Privilegiar os inputs sobre os outputs (parte VII)

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

"Customers in B2B markets are becoming increasingly sophisticated about purchasing. Recognizing that most products and services they buy are not strategic to their businesses, they begin by simply seeking suppliers that will meet their basic specifications at a competitive price. Then, after they’ve winnowed down the contenders, they often ask the finalists to offer “something more.”
.
Many suppliers misunderstand this request. They’ll respond with the well-worn tactic of stressing features their offerings have but competitors’ lack, and when that doesn’t work, they propose price concessions. But it turns out that customers are looking for neither of those things.
.
During a three-year research project, we discovered that when purchasing managers ask for something more, they are actually looking for what we call the justifier: an element of an offering that would make a noteworthy difference to their company’s business. A justifier’s value to the customer is self-evident and provides a clear-cut reason for selecting one supplier over others, effectively breaking the tie among the final contenders.[Moi ici: O artigo está cheio de bons exemplos, em vários sectores, destes "justifiers"]
...
The justifier, or tiebreaker, helps the purchasing manager demonstrate to senior leadership that he or she is making a contribution to the business. [Moi ici: Outra vez um exemplo de deixar de pensar nos outputs para concentrar a atenção nos inputs. Basta pensar no que vem a seguir] That is no small thing. People responsible for nonstrategic purchases have difficult, often thankless, jobs. They’re under pressure to complete these transactions as quickly and efficiently as possible. Whenever anything goes wrong with what they’ve bought, they get blamed. But their diligence and understanding of the business typically get little recognition.
...
Tiebreaking sellers coach their salespeople to explore this topic with customers and engage them in a conversation about their concerns.
...
With value selling, suppliers build a case to prove that their offerings provide greater worth to customers than competitors’ do. But when purchases aren’t strategic, that approach is ineffective, and suppliers need something extra whose value is self-evident to win the sale.

...
The top yearly goals of a customer’s senior management can be a great source of ideas for justifiers. By visiting a customer’s website or perusing its annual report, a supplier can learn about initiatives aimed at improving safety in specific areas, reducing waste, and the like. Yet purchasing managers told us that salespeople rarely conduct such rudimentary background research or put in the time to learn about their customers’ objectives.
...
we discovered demonstrate that with enough determination, even a supplier of a nonstrategic offering can persuade its customers’ purchasing managers and leadership that it is something special."

Trechos retirados de "Tiebreaker Selling"

O papel da arte!

Sábado, ao ouvir o deputado Pedro Duarte a pedir mais uma revolução no Ensino, desta feita para apostar e quatro vectores: ciência; engenharia; tecnologia e economia, escrevi no Twitter:

de q interessa a tecnologia, a engenharia, a economia e a ciência, sem a arte?

— Carlos P da Cruz (@ccz1) April 2, 2016

É preciso não conhecer a biografia de Jobs, ou os textos de Hilary Austen, ou o futuro de Mongo para esquecer o papel da arte.
.
Sem arte como é que a Bang & Olufsen teria o sucesso que teve?
.
Sem arte como haveria concorrência imperfeita?
.
Esquecer a arte é continuar a pensar que o valor resulta de um cálculo e não de um sentimento. Por tudo isto, recomendo a leitura deste texto "Hedi Slimane: The Steve Jobs of Fashion":

