Strategy from the Outside In: Profiting from Customer Value / Edition 1

by George Day, Christine Moorman

Overview

Shareholder value . . . core competence . . .six sigma . . . right sizing . . . These influential strategy ideas 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.

Fulfilling that purpose can be done only by approaching strategy from the outside in. In this refreshing look at creating enduring business value, two business school professors from The Wharton School and The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, challenge you to shift your perspective. They demonstrate that companies that adopt—and fight to keep—an outside-in view focused on customer value have grown revenue, profit, and shareholder value through both boom and bust business cycles.

Applying years of research, George S. Day and Christine Moorman illustrate that an outside-in view requires constant vigilance and focus on four customer value imperatives:

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

Only companies that operate with an outside-in view from the C-suite to the front lines can expect to maximize and profit from customer value.

Strategy from the Outside In puts you ahead of the competition and, just as important, keeps you there.

Visit www.strategyfromtheoutsidein.com
Strategy from the Outside In

"Throughout P&G's long history, we have focused on the four customer value imperatives outlined in this excellent book—and are as committed to them today as ever. This is essential reading for leaders focused on making a positive difference in the world and, as a direct result, delivering growth for both the near and long term."
—Robert A. McDonald, Chairman, President, and CEO, The Procter & Gamble Company

"Strategy from the Outside In is thought-provoking, practical, and full of ideas on how to strengthen your company's customer value proposition."
—Tom Lynch, CEO, Tyco Electronics Corporation

"American Express's success has rested largely on our ability to focus on our customers and adapt to their changing needs over the past 160 years. Strategy from the Outside In is an insightful book with practical advice about how to do just that."
—Jud Linville, President and CEO Consumer Services, American Express

"An in-depth look into the basic premise of what, in my view, makes successful business. Certainly worth reading once and then once every year to remind all of us what keeps us in business. For marketers, a great benchmark to help focus on how to add value most effectively."
—Geert van Kuyck, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Royal Philips Electronics

"Sam Walton said 'there's only one boss—the customer'. At Walmart we try to stay focused on that every day. But how? Strategy from the Outside In provides a blueprint for how to build a trusted brand based on consistently providing superior value to customers."
—Stephen Quinn, Chief Marketing Officer, Walmart

"Getting your company to organize around what customers value most sounds easy in theory, but it's very hard to do consistently well. Day and Moorman provide a thoughtful, realistic, and actionable blueprint for delivering the most value to your most valuable customers."
—Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer, GE

"Only a few books can really help marketing professionals make a difference in their organization. Strategy from the Outside In falls into this category. Creating superior customer value is or should be a priority of all marketers. Here, Day and Moorman provide a clear path for delivering on such value. Most important, their work is based on the real-world successes (and failures) of organizations which they have studied."
—Dennis Dunlap, CEO, American Marketing Association

"Strategy from the Outside In offers a refreshing reminder that answers to managers' most pressing questions always start by looking outside the organization and meeting consumer needs better than the other guys! It provides a combination of solid evidence and user-friendly frameworks that can be put to use immediately. A must-read not only for today's challenged CMO but for the rest of the C-suite as a guiding framework for the entire enterprise."
—Rob Malcolm, President, Global Marketing, Sales and Innovation, Diageo PLC

"Strategy from the Outside In provides a handbook to re-imagine a business through the eyes of customers. It is full of current case studies, research, and practical frameworks that senior marketers can use to refine their own thinking and influence their colleagues."
—Greg Gordon, SVP Consumer Marketing, Liberty Mutual

"Day and Moorman advise companies to leave their comfortable positions of controlling their businesses to the uncomfortable position of allowing their customers control. This is a book only for companies courageous enough to listen to their customers instead of themselves."
—Ron Nicol, Senior Partner and Managing Director, Boston Consulting Group

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780071742290
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	07/02/2010
Edition description:	List
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

George S. Day is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor and codirector of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Chairman of the board for the American Marketing Association, he is a former executive director of the Marketing Science Institute and has served as a consultant to GE, IBM, Metropolitan Life, Marriott, and other corporations. His books include Peripheral Vision, Wharton on Managing Emerging Technologies, and The Market Driven Organization. Day lives in Bryn Mawr, PA.

Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor and founder and director of The CMO Survey (www.cmosurvey.org) at The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Former member of the board of directors of the American Marketing Association and trustee for the Marketing Science Institute, she coedited the book Assessing Marketing Strategy Performance, authored more than 60 journal articles, reports, and conference proceedings, and speaks at universities and companies around the world. Moorman lives in Chapel Hill, NC.

Read an Excerpt

STRATEGY FROM THE OUTSIDE IN PROFITING FROM CUSTOMER VALUE

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By GEORGE S. DAY, CHRISTINE MOORMAN

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2010George S. Day and Christine Moorman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-174229-0

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Strategy from the Outside In

With the wreckage of the Great Recession still smoldering and slow economic growth expected for the foreseeable future, it's not surprising to see that many companies are turning inward and hunkering down. Profits, growth, and value creation seem to have become stretch goals rather than baseline expectations. Companies that were praised over the last decade for delivering shareholder value have largely fallen on hard times; buried under debt, they have no clear plan for capitalizing once customers are willing to spend again. The Fortune 500's top 25 at the beginning of the century included companies such as General Motors, Ford, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, Enron, and Compaq. Measured by market value, only 8 of the 25 largest companies in the world in 2000 can claim that distinction today.

