A sua empresa, consegue ser clara?

Na linha de "Sobre a paranóia da eficiência e do eficientismo" e de "Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte IV)" este texto "Any Value Proposition Hinges on the Answer to One Question":

"the key issue is always: what is the center-of-gravity in our approach? Do we ultimately compete on the basis of our cost structure or another basis that increases our target customer’s willingness-to-pay? In other words, will we sell it for more or make it for less — and allocate sales resources accordingly?
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Sell it for more. Here, your product or service provides better performance on attributes that are important to target customers and for which they are willing to pay a premium.
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Make it for less. Here, your cost structure allows you to sell and make money at prices that competitors cannot. Realities in many industries typically allow only a few firms to compete successfully in this manner. Once they do, moreover, their scale advantages make it difficult for others to duplicate.
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You must be clear with your people about where your business falls along this spectrum.
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If you’re not clear about this, your sales efforts will run into problems. Externally, there will always be someone out there who can beat you on cost and price, or someone else who tailors its operations and sales efforts to the performance and buying criteria of a segment better than you can. Depending upon your value proposition, sales will face different buyers and selling tasks and require different support processes to deliver value.
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Strategy requires choice, clear communication, and coherent performance management practices, not just stirring metaphors, with the people who deal with customers. A moment of truth is the customer value proposition. Clarity about that will help your salespeople (and everyone else) focus more efficiently, qualify customers more effectively, and allow your firm to allocate resources more profitably."

Um dos grandes problemas passa por isto "Subtrair é tão difícil". É difícil deixar alguma possibilidade de fora, quer-se ir a todas.

Ou seja, trabalhar para os "underserved"

Desta vez não posso concordar com Don Peppers, em "The Ideal Customer Experience is No Experience".

Julgo que Peppers está concentrado nos produtos que adquirimos unicamente pela funcionalidade.
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Nesse extremo, um qualquer tipo de "vending machine" é suficiente e mais, seguindo o racional de Peppers as "vending machine" até já nos deviam conhecer, ao chegarmos ao pé delas. Por isso, refere toda uma série de estudos em que clientes muito satisfeitos não são leais. Contudo, isso não é novidade, basta recordarmos:

Os clientes "overserved" não querem mais atributos, até já acham que estão a pagar de mais por atributos que não usam ou não valorizam. Daí que o ponto de Peppers seja:

"So when you start journey-mapping your customers, or trying to design a better customer experience for them, before coming up with ways to "surprise and delight" the customer or "wow" them or whatever, be sure to eliminate as much friction as possible, to make the experience easy, simple, and totally effortless."

No entanto, o nosso conselho para as PME passa por considerarem a oportunidade para trabalharem cada vez mais com o outro extremo, aquele onde a interacção é maximizada para permitir a co-criação. Ou seja, trabalhar para os "underserved".

Acerca da experiência do cliente

"One of the first and most difficult problems any company confronts when it tries to improve its customer experience is reconciling the time and expense required to deliver a better experience with the actual economic benefits of that improved experience.
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Because none of them had tried to quantify the actual economic value of a better experience, their efforts always took a back seat to the "hard" financial metrics that ruled these companies' managements—quarterly sales, costs, revenue, and profit.
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No matter what your business is, you won't make much progress toward delivering a better customer experience until you deal with this problem. The most straightforward way to do it, in my view, is to spend time and effort getting comfortable with and documenting the fact that the customer base itself is a valuable financial asset, and that good service will increase its value, while bad service will diminish it.
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But long-term value is created when a customer has a good experience, and then becomes more likely to buy in the future, or to recommend the company to friends or colleagues.
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And the customer's intention for the future is driven by the customer's experience today."

Trechos retirados de "What Is the Economic Value of a Better Customer Experience?"

