Em "Tilt - Shifting Your Strategy From Products to Customers" de Niraj Dawar, o autor começa por contar o impacte do barbeiro Richard Arkwright, um nome da lista que memorizei no 8º ano de escolaridade sobre os homens que começaram a Revolução Industrial em Inglaterra, ao criar o conceito de produção em escala, apostando nos volumes crescentes e nos custos unitários cada vez mais baixos:
"The money was used to set up wholesale and retail distribution routes to market and to persuade consumers to buy, [Moi ici: Cá está aquele pormenor, o mercado de massas não criou a produção em larga escala de grandes séries ou lotes. Foi o contrário, foi a produção em massa, com os seus produtos a baixo custo que levou os consumidores a fazerem o sacrifício de entrarem na massa] The marketing budget had made its first appearance. Money could be invested in building markets, not just factories. Still, for at least another century or so, the capital employed in building the factories would continue to dwarf the marketing budget, and for another 250 years, the strategic imperatives of the large-scale factory would continue to drive business decisions.
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Mass production rapidly ran riot through just about every industry. Entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and capitalists who seized this source of competitive advantage would quickly and decisively outperform firms with more traditional forms of competitive advantage. Those who missed it or were too slow to recognize it were either driven out of business or gobbled up by the fast-growing scale-seeking enterprises. Scale became the defining feature of success and the cornerstone of strategy. Scale-driven consolidation continues in many industries today. That is Arkwright's legacy. The primary strategic question that drives Arkwrightian business is, "How much more of this stuff can we sell?" [Moi ici: Isto é tão tríade...] The amortization of the fixed costs of manufacturing, the quest for new markets, and decisions related to competitive strategy all flowed from that one question."
Entretanto já no século XXI:
"if the main ongoing fixed costs are advertising, promotion, listing fees, market research, and customer relationship management, and our manufacturing costs are variable, the critical resource that needs to be optimized is no longer the factory; [Moi ici: Consigo ouvir uma série de pessoas a cair da cadeira] it is the customers.
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But customers are very different from factories as a locus for fixed costs. Factories are monolithic: a single entity that is good at producing one thing. Customers, on the other hand, are a collection of individuals, an aggregation of many different needs, preferences, and tastes. If our fixed costs reside in the downstream, then the question that should govern our strategy is no longer "How much of this stuff can we sell?" but rather "What else do our customers need? Our success depends not so much on economies of scale as on economies of scope.""
No entanto:
"Like a phantom limb or a deceased patriarch, the long-dismantled, shuttered, and offshored factories continue to haunt strategic discourse long after they are gone. Companies continue to be obsessed with volume (and volume measures such as market share), with the development and protection of new products (rather than markets and customers), and with the utilization of production capacity rather than the customer base. Managers continuously and misguidedly try to gain competitive advantage in the upstream playing fields that were leveled years ago."
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