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Mar

5 Cs of Driving Market Share Special Offer

Posted by: business901 | Comments (0)

Organizations need to change from a customer satisfaction focus to a customer value focus. The Five Cs of Driving Market Share serves as the template for this transaction. 5 Cs of Driving Market Share is not a project-by-project approach for reducing the costs of marketing activities, but rather an approach that seeks to enhance marketing’s effectiveness and efficiency. For organizations that have deployed other quality initiatives, the 5 Cs approach provides a user friendly bridge for moving the quality focus from the manufacturing floor to the marketplace. Those seeking to become best in market must shift their focus from a product orientation to a market orientation, from an internal efficiency focus to an external focus. Best in market companies will be those that can make this transformation and make it soon.

Customer Identification Program Content: The first step in the 5 Cs of Driving Market Share is identifying specific products/markets that offer the organization its best options for growth. You will learn how to evaluate products and markets using metrics such as current market share, market growth rate and competitive intensity to assess the best targets for the organization. When completed, you will eschew the notion that a company can be everything to everybody, and instead focuses on key market opportunities. This occurs in the Define/Identification stage and differs from the more project-oriented approach that traditional Six Sigma uses.

Customer Value Program Content: In the Value (Measure) stage of Driving Market Share, you will create a value model for each of your targeted product or markets. This value model is the voice of the market (VOM) that drives all operational and strategic initiatives undertaken by the organization. The VOM replaces agendas, hunches and strategic guessing as the guiding factor in growing market share. Value has been shown to be the best leading indicator of market share and top-line revenue growth. Learn how to use superior value creation and delivery to propel growth within the targeted product or markets.

Customer Acquisition Program Content: In the Acquisition (Analyze) stage you will use primarily the Competitive Value Matrix to guide you through the delivery of value delivery. An organization’s value is relative to that of its competitors. This is part of the buyers’ comparative calculus in assessing where to buy. The buyer is asking a simple question: “Is this brand worth it?” By understanding your organization’s competitive value proposition, leaders can make better decisions regarding market share growth.

Customer Retention Program Content: The Retention (Improve) stage could also be called the Enhancement stage. For value leaders, the focus should be on enhancing value to sustain their leadership position. Extending the gap between the value an organization provides and the value provided by the nearest competitor can lead to best in market status. Value followers will want to improve those elements of the value creation and delivery system that will close the gap. This is when organizations need to enhance or improve their competitive value proposition in accordance to the directives of the market place.

Customer Monitoring Program Content: The Monitoring (Control) stage is where you learn how to put monitoring systems into place to ensure that their competitive value proposition accomplishes what is intended. This control effort focuses not only on the more strategic value proposition, but also can be set up to monitor specific transactions such as sales, repairs, inquires and other customer experiences. This monitoring process acts as a trip wire, providing information where there are potential people, product of process issues that require intervention.

For 72 Hours, March 4th to 7th you can receive a special offer, a $200 savings. on the digital download of this program. Simply by clicking this link.

Related Information:
Marketing with Lean
Driving Market Share

How do I determine which markets to go into?

Posted by: business901 | Comments (0)

The starting point for identifying product/markets is to focus on first, the markets. There are two criteria that we use in Lean Marketing to assess or to evaluate markets.

The first one has to do with how attractive is that market?

Attractive of markets could be defined in terms of the market growth rate. Is it a growing market or is it a market that is in decline? For most purposes we probably want to target markets that are growing as opposed to in decline. We may want to look at the competitive intensity of the market. Is it a highly competitive market or is it more of a blue ocean type of market? One where there are few competitors or preferably even none.

What is the revenue flows within that market? What’s our market share position? Who are the dominant players? There’s any number of different criteria that we can use to assess the attractiveness of a particular market.

The second criterion is the ability to compete.

Now we take a look at how capable are we in competing within a potential market. That goes back to this concept of what are our competencies?

And one of the things we may want to look at from competitive standpoint is what the qualifiers are? What are the must haves? Do we qualify for that particular product/market or are we going to have to invest additional resources to qualify?

