"usando o que produzimos como um input para o seu processamento"

O exemplo que se segue pode servir de reflexão aos que respondem com o seu produto ou serviço à pergunta sobre qual é o seu negócio. Os clientes não compram o que produzimos, os clientes procuram o que vão conseguir viver, experienciar, usando o que produzimos como um input para o seu processamento. Diferentes processamentos, diferentes contextos:

"You’re either pregnant or you’re not. And the market for pregnancy testing kits would appear to be similarly dichotomous: you either need a pregnancy test kit, or you don’t. If you do, you buy one and it helps you answer the first question in the affirmative or in the negative.
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So you’d think there’s not much to the market – not much market segmentation potential.
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“why do consumers buy pregnancy kits?”
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The answer was surprisingly far from obvious.
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It revealed two very different kinds of buyer of pregnancy kits: those who hopefully await a positive result, and those who anxiously wish for a negative one.
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These two segments deserved to be served differently. So the product was launched differently for the two types of consumer: one for “the hopefuls” and another for “the fearfuls,” differentiated in name, packaging, pricing and in-store placement.
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For the fearfuls the product was named “RapidVue,” it came in a plain white clinical pack design, priced at $6.99 and displayed near the condoms in the contraception aisle.
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For the hopefuls, on the other hand, the company created a pretty pink box labeled “Babystart,” featuring a gurgling, rosy-cheeked infant, priced 50% higher at $9.99 and sold near the ovulation predictor kits.
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It was a dramatically successful strategy for Quidel. A new way of segmenting the market was born."

Recordar:

• Preço e JTBD são contextuais (Novembro 2016)
• Conservas e pricing (Janeiro de 2014)

Trechos retirados de "Segmenting The Market For Power And Profit"

"This wide gap deserves top management attention"

Segue-se um relato que não anda longe do que encontro quando trabalho com PMEs. Dirigentes que acreditam que o seu negócio é o que produzem, mas que depois dizem que a sua vantagem competitiva nada tem a ver com o que produzem, e tudo a ver com a interacção.

"Over the past twenty years, I have asked thousands of managers around the world Levitt’s question: “What business are you in”? And I have followed it up with another: “Why do your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors?” In answer to the first question, the responses from managers in a wide variety of industries, from extraction, to pipelines, window frames, software, and banking, almost invariably still describe the product the company sells or the production facilities. I am always bewildered at how rarely the customer or the benefits the customers buys, enter the description. [Moi ici: Recordar a série "Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte XI)", particularmente a parte IX. Recordar também "Most people tend to describe what they do rather than the value they bring"] To many managers, the product is the business, just as in Levitt’s era. Firms continue to spend inordinate amounts of time, effort, and resources on their products. In fact, businesses are structured around their products: they have product divisions and product managers, profitability is measured by product (not by customer), planning meetings and budgets are product-based, and the managers’ hopes and aspirations are pinned on product innovation and the new product pipeline. Building better products, conventional wisdom holds, is their pathway to a better, less price-competitive future.
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My follow-up question aims to uncover what managers see as their particular competitive advantage, not just how they see their business – and it does one other thing: it reveals a puzzling gap between their product obsession and their customers’ behavior. So why do they think their customers buy from them rather than from their competitors? The responses consist of reasons such as “They trust us,” “Our reliability of supply and delivery,” “Our service,” “We are knowledgeable about their business,” “Our experience with other such customers,” “We make it seamless,” “They see us as unique,” “We’re in their consideration set,” and so on.
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Rarely is a better product mentioned, and seldom is a lower price seen as the reason customers buy from us. In other words, the “reasons customers buy from us” reside almost entirely in the interactions that take place in the marketplace: trust, reliability of supply, service, knowledge, and experience cannot be made in a factory, nor packaged and sold off the shelf. These are downstream sources of value. They have their origins in specific activities, processes, and systems the firm employs to reduce the customers’ risks and transaction costs.
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This wide gap between why customers buy from us (downstream reasons), and where we are spending most of our effort and resources (upstream) deserves top management attention – it can both increase efficiency by re-allocating effort to where it matters, and can build advantage by spending resources on activities that customers value and are willing to pay for."