Yet a number of companies operating in the same challenging environment have gained market share, grown revenues and profits, and created more value for customers, in contrast to their competitors' intense focus on budget cutting. Indeed, there are companies that have managed market share, profit, and customer value growth throughout the vertiginous boom-and-bust business cycles of the last 20 years. These companies may not have been favorite stock picks, nor have all of them topped the lists of the decade's most profitable corporations. But what they have done is found a way to build value over the long term. These are not flash-in-the-pan companies, world-beaters one year and stragglers the next. They are companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Fidelity, Cisco, Walmart, Amazon, Apple, IKEA, Texas Instruments, Becton Dickinson, and Tesco, among others.

These companies have been successful because they have remained true to the purpose of a business (as stated by Peter Drucker): to create and keep customers. They've kept that purpose not by focusing on shareholders and meeting quarterly numbers, by playing games with their financial statements, or by focusing just on competitive advantages. Instead, they've done it by consistently creating superior customer value—and profiting handsomely from that customer value.

We've spent years looking at these companies—and many not-so-successful ones—looking for patterns and commonalities that explain their stellar results, and we've concluded that they offer three very important lessons for any executive who wants to consistently create superior customer value and generate economic profits over the long term. There is no step-by-step formula, but there are consistencies in how these companies think, how they make strategic decisions, and, most important, how they operate to ensure they are maximizing the value they create and the profits they capture.

• These companies approach strategy from the outside in rather than from the inside out. They start with the market when they design their strategy, not the other way around.

• They use deep market insights to inform and guide their outside-in view.

• Their outside-in strategy focuses every part of the organization on achieving, sustaining, and profiting from customer value.

Two Paths to Strategy

The first thing that distinguishes these value- and profit-creating companies is that they drive strategy from the perspective of the market—in other words, from the outside in. This may sound trivial, but it is shockingly uncommon. For all the talk about "putting the customer first" and "relentlessly delivering value to customers," most management teams fail to do this. Put most simply, outside in means standing in the customer's shoes and viewing everything the company does through the customer's eyes.

Far more common than outside-in thinking is inside-out thinking and inside-out strategy. Inside-out companies narrowly frame their strategic thinking by asking, "What can the market do for us?" rather than, "What can we do for the market?" The consequences of inside-out versus outside-in thinking can be seen in the way many business-to-business firms approach customer solutions. The inside-out view is that "solutions are bundles of products and services that help us sell more." The outside-in view is that "the purpose of a solution is to help our customers find value and make money—to our mutual benefit." Some differences in the two ways of framing strategic issues are shown in Figure 1-1.

Inside-out thinking helps explain why a large database company that was looking to grow by leveraging its deep information about the companies' finances spent several million dollars to develop a product for small and medium-sized enterprises without first having in-depth conversations with potential buyers. Management, seduced by the seemingly vast potential of this market, relied on the assurances of the sales force that customers would buy. During the process, no one asked what value the company would be offering customers, or how the company's new product would offer customers more value than the status quo. Instead, managers focused on what customers could do for the company. As a result, the new product flopped and was abandoned in less than a year.

An even more costly example is Ford's unfortunate decision not to add a sliding door on the driver's side of its Windstar minivan. The extra cost of the fifth door was the major factor in this decision, but just to be sure, the designers asked a sample of buyers their opinion. Only one-third of the sample thought it was a good idea, while the rest said no or weren't sure because they couldn't envision the benefits. Meanwhile, Ford's competitors were "living with" prospective buyers at shopping malls, do-it-yourself stores, and soccer fields. That fieldwork showed that the fifth door could solve a lot of problems for families and handymen. Based on these benefits to customers, Ford's competitors, including Honda, Chrysler, and GM, added the door, which was an immediate hit. Ford's sales suffered so badly because of the lack of this feature that the company was forced to add it later. Doing so meant that Ford had to redesign its van to match competitors'—at an out-of-pocket cost of $560 million (not including the opportunity cost of lost sales).

Winning from the Outside In

With an outside-in mindset, top management's strategy dialogue starts with the market. The management team steps outside the boundaries and constraints of the company as it is, and looks first at its market: How and why are customers changing? What new needs do they have? What can we do to solve their problems and help them make more money? What new competitors are lurking around the corner, and how can we derail their efforts? This perspective expands the strategy dialogue and opens up a richer set of opportunities for competitive advantage and growth.

Jeff Bezos, the founder and chairman of Amazon.com, is a champion of the outside-in approach. He explained how Amazon was able to meet the needs of its customers for Web services by offering access to its cloud computing network and for a more convenient reading experience with the Kindle. He describes it as a "working backward" mentality:

Rather than ask what we are good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask, who are our customers? What do they need? And then you say we're going to give that to them regardless of whether we have the skills to do so, and we will learn these skills no matter how long it takes.... There is a tendency I think for executives to think that the right course of action is to stick to the knitting—stick with what you are good at. That may be a generally good rule, but the problem is the world changes o
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from STRATEGY FROM THE OUTSIDE IN PROFITING FROM CUSTOMER VALUE by GEORGE S. DAY. Copyright © 2010 by George S. Day and Christine Moorman. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. Strategy from the Outside In
Chapter 2. Profiting from Customer Value
Chapter 3. Imperative One: Be a Customer Value Leader
Chapter 4. Becoming a Customer Value Leader
Chapter 5. Imperative Two: Innovate New Value for Customers
Chapter 6. Innovating New Value for Customers
Chapter 7. Imperative Three: Capitalize on the Customer as an Asset
Chapter 8. How to Capitalize on the Customer as an Asset
Chapter 9. Imperative Four: Capitalize on the Brand as an Asset
Chapter 10. How to Capitalize on the Brand as an Asset
Chapter 11. Market Insights and the Customer Value Imperatives
Chapter 12. Organizing to Compete on the Customer Value Imperatives
Chapter 13. Leading for Customer Value