Value Creation: Customer, Employee and Stakeholder value Right now, there’s a buzz out there around the term Value Creation. But there’s also a lot of fuzz. Far too often, companies send out mixed messages about the focus of any Value Creation initiatives. Is the Customer the primary focus? Or the Shareholder? Or the Employee? Or all three? Sorting this quandary out is critical for any business that intends to stay vibrant and profitable. And, as we hope to convince you, it all comes down to a consideration of what happens at the Customer-Supplier interface. That’s where everything that you plan, everything that you produce, everything that you hope for meets the real world. It’s where your business wins or loses. And it’s where, hand on heart, the Value Genie team has world-leading insigh...
Customer Value Hello. I recently received a letter informing me that UK vehicle registration number P117 DER is for sale, and that this can be arranged to spell out my surname. You can see the idea from the photo. The letter says: “For the above number we are currently looking for offers in the region of £5750 ono (around $8,600); a price that we believe represents excellent value for money when you consider that this is THE perfect plate for your surname.” The letter illustrates two important points: One: Value – like beauty – is in the eye and mind of the beholder. The idea of owning a personalized number plate doesn’t hold the slightest appeal for me. I couldn’t even be bothered to gamble on the investment element. I don’t write this in any pejorative sense: for other members of the Pin...
Value in Use We all recognize the astonishing technological advances of recent years. After all, we all carry supercomputers around in our pockets and purses. And we routinely use the internet, “the largest experiment involving anarchy in history”[i]. And terms such as ‘Big Data’, ‘digital world’ and the like are part of everyday business discourse. And yet, and yet, many companies fail to grasp the profundity of a fundamental change that these advances have both enabled and empowered: the power shift from Producer to Customer. Or maybe it’s just that a lot of folk don’t want to see it. For the leaders of enterprises that thrived in the top-down-drivin’, product-pushin’, profit-hustlin’ milieu of 20th century business, the need for fundamental change may not be greeted with wholehearted en...
The 4Ps of Marketing There’s a lot of stuff out there about the 4Ps of Marketing. Fact is, the best thing to do with the 4Ps model is bury it. To borrow from the Monty Python team, “It is a late model. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life it rests in peace”. Let’s take a step back. The 4Ps of Marketing model – Product, Place, Price, Promotion – was created by Jerome McCarthy, a marketing professor at Michigan State University, in 1960. That’s a long time ago: the year that John F. Kennedy became President of the United States; a new band called The Beatles played their first gig, in Hamburg; and the Pentel Corporation demonstrated the fiber-tip pen. The business mindset back then was all about Products. In the September 2014 McKinsey Quarterly, in an article titled Redefining Capitalism, authors E...