Trecho retirado de "Why Do Your Customers Buy From You?"

"extend your brand value beyond the product"

"The best way to enhance and protect your brand at the same time is to extend your brand value beyond the product. When your brand is comprised of a complete customer experience — including service, environment, communications, shopping experience, personality, and values — it is inimitable and far more valuable. A pirated product may mimic your brand but it doesn’t replace it.  It simply whets consumer’s appetites for more of your brand."

"extend your brand value beyond the product" - o truque não é o produto, o produto é um recurso que os clientes integram na sua vida, o truque é a atenção na vida dos clientes. Bem na linha do que Niraj Dawar escreveu em "Tilt" e a Service-Dominat Logic preconiza.


Trecho retirado de "Think Differently About Protecting Your Brand"

O jogo de sedução pode ir para muito mais longe

Esta interessante reflexão de Seth Godin "Is digital the end of luxury brands?" deixa-me a fazer a ponte para o livro de Itamar Simonson e Emanuel Rosen, "Absolute Value":

"Consumers used to make decisions relative to other things—a brand name, their previous experience with a company, an inflated list price, a brand’s advertising message compared to competing brands’ messages, or the other products a marketer chose to display on a catalog page or on the shelf. Conventional wisdom still holds that people’s choices can be greatly influenced by the context or the framing of an offer.
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But for the first time this is starting to change and we’re moving toward an age of nearly perfect information. Review sites, shopping apps on smartphones, an extended network of acquaintances available through social media, and unprecedented access to experts and other sources, all mean that many consumers today operate in a radically different, socially intensive information environment. In a world where consumers enjoy complete access to informed experts and various information services, where they can instantly read the opinions of previous users, it’s much easier for consumers to predict their likely experience with a product or a service—it’s easier to know the absolute value of things. When we talk about “absolute value” we refer to the experienced quality of a product. For example, the experience at a restaurant, the pleasure (or boredom) one might experience reading a book, the closeness of the shave, the actual comfort of headphones, or the usage value you get from using your camera. So “absolute value” doesn’t only refer to the technical specifications and reliability of a camera, but to what it is like to own and actually use it. In short: The new information environment around us allows consumers to predict much more accurately the experienced quality (or absolute value) of products and services they consider getting."

Ainda tenho de ler o livro mas à partida vou de pé atrás. Julgo que as marcas colhem o que semeiam... e, na linha do que Niraj Dawar escreveu recentemente em "Tilt", e se escreve neste blogue há muitos anos, o jogo de sedução pode ir para muito mais longe do que simplesmente o produto em si.
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ADENDA: E o mercado de massas, tem futuro?

Um exemplo

"é uma empresa cuja grande vantagem competitiva é exactamente "dar conforto e segurança aos clientes". [Moi ici: Recordar Dawar, reduzir custos e riscos para o cliente]
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é uma empresa industrial, com vários clientes, e cuja diferenciação face aos concorrentes é exactamente a flexibilidade.
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ao contrário da maior parte dos concorrentes que produzem muito mais (o principal factura quase 2,5x mais), eles produzem séries mais pequenas, vão entregando ao ritmo que o cliente quer, o que permite margens melhores (o tal concorrente, apesar de facturar 2,5x mais, tem um cash-flow mais pequeno).
ainda têm alguns aspectos a melhorar, mas não duvido que os clientes sintam conforto com eles, exactamente por esse tema.
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os preços de venda variam em função da rapidez exigida (uma encomenda para 1 semana será mais cara que uma encomenda para 1 mês).
segundo o próprio, não são os mais caros, mas gabam-se de não serem os mais baratos."