Escapar ao passado

Este exemplo é tão aplicável a certas empresas (não posso dizer que seja aplicável ao Estado senão o Mário Cortes corta-me o acesso à internet):

"Such is the power of convention, and this power is especially strong when it comes to running a business. We develop our habits, our work patterns, our routines, and we adapt these habits and routines to an ever-changing competitive and technological environment. Over time, we go to greater and greater lengths to preserve our traditional routines, until pretty soon we’re crossing an entire ocean just to be able to do things the way we’ve always done them. And what’s more, we don't even notice that the environment has changed radically.
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The problem is that the more we simply make minimal accommodations to deal with a radically changed environment (even if the change was gradual), the more fragile we become -- and this is just as true for businesses as it is for reptiles.
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Businesses fall into the same trap, all the time. They stretch and stretch and stretch to accommodate a changed environment until they are too fragile, with no fall-back position, no redundant capacity. They become fragile, so they are catastrophically vulnerable to the first disruptive innovation, or the first unanticipated regulatory change.
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If you don't want your own business to be fragile, then think about what you would do if you were to build your company today starting from scratch, for today's environment. Would you build it differently?
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If businesses were designed for today's new environment, rather than yesterday's,"

 Excelente convite de Don Peppers à reflexão em "Biggest Business Challenge: Escaping the Past"

Proximidade (parte III)

A evolução descrita na parte II tem um lado muito positivo; a subida na escala de valor.
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A subida na escala de valor traduz-se na venda do produto a um preço unitário cada vez maior. Como o preço não pode ser imposto, a sua subida é a contrapartida para um aumento da percepção de valor potencial por parte dos clientes e consumidores.
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A mesma lógica por detrás deste discurso "CEO da McLaren explica porque é que só constrói carros desportivos".
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BTW, a lógica seguida pela Lamborghini parece ser a contrária, ao decidir avançar para a produção de um SUV. Ou seja, diluição da marca.

Recordar:

• "Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte V)"
• "Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte IV)"

Acerca dos clientes-alvo

"Have you segmented your customers by their individual needs – that is, by preferences, or life stage, or psychographics, or some other proxy for customer motivation (and not just by customer spending level or volume)?
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Does each of your needs-based customer segments have a “protagonist” within the marketing organization – someone responsible for watching out for that particular type of customer’s interests?
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Have you launched any new products or services specifically designed to appeal more to one or more of these needs-based segments?"

Trecho retirado de "How "Customer Healthy" Are You? 4 Questions"

Acerca da diversidade de escolha

Dois artigos, lidos no mesmo dia e com conclusões opostas:

• "Variety, Not Quantity, Drives Car Sales"

"In their analysis, the authors found that an increase in a dealer’s inventory of a specific model actually lowered overall sales. But there’s a twist. If the boost in inventory also expanded the number of models available—in other words, if the dealership added a new type of Cadillac, not just more of the same model it already carried—then sales did increase.
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Expanded variety—from engine sizes to the number of doors—enables dealers to appeal to a wider set of consumer preferences, the authors write. "

• "Increase Sales by NOT Giving Customers Choices"

"As contrary as it might seem, you are not doing your customer any favor by offering thousands of choices, or even dozens. The act of choosing is an imposition. Fundamentally, you are asking your customers to do your work for you. Yes, the customer will want something just right, and yes, every customer may want something different. But the choosing of it is still an onerous activity."

Será que ambas as abordagens fazem sentido, cada uma na sua categoria, em função da importância da compra na vida dos clientes?

Treating different customers differently

Trecho retirado de "The One to One Manager : Real-world Lessons in Customer Relationship Management" de Don Peppers e Martha Rogers.

"Treating different customers differently is an old concept, dating back to the very beginnings of trade and commerce. We began to lose sight of this concept amid the excesses of the Industrial Revolution and the decades of global turmoil that followed. The astonishing success of mass production as a means for adequately feeding, clothing and equipping unprecedented numbers of people pushed the concept even further into the background. Now, ... is returning the focus of business to the individual relationships between buyers and sellers."

