Concentrar a atenção na procura! (parte I)

Esta semana comecei a ler e a devorar “How Companies Win – Profitting From Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Businees Your’re In” de Rick Kash e David Calhoun.
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Um excelente livro com alguns capítulos de ouro.
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"“… a fundamental shift in the relationship between supply and demand in the global economy. It is a shift from a supply-driven economy to a demand-driven economy. It is a shift that requires a new set of strategies and tools.
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Demand is what customers possess in terms of the needs and desires – emotional, psychological, and physical – they want satisfied, and have the purchasing power to satisfy. For companies, demand is ultimately about profit. At the end of the day, whoever satisfies demand the best, profits most. (Moi ici: Muitas empresas ainda não perceberam isto, ainda continuam a dedicar toda a sua energia a optimizar a cadeia de fornecimento, quando o gargalo está na procura.)
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For more than a generation, business has been extraordinarily focused on the supply chain: building it, perfecting it, defending it. And the modern corporation depends on the supply chain to continually generate profits, because organic growth has been so hard to achieve.
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But the fastest-growing companies of today … don’t focus nearly as much on distribution channels. Instead, their businesses are built around consumption models, and their single-minded focus is on building relationships to their family of consumers to earn their trust, to expand their role in their consumers’ lives, and to enlist them in everything from product design to service.
These twenty-first-century enterprises are as focused on constantly improving their levels of trust with their customers and consumers as they are on the degrees of efficiency of supply.
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… companies that did survive the shakeout [the dot.com bust] have proven to be some of the most important and influential companies of recent years.
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What did those survivors had in common? Their business was based on what customers wanted, rather than what the suppliers already had. They were the harbingers of the demand-driven economy, if only we had noticed.
One of the lessons they taught is that we have now entered an era of oversupply. Oversupply is a situation where significantly more supply exists than there is demand to absorb it. Oversupply is often characterized by a lack of differentiation, with price becoming the primary factor underlying purchase decisions. As a consequence, pricing power virtually disappears, and organic growth and profitability become increasingly difficult to achieve. (Moi ici: Ainda ontem Seth Godin escreveu sobre o pricing power, "On Pricing Power".)
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Segue-se extracto do texto de Seth: ("And so we often find ourselve stuck, matching the other guy's price, or worse, racing to the bottom to be cheaper. Cheaper is the last refuge of the marketer unable to invent a better product and tell a better story.


The goal, no matter what you sell, is to be seen as irreplaceable, essential and priceless. If you are all three, then you have pricing power. When the price charged is up to you, when you have the power to set the price, there is a line out the door and you can use pricing as a signaling mechanism, not merely a way to make a living.


Of course, the realization of what it takes to create value might break your heart, because it means you have to specialize, take risks, create art, leave a positive impact and adopt generosity in all you do. It means you have to develop extraordinary expertise and that you are almost always hanging way out of the boat, about to fall out.")
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To continue to grow in a world of flattening or even shrinking demand, you are going to have to build on one of the most successful strategies of the past – endlessly fine-tuning a supply chain for its own sake – and simultaneously shift to guiding and informing that supply with a demand chain that constantly monitors the changing demands and need states of your highest-profit customer pools.
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In the business to consumer (B2C) world, those customers are the wholesalers, distributors, and retailers who make your offers available to the end users … the consumers who purchase and use them. For business to business (B2B), customers will include other businesses that distribute and sell your offers and ultimately the small-, medium-, and large-sized businesses who are the end users of those offers.
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We have before us a great opportunity. Supply wildly outpaces demand right now. The global economy has become unbalanced.
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In a world where supply is growing ever more efficient while demand is flattening or even contracting, understanding demand becomes the new imperative for how companies will compete and win." (Moi ici: É a nossa clássica preocupação com a escolha dos clientes-alvo e com a caracterização das experiências que procura e valorizam.")
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Continua.