Comentário do Bruno Fonseca em "Acompanhar o dinamismo do sector"

to seek competitive advantage ... inside the customers' mind

E, para terminar a minha leitura de "Tilt - Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers" de Niraj Dawar:

"The tilt to downstream competitive advantage carries three implications that go to the heart of strategy. First, its locus is no longer within the firm, but resides increasingly downstream, in the marketplace, in interactions with customers. [Moi ici: Cá está o papel da interacção, ferramenta essencial para a co-criação de valor] Second, firms have an opportunity to aim for more than merely sustainable competitive advantage; they can build accumulative competitive advantage. And third, the skills and resources required to make and move stuff can be bought or brought in, while those required to connect and engage with customers need to be owned and honed. [Moi ici: Pois, o futuro serão os call-centers? Claro que não em Mongo... sim para os Golias, e outros ingénuos que não sendo Golias pensam que só podem competir como os Golias, que só sabem seduzir clientes pelo preço, só pensam nos overserved! Interessante ler isto "Flying Truly First Class" finalmente alguém se lembra dos underserved e do seu efeito multiplicador nas contas, sem ser pelo volume]
...
[Moi ici: E a parte mais importante, IMHO] The tilt strategy urges the CEO to seek competitive advantage in the firm's interactions with the marketplace, in the networks with and between customers, and on the playing field inside the customers' mind. [Moi ici: Não são as máquinas, não são os atributos] By asking fundamental questions such as "Why do our customers buy from us?" the firm brings the voice of the customer into strategy formulation. Uncovering the reasons why shows that the customers buy from the firm (rather than from its competitors) because it helps reduce their costs and risks. The CEO should be busy (1) seeking out more customers who value a similar reduction in costs [Moi ici: Atenção, estes custos não são necessariamente financeiros na versão clássica. Recordar o exemplo da Albano Morgado "flexibilidade para aceitar encomendas a partir dos 100 metros, quando os italianos exigem mínimos de 300 metros"] and risks and (2) uncovering additional costs and risks that the firm can reduce for its existing customers."

Um excelente livro que recomendo a quem quer pensar estratégia

Prisioneiros do muros altos que ergueram.

Ontem comecei a leitura de "Service-Dominat Logic: Premises, Perspectives, Possibilities" de Robert Lusch e Stephen Vargo.
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No primeiro capítulo li:

"Institutionalization refers to the shared acceptance of concepts, meanings, and normative behaviors - it allows coordination by providing rules of the game. It also allows human actors to "think," communicate, and act without taxing their limited calculative capacity. A dominant logic is a set of related, institutionalized conceptualizations concerning some activity or object - in the case of G-D logic, economic exchange.
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Performativity relates to acting in accordance with an institutionalized logic and thus implies at least a partial self-fulfillment."

À noite, encontrei este texto "Crowdsourcing fashion".
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O que quero realçar é algo que Niraj Dawar não se cansou de chamar a atenção em "Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers".
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Segundo Vargo e Lusch:

"Importantly, institutions are almost always ignored in traditional approaches to firm strategy. However, it is one of the most crucial determinants of a firm being able to design and reconfigure markets and its future. For customers, the firm needs to know if there are institutions required for a new solution (service) to be successful, and, if there are whether these institutions are in place, and whether any institutions need to be desintitutionalized."

Segundo Niraj Dawar, como referimos em "Para reflexão" quem aposta em alterar as instituições em curso e re-institucionalizar outro modelo, quem re-escreve o mercado, tem uma vantagem tremenda sobre os concorrentes, eles continuam agarrados ao modelo mental anterior, prisioneiros do muros altos que ergueram.

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Por isso, foi com um sorriso cúmplice que li em "Crowdsourcing fashion":

"Finally there is the issue of how easy it would be to copy this model. To date, existing brands have not.
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“We benefit a little bit from how old this industry is. A lot of fashion companies are used to working a certain way, and either they’re too wedded to the traditional retail model – they can’t walk away from hundreds and hundreds of stores, that’s too scary – or they just don’t get it. They say, ‘No, we’ve always done business this way, why would we change?’”"

