Apr 20, 2009 | Marketing
SOW is a simple but powerful concept for both consumer and B2B markets.
How much of a customers spending on products you could supply, actually comes your way, Vs going to a competitor? how much of their “wallet” to you get? It is a great measure of the relative value of your offering to a customer against that of your competitors.
The key is to define the wallet, and fundamental to that is an understanding of the customers behavior, what they buy, from whom, via what channels, why they buy it, and what they buy it instead of.
Setting the parameters of a wallet for major or target customers is a task that should be central to any strategic effort to enhance performance. It is also a valuable exercise for the sales and marketing personnel, as it demands a critical examination of the customer, always a useful exercise.
Apr 19, 2009 | Strategy
Success always means making choices… which customer, which market, which price point, which channel, and so on.
The key is to actually make the choice after the appropriate analysis, and commit to it, whilst remaining sufficiently alert and agile to recognise early when the choice is sub-optimum, and make the necessary adjustments.
The danger is in not making a choice, rather than making the wrong choice.
Apr 18, 2009 | Demand chains
In the past, those who held the information held the power, no longer is it so clear cut.
Now, we have so many options opened up to us that the sharing of information is the new power, as information attracts activity, as light attracts a moth.
This is a huge change in the competitive landscape that has occurred so quickly that many have yet to twig, and therein lies a wealth of opportunity to restructure demand chains based on the availability a and transparency of information, rather than its proprietary ownership or location.
Apr 16, 2009 | Marketing
Many people who run businesses obsess about the competition to the extent that it impacts on their own strategic development. They watch what competitiors do, aggressively match them, and set out to beat them at their own game.
Often the better answer is to be different to them, be so different that there is a yawning chasm for at least a small group of customers, such that they would not leave you for them, and you attract that same type of customer currently with “them”
Competition is not all about them, it is also about us.
Apr 14, 2009 | Operations
As a boy my dad used to say “everybody makes mistakes, only a fool makes the same one twice”
There are now many learned tomes written and sold that offer similar advice, boiled down, “learn from your mistakes”. You do not need a book, it is 5 easy steps:
- Gather all relevant information
- Form a hypothesis
- Test the hypothesis against performance expectations based on steps 1 & 2.
- Understand where and why the actual performance in the test differs from those expected
- Back to step one, and repeat.
If you are a scientist, you will probably call it the “scientific method” if you are a reader of continuous improvement articles you will call it a “PDCA” cycle, if you come from the military, you probably know it as an “AAR”.
Seems to me, they are all synonyms for common sense.
