Thanks for your overwhelming response to the ‘achieve strategic transformation for enduring growth – part-I‘ of this two-part series. In the part-I of this article, we agreed with Mark that strategic transformation is indeed the key to enduring growth. However, we differed on the way to achieve transformation.
So how do you achieve strategic transformation for enduring growth of your business?
In part-I, we asserted that the secret to achieving strategic transformation is to be fiercely customer-centric.
In this part, let us discuss how you can transform your business and grow it further keeping customer-centricity at the core of your business strategy.
When you become passionately customer-centric, you make your customers’ delight the overarching goal of your organization. ‘Customer delight’ becomes the Shinbashira – the central pillar – on which your organization stands. You listen to your customers and place your customers (and consumers) at the centre of everything you offer. You direct your resources toward satisfying (and exceeding) the needs and wants of your consumers. As their needs change, the solution you offer changes, and the business strategy behind delivering those solutions changes too. You become so agile in responding to your customer’s changing tastes that you barely notice the incremental changes taking place in your organization. This continuous change becomes second nature to your organization.
And when you look back over a period of time, you realize that you have moved so significantly from your original business situation that there is hardly anything common between the old face and the new face of your organization. It is like the organization undergoing morphing.
This is when you have achieved transformation, without consciously embarking on doing that.
You don’t TAKE disruptive actions for strategic transformation; you take well-conceived actions with specific goals that BRING ABOUT ‘disruptive transformation’. There is a difference!
But this is a very simplified view of an organization going through transformation.
What actually happens (or has to happen) on ground is far more complex and far too deliberate.
Let us see how.
Our analysis of the top-100 brands revealed that when organizations commit themselves to becoming customer-centric, they tend to take these five steps so as to focus on creating maximum value for their customers:
- They meticulously track usage of their products and services to figure out their customer’s usage patterns. This may involve analysing usage data from customers and in some cases their customer’s customers, who are using products that incorporate your product.
- They strive to understand their customers thoroughly to comprehend the real reasons behind their customers’ purchases and apply that knowhow to identify real profitable customers. They perform detailed analysis of the customers’ data to generate deep insights into their purchasing behaviour and to spot any changes in them.
- They incorporate their customers’ feedback into R&D to continually improve their products and services in line with the changing consumer expectations. Once in a while, this may result in conceptualizing an innovative product not yet in the market.
- They put in place mechanisms to refine their operational strategies and organizational processes to address the changing priorities.
- Most importantly, they use the feedback to calibrate their future roadmap and formulate the long-term growth strategy for their business.
These actions, when deployed effectively, enable these companies to embrace one or more of the three growth strategies: Market Expansion, Product/Industry Expansion, and Operational Improvement.
Let us briefly look at each of them.
1. MARKET EXPANSION – Business growth by entering into new market(s):
When you are customer-centric, you strive to know the face of your most profitable customers and the benefits for which they are buying from you. Your growth objective is to identify more of such customers globally who may benefit from your offering. This insight assists you to explore new customer bases in newer markets. The way this objective is achieved varies from company to company. Some companies merge with or acquire other businesses having presence in the target market, and leverage that presence to market their products. Others may form joint-ventures on the agreement to share technology and markets. Yet others may plan to grow organically by entering a new market on their own.
Coca-Cola, MTV, Starbucks, Nestlé, Heineken, and scores of other companies have successfully located their target customer segments across the world. They achieved international expansion over an extended period of time transforming their businesses from being local entities to becoming global market-leaders.
2. PRODUCT OR INDUSTRY EXPANSION – Business growth by introducing better products and services:
As your customers’ preferences change, the products or services they employ to do their job (need to) change too. When you are constantly tracking this change, you get innovative ideas for improving your existing product lines and introducing new ones. A good grasp on customers’ needs in new areas can propel you to launch new product categories that didn’t exist previously.
Procter & Gamble has developed this expertise in consumer research through ethnographic methods; they claim to co-create new products or new line of existing products by closely observing how their consumers use the existing products.
Amazon is an excellent example of growth through product or category expansion. Pursuing the vision of becoming ‘earth’s most customer-centric company’, Amazon is single-mindedly striving to make customer’s (online) shopping experience easy, comfortable, and pleasant. In fact, they are in the process of disrupting the entire book publishing industry by planning to publish and sell every future book online. The established book-publishers lost touch with the changing consumer need of ‘reading books anytime-anywhere without having to spend time buying it physically’, and now their survival itself is threatened by the digital publishing industry; whereas the likes of Amazon, with relentless focus on the consumers, are thriving.
3. OPERATIONAL IMPROVEMENT – Growth by developing unique competitive advantage:
This strategy involves creating differentiation in your business model and/or operations. Companies are leveraging their organizational data by applying the latest analytics techniques to mine insights. These insights are utilized to devise new distribution channels, optimize logistics and supply chain management, improve operations by deploying superior technology, and streamline existing processes. Relentlessly pursuing these strategies eventually renders them distinctive advantage over their competition, and helps them grow in the marketplace.
FedEx addressed the customer need of next-day courier deliveries and launched ‘FedEx Express’.
eBay provided easy B2C and C2C sales services to consumers via its (online) eCommerce platform.
Michael Dell grew his company by sensing an opportunity among PC-savvy consumers who enjoyed the convenience of customizing their PC and buying it online to be delivered in days. Thus Dell has developed an innovative business model of ordering PC online which enabled them to lower their PC prices to impossibly low levels.
These strategies have the potential to propel your organization into a bigger growth curve.
And the key to doing this is to understand your customers as thoroughly as you can!
In this world of disruptive innovations, business owners and CEOs must focus all their efforts in deeply understanding their customers. When you become ardently customer-centric, you set yourself up for strategic transformation that is key to enduring growth of your business.
Related Posts:
- Why your Business should go Digital?
- What does Digital Maturity really mean?
- Customer-centric Sales is the New Competitive Advantage
<– Strategic Transformation Part-1
3 Lessons Every Executive must Learn from Wimbledon Centre Court –>
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