"Like many industries, Big Fashion companies keep acquiring tiny, money-losing, buzz-worthy brands… that never quite go mainstream. They die silently and perhaps mercifully. But the real question is: why is this a pattern, when it’s both predictable and pointless? Because the fashion industry is making stuff for critics. Like many industries, from tech to media to sports, it’s trying to please them, win them over, even pander to them. But the critics aren’t the people who are buying the stuff. Result: shapeless, gigantic, genderless clothes that critics love… but that are driving the business of fashion to stagnation. They’re out of touch with what people actually want, love, hunger for.
...
He also, importantly, made clothes people actually wanted to wear, and that looked better up-close in stores than they did on the runway. The fashion world was shocked.
...
But collection by collection, he built a devoted cult of fans precisely because he was ahead of even the critics. The self-referential game of pleasing critics might feel good — but it doesn’t necessarily build a business.
.
To do that, you have to make products people truly desire. It’s a dirty word in boardrooms, desire. We’re more comfortable with calculative, rational expressions of wants. We can put them in spreadsheets and crunch and process those. There’s just one tiny problem. So can consumers. You don’t pay royally for stuff that you’re running a calculation in the back of your mind about. You pay royally for stuff that enchants, hypnotizes, and entrances you. Stuff you love. Stuff that we love — whether that “stuff” is people or clothes or phones, to be crude — suspends the rational bits of us. It intoxicates us and leaves us giddy. We say to ourselves, “Of course it’s too expensive… but I don’t care. I have to have it.” [Moi ici: Excelente!!! Isto é Mongo! Isto é a concorrência imperfeita! Isto é arte!]
...
At the core of this financial success is real artistry.
...
Clusters like Brooklyn and Detroit are putting artistry and craft back into products from chocolate to coffee to furniture today. But the harsh truth is that Big Corporations see artisanship as marketing. They try to brand it, tricking people into thinking there’s artistry in things – Tesco’s “fictional farms” marketing ploy is a recent example — not really practicing itor investing in it. They should take a lesson from Slimane and actually do it.[Moi ici: A importância da autenticidade]
...
That’s how you get out of the trap of simply riding trends and cashing in on them: ignoring critics, breaking rules, making things people truly desire, and making them with real artistry. It takes a rare combination of personal genius and organizational risk – which is perhaps why we don’t see that many Slimanes out there. Still, we can always hope for more."

Saltar do disco do HOW, HOW, HOW, HOW.

A revista Business Strategy Review publicou em 1999 um artigo Constantinos Markides intitulado "Six Principles of Breakthrough Strategy".

.

O artigo é muito interessante. Destaco, numa primeira parte:

.

"In every industry, there are several viable positions that companies can occupy. The essence of strategy is, therefore, to choose the one position that our company will claim as its own. A strategic position is simply the" sum of the answers that a company gives to the questions:

• WHO should I target as customers?
• WHAT products or services should I offer them?
• HOW should I do this in an efficient way?

Strategy is about making tough choices on these three dimensions: the customers we will focus on and those we will consciously not target; the products we will offer and the ones we will not offer; the activities we will perform and the ones we will not perform." (Moi ici: escolher o que fazer e o que não fazer. Matar filhos, produtos ou serviços tornados obsoletos, é quase blasfémia. Como desenhou Seth Godin, o attachement cega).

.

"Strategy is all about choosing and a company will be successful only if it chooses a distinctive (ie different from competitors') strategic position. Sure, it may be impossible to come up with answers which are 100% different from the answers of our competitors but the ambition should be to create as much differentiation as possible whilst satisfyng your chosen customers' needs.

.

The "WHO-WHAT-HOW" decisions set the parameters within which the company will operate. At the same time, they also define the terrain for which the company will not fight: the customers it will not pursue, the investments it will not make, the competitors it will not respond to. As a result, these decisions are painful to make and are often preceded by internal arguments, disagreements and politicking. But unless a decision is taken, the company will find itself spreading its resources too widely with no clear focus or direction." (Moi ici: De acordo com tudo isto, só acrescentaria outra questão, anterior às outras: Qual é o nosso negócio? Ou, seja, ter em conta a primeira lei que Tony Hsieh aprendeu com o poker "Table selection is the most important decision you can make. It’s okay to switch tables if you discover it’s too hard to win at your table. If there are too many competitors (some irrational or inexperienced), even if you’re the best it’s a lot harder to win.")

.

"Most managers have a strong bias towards the "HOW" question (Moi ici: Atenção a este ponto muito importante). Either because they do not think the "WHO" and the "WHAT" choices are real strategic choices or because they think that, once decided, these choices should never be revisited, most managers spend little time on the "WHO" or "WHAT" questions (Moi ici: como refere David Birnbaum "We in the garment industry — both the factory suppliers and the importer/retailer buyers — none of us like strategies. We are very good at tactics. We are masters at dealing with crisis. But long-term strategies are simply not our thing.").

.

BUT EXPERIENCE SHOWS THAT MOST BREAKTHROUGHS IN STRATEGY OCCUR NOT SO MUCH WHEN THE "HOW" IS QUESTIONED BUT WHEN THE "WHO-WHAT" CHOICES ARE CHALLENGED.

...