"and trained managers who worship the gods of efficiency"

"For over 250 years, sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, and technological progress have been at the center of business activity. All other business activities grew around this core. Strategically, business has honed skills to spot and capture upstream sources of competitive advantage, notably, scale and product innovation. Organizationally, companies are invested in systems that keep the upstream machine humming, processes that maximize throughput, and trained managers who worship the gods of efficiency. By now, your business knows what it takes to make and move stuff. The problem is, so does everybody else.
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Still, many businesses are run as though the major fixed costs, the primary customer value, and the key competitive advantages reside in the upstream. These businesses continue to emphasize volume throughput and upstream efficiency. They think of product innovation as their key to a brighter future, often to the detriment of a customer focus, a broadened understanding of customer needs, economies of scope, down-stream innovation, cost and risk reduction, and ownership of the criteria of purchase."

Trecho retirado de "Tilt - Shifting Your Strategy From Products to Customers" de Niraj Dawar

Cheira-me a tiro no pé (parte VI)

Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV e parte V.
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"Sport TV duplica prejuízo para seis milhões de euros em 2013"

"Resultados negativos mais do que duplicaram no último ano. Empresa tem sido afectada pela diminuição do número de subscritores."

Estava escrito nas estrelas.
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Isto faz-me lembrar o capítulo que li ontem em Tilt de Niraj Dawar...

"1. How do you make sure your brand is among the set of brands considered for purchase by the customer?"

A Sport TV assumiu que o critério de compra dos subscritores da Benfica TV era o preço e desenvolveu campanha baseada no preço.
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A Benfica TV lançou a ligação emotiva ao clube e fez dela o critério de compra e, com isso, fechou a porta atrás de si, impediu que mais alguma alternativa entrasse no conjunto que o potencial subscritor consideraria. A Sport TV deveria ter apelado a outros critérios... qualidade do comentário?

Para reflexão

Para reflexão por muito boa gente:

"Strategy is the means by which a business entity seeks to outperform competitors. In other words, strategy is a quest for a wrinkle in the market [Moi ici: Uma boa boa forma de designar o esforço de tornar a concorrência imperfeita; criar rugas, dobras na paisagem competitiva] that will allow a firm to generate returns greater than those of its competitors. In efficient markets, it is not easy for firms to find lasting sources of competitive advantage. Rivals are quick to locate and replicate sources of advantage and iron out the wrinkles. [Moi ici: Outra metáfora interessante, passar a ferro a ruga, commoditizar a situação, re-estabelecer a concorrência perfeita]

...

A successful tilt strategy, as we have seen, groups your firm's resources and activities into two buckets: upstream or downstream. [Moi ici: Recordar a terminologia em "Ver o filme dos últimos anos..." e na imagem]

Companies seeking a wrinkle to exploit in the upstream tend to home in on advantages such as new products, technologies, features, low-cost sources of supply, and efficient production processes. Downstream sources of competitive advantage, in contrast, reside in your knowledge of; and your links with, your customer base and their knowledge of you.

...

Upstream competitive advantage tends to be located inside the firm. In trying to seize upstream competitive advantage, companies scramble to lock up sources of supply (e.g., exploration rights for oil companies) or achieve efficiencies in production or logistics (e.g., install radio frequency identification systems), build large-scale production infrastructure, develop and patent proprietary technology, hone R&D capabilities, assemble high-performance teams, build lean and efficient organizational structures, and develop a unique culture. Common to all of these endeavors is the idea of building unique assets or capabilities, then constructing a wall around them. The purpose of the wall is to foster and maintain the advantage—to prevent the source of competitive advantage from leaking out to competitors and the rest of the world.

...

