Profiting from Customer Value

I had the pleasure this past week of interviewing the co-author of the book Strategy from the Outside In, Christine Moorman for an upcoming Business901 Podcast. Christine is the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor and founder of The CMO Survey at The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

She stated that many strategies such has shareholder value, core competence, six sigma and right sizing have lured many companies into a dangerous internal focus, viewing the world from the inside out. As a result, companies lose sight of the market, which leads to poor results over the long run. Inside-out thinking distracts companies from the core purpose of a business: to create and serve customers.

In research for the podcast, I came across this video by the other co-author George S. Day. George is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor and co-Director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In this video he emphasized that we must stop looking at your customer as another competitive force but rather embracing how they perceive your relative market position. Understanding this as your market orientation will allow you to achieve greater revenue and profit. He also claims that this orientation with allow you to react sooner sooner to market shifts.

The four imperatives that are discussed in the video:

Be a customer value leader
Innovate new value for customers
Capitalize on the customer as an asset
Capitalize on the brand as an asset

If you have been reading my blog for any period of time, you realize George is preaching to the choir here. Great delivery and a real enforcer of why Customer Value is so important.

From the Driving Market Share Website: Every customer is looking for value, and practically every company claims to offer it. Yours is likely no exception. But do you really know what value means to your customers? If you suspected they were less than thrilled with your products and services, how would you go about discovering why? And if you discovered that you were missing a piece or two of the value equation, what would you do to address the problem? These are questions that every business leader should consider, especially in today’s economy. When you make an effort to figure out what value looks like to your customer—and take steps to provide it—the results can be extraordinary.very.

And remember, Customer Value is the best Leading Indicator of Growing Market Share.