Usually, strategic innovation takes place when companies question and chalenge the answers they gave, often a long time ago in their history, to the "WHO-WHAT" questions."

.

Saltar do disco do HOW, HOW, HOW, HOW... para o pôr o jogo em causa e virar a mesa é tão difícil.

.

Cada vez percebo melhor este título e a ideia subjacente ao livro "Hero with a Thousand Faces" de Joseph Campbell... calçado, têxtil, mobiliário, maquinaria, medicamentos,... à primeira vista parecem histórias diferentes, heróis diferentes, mas depois de alguma análise, começamos a perceber que há um arquétipo por trás disto tudo. Steven Blank tem razão!!!

E os governos que vivem da impostagem pornográfica do consumo

Este artigo "Portugueses criam plataforma para gerir 'carsharing' em rede" é um exemplo nacional dos modelos de negócio que fervilham em torno do aluguer e da partilha.
.
Entretanto em "How Next-Gen Car Sharing Will Transform Transportation" um fundador da Zipcar fala sobre o lançamento de um novo conceito, em fase de testes em França, a partilha de carros (Buzzcar): partilhar e alugar o carro não de uma empresa mas de um particular, de um vizinho, por exemplo.

"It’s a variation on the Zipcar theme, called Buzzcar. Buzzcar is another car-sharing business. But this time, instead of sharing cars from a company-owned fleet, people share their neighbors’ cars. The company calls this peer-to-peer car rental, and has taglines that include “Borrow the car next door” and “fewer cars, more options & the money stays in the ‘hood.”
...
Car sharing is a win/win/win/win situation. There’s no stakeholder for whom it’s not a better situation, except for perhaps car manufacturers and car rental companies.(Moi ici: E os governos que vivem da impostagem pornográfica do consumo)
...
Zipcar had 10,000 cars and probably 730,000 members last year, so that would have meant about 150,000 cars not bought or avoided being purchased. And that — I checked with someone from GM — is half a percent of the cars sold in the US that year. That’s a significant percentage. (Moi ici: E isto é só o começo... qual o impacte disto na interpretação das estatísticas clássicas?)
...
The bottom line is that paying in real-time really, really transforms how you do things. When I have to pay by the hour and by the day, I choose to drive about 80% less — fewer vehicle miles traveled. And this transformation is very natural and effortless. When it is your car sitting downstairs, all the sunk costs are behind you, and you’re only thinking that it’s the variable cost of gas in the car. Now, it is a rental car, and you think carefully about the value of the trip."

Como não reagir a uma disrupção

Outra interessante reflexão de Maxwell Wessel em "Best Buy Can't Match Amazon's Prices, and Shouldn't Try"
.
Um incumbente do retalho físico (Best Buy) a ser massacrado por vários agentes com um novo modelo de negócio (venda online) e, como não deve reagir.
.
Ainda este fim de semana um familiar me contava o que se está a passar na Alemanha  com a falência sucessiva de várias cadeias (ex-poderosas) de lojas.
.
No caso da Best Buy:

"So, naturally, watching their profit margin drop precipitously as customers flock to these other retail centers, Best Buy is trying to figure out a way to compete. It's too bad they're doing so by fighting their biggest disruptor head-on: by offering to match Amazon's price on everything."

É sempre a mesma reacção... o incumbente, perante o sucesso do disruptor, tenta salvar os clientes "overserved" baixando os preço... como se tivesse estrutura de custos, como se tivesse modelo de negócio capaz de competir com os disruptores. Simples, rápido e... errado!!!

"To survive disruption, managers of legacy businesses need to change the game. Best Buy needs to take stock of its unique advantages and compete for the customers that disruptive entrants are currently poorly positioned to win."

Pragmaticamente há que reconhecer que não se pode defender um passado que já não volta e há que apostar na criação de um futuro diferente fazendo batota.

"To survive their disruption, Best Buy should be looking for opportunities to optimize their business model around the jobs that Amazon can't do for customers."

É o mesmo filme que vimos nos jornais, perante a força disruptora, em vez de procurarem como podiam fazer a diferença, cortaram nos custos e quase acabaram com o que os diferenciava, usando todos os mesmos títulos e os mesmos textos das mesmas fontes.