BTW, isto deve violar umas quantas leis de Bruxelas, e mesmo americanas.

you will need to concentrate on building unique relationships with individual customers

"Assembly-line technology made mass production possible, but it was the emergence of mass media that virtually mandated the development of mass marketing. Similarly, the emergence of 1:1 media will produce a totally new kind of business competition - 1:1 marketing. In the 1:1 future, you will find yourself competing for business one customer at a time.
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The mass marketer visualizes his task in terms of selling a single product to as many consumers as possible.
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The marketer's task has always been to make the product unique in a way that would appeal to the largest possible number of consumers, and then to publicize that uniqueness with one-way mass-media messages that are interesting, informative, and persuasive to the "audience" for the product.
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As a 1:1 marketer, however, you will not be trying to sell a single product to as many customers as possible. Instead, you'll be trying to sell a single customer as many products as possible - over a long period of time, and across different product lines.
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To do this, you will need to concentrate on building unique relationships with individual customers, on a 1:1 basis. Some relationships will be more valuable than others. Your best relationships, and your most profitable business, will define your best customers."

Como não pensar na "miudagem".
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 Trecho retirado de "The One to One Future" de Don Peppers and Martha Rogers

"share of customer, measured one customer at a time"

Trecho retirado de "The One to One Manager : Real-world Lessons in Customer Relationship Management" de Don Peppers e Martha Rogers

"The idea appears in many guises, but it is a singular idea nonetheless, based on developing and managing individual relationships with individual customers.
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A relationship, of course, is made up of a continuing series of collaborative interactions. Because it goes on through time, a relationship develops a "context," as both parties to it the company and the customer participate in successive interactions. And each relationship is different, inherently unique to its individual participants.
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And mass customization technology permits a firm to configure its offering digitally, in effect mass-producing a product in lot sizes of one.
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So, rather than sampling a "market" of potential customers to determine what the average customer in the market needs, the 1to1 marketer focuses on one customer at a time. Using these three types of computer technologythe database, interactivity and mass customizationthe marketer can set up a relationship that goes like this: "I know you, you're in my database. You tell me what you want, and then I'll make it for you that way." This interaction is then likely to become part of an ongoing series of linked interactions, together building a richer context for the relationship over time.
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The contrast between 1to1 marketing and traditional marketing is interesting. While the key metric of success for a traditional marketer is market share, measured one product category at a time, the success metric for a 1to1 marketer is share of customer, measured one customer at a time. A traditional marketer tries to find more customers for her products, but a 1to1 marketer tries to find more products and services for her customers. A traditional marketing company manages products, holding its executives accountable for quarterly sales of these products, while a 1to1 marketer manages customers, holding its executives accountable for growing the expected values of these customers, over time."

Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte V)

A propósito deste texto "Do Things That Don't Scale" lembrei-me logo de Christensen e de Don Peppers.
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Quem pensa em ter sucesso "doing things that scale" pensa em crescimento do volume, pensa em ganhar escala, pensar em drequência de produção, pensa em eficiência.
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Daí Christensen, como sublinhei em "Sobre a paranóia da eficiência e do eficientismo". E, sobretudo, daí Don Peppers em "Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte IV)":

"Quando se compete pelo preço e se elege a redução de custos como o vector fundamental para o negócio, procura-se quantidade, volume, market share para maximizar o retorno do agregado daquele SKU. Quando se sobe na escala de valor e se trabalha do cliente para trás, para a oferta, para o produto, aposta-se no aumento do valor percepcionado pelo cliente, por cada cliente. Assim, aposta-se na maximização do valor criado com cada unidade de SKU e não pelo seu agregado. O negócio não é quantidade, não é market share!"

Ou, melhor ainda, e ainda com Don Peppers num texto que descobri muito recentemente e sublinhei em "Isto é tão bom" (Não consigo destacar nada em particular, é tudo tão bom!!!)
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Em vez de escalar, concentrar a atenção em cada cliente, como se não houvesse mais nenhum no mundo. O texto é sobre as startups mas startups são o ADN primordial de futuras empresas:

