them to illustrate the ideas, bring them to life and – we hope – encourage you to emulate the most successful and learn from the mistakes of the less successful. Much of the material comes from public sources but we are also greatly indebted to the many executives who have generously provided unpublished data and personal insights on their companies or former companies. A few have requested anonymity but, among those who have not, we would especially like to thank Chris Havemann (Research Now), Simon Lyons, Bruce Pool and Rupert Soames (Aggreko), Carol Berning, Peter Carter, Werner Geissler and Scott Stewart (P&G), Wanda Pogue (Saatchi & Saatchi), Fergus Boyd (Virgin Atlantic), Steve Liguori and Anubhav Ranjan (GE), Kris Gopalakrishnan, Bikramjit Maitra, Aditya Nath Jha, Nandan Nilekani, and Sanjay Purohit (Infosys), and Geert van Kuyck (Philips).

We also draw on a wide range of academic research, listed in the reference notes at the back. As well as this formally cited literature, however, over the five years it has taken us to research and write this book, we have greatly benefited from countless informal discussions with our academic colleagues at London Business School and IMD, a constant source of ideas, tough questions, and encouragement, as well as from the generous research support of the Centre for Marketing at LBS and the Global Research Fund at IMD.

Next, we would like to thank our four outstanding researchers Emma Macdonald, Willem Smit, Mandeep Waraich, and Sandeep Waraich. They all went way beyond the brief, adding new ideas and suggestions and providing constructive challenge at every stage. Their excellent work has contributed greatly to the quality of the case studies, the breadth of the academic research base, and the tightness of the argument.

The book has also benefited from conversations with, and feedback from, a range of other people. Among scholars at other business schools, we would specifically like to thank George Day (Wharton), Liz Morrison (NYU), Eric Von Hippel (MIT), and Gerald Zaltman (HBS). Our understanding of the practicalities of customer satisfaction – and dissatisfaction – metrics was much helped by talking to Fred Reichheld (Bain) and Claes Fornell, David Ham, and Sheri Teodoru (CFI Group). Tania Dussey-Cavassini, John Evans, Loic Frank, Stefan Michel, Jim Pulcrano and Stuart Read provided particularly creative suggestions along the way. Tim Ambler, Alex Barwise, Charlie Dawson, Bill Fischer, Kit Harman, Bernie Jaworski, Nancy Lowd, Jean-Louis Rufener, Kirsten Sandberg, Chris Styles, and Peter Vicary-Smith all provided helpful comments on the various drafts. We also benefited from the detailed reviews and professional expertise of our editorial consultant Morgen Witzel. Thanks also to Rosemary Nixon and all the team at John Wiley/Jossey-Bass for efficiently bringing our manuscript to you the reader.

Our final thank you is to those who, day in and day out, have provided essential administrative back up and support, especially Laura Hall, Sylvie Happe, Maryline Mermillod, and Margaret Walls.

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT EVERY CEO WANTS

‘Organic growth is always stronger’

– Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive, WPP Group3

Every CEO wants sustained, profitable, organic growth. Even firms that grow mainly by acquisition – with its high failure rate – usually need to show that they can increase value through top-line growth of the combined business as well as through cost-cutting. Organic growth therefore lies at the heart of long-term shareholder value creation for almost all businesses.

We all know of companies like Procter & Gamble, Apple, Canon, IBM, Infosys, BestBuy, Oticon and Zara that seem to achieve this kind of profitable organic growth year after year. They go from strength to strength, from success to success. How do they do it?