Second, do we have a product line that has both the width and depth of the market? Can we successfully provide product and product support? That’s a very important point. Do we have the product support systems to support the product lines once we are marketing there?

What about our distribution system? Do we have the right network setup? Are the dealers that we have adequate or the brokers, the agents, the middlemen, that type of thing? And again, do we have the right personnel?

So by matching the attractiveness of the market with our ability to compete, we can then begin to prioritize different potential markets. Clearly we want to target those markets that are highly attractive and for which we have a very strong ability to compete. Then we want to target attractive markets that we might have a moderate ability to compete in. We also want to be able to ask the question, what do we need to do to improve our capacity to compete with any of those markets?

This is an approach that is good not only for those companies that are embarked on a marketing development strategy where they’re looking to enter new markets and they’re trying to assess the efficacy of any market, but it’s also a good thing for companies to do on an audit basis of what their current markets are because a lot of those companies have inherited markets and been serving them.

From time to time markets change, their attractiveness will change, the market growth rate may drop, and the competitive intensity may have increased significantly, the revenue flows have declined. So it’s a good opportunity for the company to take a look at what they are currently doing and then make the assessment as to whether or not those markets are the right ones for the company to be in.

Leaders who take the time to really focus and understand their markets are super tough competitors. That’s why they’re leaders and not followers.

The following was derived from a conversation between Dr. Reidenbach creator of the 5Cs of Driving Market Share and me.

Is your marketing concentrated in area that makes a difference?

Posted by: business901 | Comments (0)

Identifying your customer segments is imperative in your future marketing efforts. If you have not identified those segments well, you will be discounting, providing unpaid services and minimizing profits to be competitive in the market place. Customer (Market) Identification is not easy. However, it may be the most important task that marketing has within your company.

First look at how you determine pricing, paraphrased from the The Going Lean Fieldbook:

Do you look at pricing from the standpoint of a cost plus or from the standpoint of what the customer is willing to pay for the value you receive?

Taiichi Ohno felt that most companies set their pricing models incorrectly and said, “When we apply the cost principle selling price = profit + actual cost, we make the customer responsible for every cost. This principle has no place In today’s competitive automobile industry…The Question is whether or not the product is of value to the buyer.”

Toyota shifts the equation around in a way that is mathematically equivalent but creates an entirely different meaning: selling price – actual cost = profit. The company recognizes that customers not the company assess the value of its products. And, like it or not, it is customer perception of value that forms the basis for pricing. Setting a sticker price higher than this will only drive customers to competitors’ more reasonably priced products.

As a result profits are not set by the company but they are simply the difference that the customer is willing to pay (their perceived value) and what it takes the company to produce it.

This is a subtle difference but important. As Dr. Reidenbach said in a guest blog post, “Is your price worth it?” Are you adding a perceived value to the product? Many resellers and small shop owners struggle with this and the internet has played a large part of changing the landscape as we see it. All products are commoditized, practically instantly. The difference in price can only be justified by the value your customer places on the service you provide.

If this is the case, would we not be better off trying to concentrate our sales and marketing efforts on growing the areas that our customer values. The Critical to Quality points (CTQs) that are important to our customer. In the diagrams, I try to depict the old model of pricing where we create demand and support material and labor through expenses. At the end of it we determine what profit we want to make and add it. The new model is that the customer determines the value that you add to the product through the price they are willing to pay. If they determine that your services does not warrant the price, they typically have multiple sources to choose from. If you are reseller, they can probably get the exact same product.

When you look at your sales and marketing resources and budget you might be surprised to find that they are not addressing the CTQs. The real reason a customer buys from you. Many times, I see resellers and retailers marketing products that are carried by numerous others and many of them at perceived lower prices. They actually are advertising for lower profits.

Shameless plug: Dr. Reidenbach and I have put together a program called the 5Cs of Driving Market Share. The first step in the process is Customer Identification. Though the process is based upon the problem solving principles of DMAIC, it was created for anyone to understand and use. It does not require a proficiency in Six Sigma.

You can also listen to a podcast that discusses many of the principles:
Applying Six Sigma Marketing to become Best In Market