All companies claim that their strategies are customer driven. But when "customer" means any number of entities in a company's value chain--consumers, suppliers, retailers, even internal units like R&D--managers tend to lose focus, and their firms become vulnerable to competitors who have clearly defined who they serve and how. In this article, Robert Simons of Harvard Business School presents a framework that can help companies develop strategies that are truly customer-centric. The framework lays out four steps: (1) Identify the best primary customer for your business. This choice determines what resources and capabilities you invest in and how you organize your business. Amazon serves four very different types of customer (consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content providers), but it devotes the lion's share of its resources to pleasing consumers, even if that means sellers or content providers sometimes feel shortchanged. (2) Create processes to learn what your primary customer's values are. Data analytics, ethnographic research, and other methods can reveal needs and preferences that customers themselves may not be aware of. (3) Allocate resources accordingly, using one or more of the five business-model configurations: low price (Walmart), local value creation (Nestle), global standard of excellence (Microsoft), dedicated service relationship (IBM), or expert knowledge (Merck). (4) Build an interactive control process to monitor shifts in the assumptions that underlie your choices and prepare an action plan to respond.

【書誌情報】

ページ数：9ページ

サイズ：A4

商品番号：HBSP-R1403B

発行日：2014/3/1

登録日：2014/4/21