"The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time.
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And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos of their first hosts' apartments. They were just trying to survive. But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big market.
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Another reason founders don't focus enough on individual customers is that they worry it won't scale. But when founders of larval startups worry about this, I point out that in their current state they have nothing to lose. Maybe if they go out of their way to make existing users super happy, they'll one day have too many to do so much for. That would be a great problem to have. See if you can make it happen. And incidentally, when it does, you'll find that delighting customers scales better than you expected. Partly because you can usually find ways to make anything scale more than you would have predicted, and partly because delighting customers will by then have permeated your culture.
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What founders have a hard time grasping (and Steve himself might have had a hard time grasping) is what insanely great morphs into as you roll the time slider back to the first couple months of a startup's life. It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. The product is just one component of that. For a big company it's necessarily the dominant one. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
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Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs.
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Like paying excessive attention to early customers, fabricating things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups. You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you learn things you'd never have known otherwise. Eric Migicovsky of Pebble said one of things he learned was "how valuable it was to source good screws." Who knew?
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The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going."

Parte I, parte II e parte III e parte IV. 

A curva de Stobachoff

Para recordar a curva de Stobachoff, para recordar o custo de perder um cliente, para recordar o custo de conquistar um cliente, esta interessante reflexão de Don Peppers "Are Your Biggest Customers Your Biggest Losers?"

Isto é tão bom!!!

"In 1993, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote “The One To One Future,” a revolutionary book about the idea of one-to-one marketing and its impact on the future of marketing.
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If you haven’t gotten a chance to read this book, here are a few notable quotes:
“A mass marketer tries to differentiate their products, while a 1:1 marketer seeks to differentiate their customers” (Moi ici: Profundo!!! Começar pelos clientes-alvo e apostar tudo na diferenciação via interacção, via co-design, via-co-produção, via co-criação, via co-... é o regresso em força do alfaiate e da modista (e aqui também))
“It is information about individual consumers that will keep a marketer functioning in the 1:1 future. (Moi ici: Clientes individuais... olhar na menina dos olhos, ter dupla precaução relativamente às estatísticas e seus fantasmas) Without individual information, as opposed to market or segment information, 1:1 marketing would not be possible.
Peppers and Rogers wrote about the need to track people, and talk to people on a 1:1 basis before the technology ever existed. Despite what some people might claim, marketing automation didn’t exist until 1999. Keep in mind, this quote from Peppers and Rogers was published in 1993:
“When individual consumer information is added to the equation as an asset, the competitive battleground shifts. Using individualized information, you can achieve economies of scope, which can make your competitors’ economies of scale relatively less decisive."" (Moi ici: Mais uma vez - PROFUNDO!!!! e tão, tão actual)

Trechos retirados de "Best B2B Marketing Ideas from 1993"

Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido (parte IV)

Parte I, parte II e parte III.
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Don Peppers brinda-nos com mais um interessante artigo "Explaining Customer Centricity With a Diagram" que julgo que também se enquadra na série "Aumentar o "producer surplus", o caminho menos percorrido" e até com "Uma comichão mental..."
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A certa altura Don escreve:

"the financial objective for a product-centric competitor is to maximize the value created by each product, while the financial objective for a customer-centric competitor is to maximize the value created by each customer."

A linguagem, julgo, IMHO, não é a melhor, aquele "each product" não se aplica ao valor unitário de um produto, aplica-se à quantidade total que é possível obter com a venda da soma de todas as unidades de uma referência (SKU). Quando se compete pelo preço e se elege a redução de custos como o vector fundamental para o negócio, procura-se quantidade, volume, market share para maximizar o retorno do agregado daquele SKU. Quando se sobe na escala de valor e se trabalha do cliente para trás, para a oferta, para o produto, aposta-se no aumento do valor percepcionado pelo cliente, por cada cliente. Assim, aposta-se na maximização do valor criado com cada unidade de SKU e não pelo seu agregado. O negócio não é quantidade, não é market share!
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Voltando ao artigo:

"A product-centric competitor focuses on one product at a time and tries to sell that product to as many customers as possible.
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A customer-centric competitor focuses on one customer at a time and tries to sell that customer as many products as possible."

Numa empresa "product-centric" a lógica é: temos este produto, a quem o podemos vender?
Numa empresa "customer-centric" a lógica passa por estudar a vida do cliente e ir desenvolvendo a relação, para ir criando uma sucessão de ofertas relacionadas com ele, com a sua vida, com as experiências que procura e valoriza.