Yet, over time, those walls and protection mechanisms can have a pernicious effect: they can keep the external world out. In the extreme, companies become obsessed with what is inside their walls and remain oblivious to the outside world of customers, complementors, channel members, and competitors. In one possible evolutionary trajectory for such companies, their interactions with markets and, in particular, customers can become circumscribed, highly scripted, stultified, and limited to transactions where product is transferred in exchange for money. The companies' ability to listen to the market and respond to its changing needs withers because they are focused on protecting their internal sources of competitive advantage. They obsess about producing more because each unit brings in more revenue and a good margin. This increased revenue allows them to invest in a larger factory or more of any other internal advantage they believe makes them successful. These investments raise their upstream fixed costs, so they now need to sell more. Volume becomes the primary imperative. The upstream focus becomes self-reinforcing. [Moi ici: E os encalhados da tríade não conseguem fugir deste atractor] The market may even buy more for a while. But in their internal focus, upstream players eventually neglect to ask why the customer is buying their product and, in particular, why the customer is buying from them rather than from their competitors. At the logical conclusion of this trajectory, they find themselves enclosed inside the walls they erected." [Moi ici: Outra metáfora interessante...]

Trechos retirados de "Tilt - Shifting your strategy from products to customers" de Niraj Dawar.

Valor, sempre o valor

Sou um grande admirador de Ronald Baker, aprendi muito com:

• Implementing Value Pricing: A Radical Business Model for Professional Firms
• Pricing on Purpose: Creating and Capturing Value

No LinkedIn encontrei esta deliciosa história sobre a aprendizagem que o seu pai, barbeiro de profissão, fez à custa da crise gerada pelos Beatles, em "Those Damn Beatles":

"Yet my father was conducting a radical experiment in his shop. He partitioned off a chair in the back and started booking hairstyles in the evenings, by appointment only, [Moi ici: O mundo mudou! E ele, em vez de apostar no aumento da eficiência, em vez de se concentrar na aproximação a uma "vending machine", resolveu fazer uma experiência concentrada na mudança que estava a ocorrer numa faixa importante de potenciais clientes]
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After a few months, my father was astonished to learn that approximately 80 percent of his revenue came from these new hairstyles, and that he was making more in four hours than his fellow barbers were making in eight. [Moi ici: Em vez de correr mais depressa, em vez de reduzir custos unitários, apostar no que é que os clientes procuram e valorizam. E, o que eles procuram e valorizam pode não ser a funcionalidade da oferta. Quem procura a funcionalidade, procura o preço mais baixo. Quem, para lá da funcionalidade, procura algo intangível, algo místico ... o preço é secundário, ponto. Imagine a diferença de produtividade, imaginem o aumento da produtividade, imaginem o melão dos eficientistas puros e duros] He decided he needed to pursue this full- time, so he closed up his traditional barbershop, moved across town, and opened the Hairistocrat.
...
Rigidity is what organizations manifest when they are faced with either superior competition or outdated business models. They blindly cling to “that is the way we have always done it” [Moi ici: Algo fomentado por muitos apoios, subsídios e empréstimos, no tempo em que o dinheiro era barato] in defiance of the evidence that this way is no longer relevant to success.
...
What matters is how we react—either we embrace the possibilities or slide into irrelevancy. How will you embrace the changes happening in your industry or profession?"

Acerca dos fabulosos programas de inovação

A propósito de mais esta história "CHICORAÇÃO (PT2)":

"Quando lá fomos, tinham acabado de comprar a maquinaria de uma antiga fiação e vários teares que estavam destinados à sucata. Tudo estava a ser reparado, afinado e lentamente reactivado.
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Por isso, se estão a ser enviadas para a sucata em nome de fabulosos programas de inovação, o que está a ir para a sucata é a possibilidade de reiniciar um tipo de produção de média-escala que costuma ser o habitat perfeito de pequenas empresas focadas na qualidade e na diferenciação do produto."

Recordo logo Loulé... em Novembro de 2007 e "Agora vou especular".
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Curioso, relacionar o nome de "Chicoração" com o que escrevi em 2007:

"Os gestores profissionais só vêem rácios financeiros e oportunidades para reduzir custos. Quantos têm um caso de amor com os produtos das fábricas que gerem?
Quando se tem amor reconhece-se o valor. Quando se reconhece o valor, conhecem-se outras alavancas, além dos custos."

Entretanto, o número de artesãos de cerveja em Portugal... disparou.

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Recordo também uma fábrica de lixas e outros abrasivos que existia junto à estação de caminho de ferro de Aveiro, a Lusostela. A carcaça já foi demolida, contudo, anos antes, as máquinas tinham sido adquiridas por uma empresa de sucesso do sector. Espero que eles as tenham aproveitado para fazer o pwp de Skinner e, assim, conjugar volume com diferenciação.
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Pena que os assustados membros da tríade, com a sua aura de conhecimento, com o seu poder informal de influência, com a sua visão enformada no século XX, assustem empresários que subestimam o seu valor e o seu conhecimento, cortando-lhes uma possibilidade de futuro que não passe por mais um fabuloso programa de inovação, para o qual não têm dinheiro, nem conhecimento técnico, nem conhecimento de mercado.
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Isto tem tudo a ver com a minha leitura em curso "Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers" de Niraj Dawar.

"Yet in most organizations, strategic decisions are still prisoner to the imperative to spread upstream costs over ever larger product volumes"

Voltando novamente a "Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers", de Niraj Dawar, encontramos um trecho muito interessante para gerar uma reflexão sobre a intangibilidade da oferta.
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Um consumidor pode aproveitar uma promoção da distribuição grande e comprar um pack de 24 latas de Coca-Cola ao preço unitário de $0.25 e ficar todo contente.
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No dia seguinte, numa tarde de calor, o mesmo consumidor pode aceitar pagar $2 por uma lata de Coca-Cola bem fresca.

"This customer willingly concedes a large price premium, traceable not to a better cola, but to a better way of buying and consuming the cola. Think of what the customer is paying for: he or she does not have to remember to buy the twenty-four-pack in advance, break out one can, find a place to store the rest, lug the can around, and find a way to keep it chilled all the way to the point of thirst in the park. The premium the customer is willing to pay reflects value created and captured by delivering the product for specific consumption circumstances and tailoring the offering to those circumstances. The value the consumer pays for includes what the consumer buys (the can of Coca-Cola), but it also includes how the consumer buys and consumes (the can is sold chilled, in a single serve, at the point of thirst). 

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VALUE = WHAT + HOW
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Since the can of Coca-Cola can be purchased at the warehouse store for $0.25 or in the park for $2, the 700 percent price premium in the park reflects the value that resides in the how. This incremental value is created in the downstream activities of the firm—in its interactions with the marketplace. In this instance, the 700 percent is such a significant increase that, in comparison, upstream exercises to reduce the materials, manufacturing, or inventory costs of each can of cola cannot produce anything comparable. [Moi ici: Estão a ver onde é que a tríade pensa e sabe actuar e, onde este blogue recomenda actuar? Estão a ver porque é que o calçado português aumenta os preços ano após ano?] The sort of supply-chain efficiency that made Walmart so dominant, in contrast, provides between 2 and 5 percent in cost savings. That kind of savings is, of course, extremely valuable when you are playing on an intensely competitive playing field where every penny matters and can add up to significant amounts when you have the scale of a Walmart. But the point of building a competitive advantage in the downstream is to escape that intensity of competition altogether and to think in terms other than production scale. 

...

Yet in most organizations, strategic decisions are still prisoner to the imperative to spread upstream costs over ever larger product volumes. They force businesses to seek profitability in thin margins from large scale. The question "How much more of this stuff can we sell?" limits us to what we sell. And it neglects the substantial sources of customer value in the downstream—in the how. The question may be obsolete, but it still weighs on strategy and practice in many businesses in many industries today."

If our fixed costs reside in the downstream...

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."