"The way to solve the problem is to create a new disruptive business unit that’s got to work out how to become profitable by itself.
I wonder out loud whether this is a big part of the reason why so many news organizations are having this difficulty, because the way they see it is, “Okay, we’re going to keep cutting various bits and pieces until we manage to get our organization to a cost structure where we can compete in this new world.”
.
Although it’s a subtle difference, it actually becomes really important to think about it in the reverse way. It’s like, “Okay, guys. If we were going to start a new organization in this new world completely from scratch — who would we take with us?”
.
The difference being: Don’t assume your starting point is the existing organization, and you try and cut, cut, cut, cut, cut until you make it down to a new organization. You think about it from a completely clean slate, and you say, “Okay, what do we need to add to create something that’s going to be able to compete with the Huffington Post?” That difference in perspective is critical in responding to disruptive threats."

Trecho final retirado de "Clay Christensen on the news industry: “We didn’t quite understand…how quickly things fall off the cliff”"

• "Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism"
• "The path of disruption: Did Newspaper Next succeed in transforming newspapers?"

Quando o mundo muda e o locus de controlo

Quando o mundo muda as empresas... as organizações com o locus de controlo no exterior viram-se para o papá-Estado a pedir apoios, a pedir protecção, a pedir arranjinhos, a pedir ... crony capitalism.

Quando o mundo muda as organizações com o locus de controlo no interior fazem perguntas, tomam decisões, avançam e testam:

"Anyone in retail needs to ask themselves a set of important questions that weren’t relevant post–World War II because in that era they were obvious questions. Stepping outside and reconsidering the dynamics of the retail world, these questions include:
.
Price strategy. Do you want to compete on price? If the answer is yes, then it’s going to be increasingly difficult to retail in physical stores. There’s an extra step in the supply chain, and the economics simply don’t make sense. In a market of near-perfect pricing knowledge, price-sensitive buyers gravitate to the cheapest price unless the warehouse and the store are one and the same. ... They are more a bulk warehouse pick-up system than a traditional retailer. In general, online will win the price battle because price leadership is about low-cost infrastructure, and extra links in the retail chain do not make for low cost.
.
Product range strategy. Do you want to have a large or lean product range? Clearly, online will win the large-range battle. It doesn’t have the physical constraints of shelves and the cost of big stores. Online needs fewer places for the actual goods. In this world bricks-and-mortar retail can’t win a product-range battle, it can only win a uniqueness and customised one. It’s only a matter of time before widely distributed product brand owners start competing with retailers.
.
Location strategy: What’s our physical location about? For online players it’s an easy decision: find a location that facilitates effective delivery. For stores it’s much more than that. If the store is merely about acquiring the product, then in a connected world it has no reason to exist. A physical store needs to be a place of entertainment, education, co-creation and socialisation — a maison and experience that satisfies the five senses. Stores need to be events, not re-sellers.[Moi ici: Dedicado a leitora de Aveiro]
.
Attention strategy: Will people use their feet or their fingers to find us? If it’s fingers (online), we have two simple choices: have an über niche audience that loves what we do because it’s unique, or have a kicking SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy that’s first-page worthy. Both of these realities show a clear strategy: survival in retail is about being the cheapest or the nicest. Anything in between can’t compete or will get lost in a world of infinite supply."

Imaginem o tempo perdido com o papá-Estado, que aproveita para dar o seu abraço pedófilo com a impostagem normanda como contrapartida para o suposto apoio, tempo que não pode ser dedicado a reflexão e acção interna.

Trechos retirados de "The Great Fragmentation : why the future of business is small" de Steve Sammartino

Lições a recordar por quem quer colocar um produto de elevado desempenho no mercado

Ontem, o André Cruz mandou-me este artigo "Cloud Burst".
.
O artigo é um bom exemplo, é um caso que deve ser estudado por quem pretende desenvolver um negócio assente no melhor desempenho do produto ou serviço.
.
Voltando à simplificação de Treacy e Wiersema, a proposta de valor da sua empresa assenta em qual dos vectores?

• Preço mais baixo?
• Serviço à medida?
• O melhor desempenho?

Se a proposta de valor gravita em torno do melhor desempenho...

.

Tudo começa com a definição dos clientes-alvo: Quem são os clientes-alvo? E por que existimos? Qual é a razão de ser da nossa empresa?

"The On story starts with Swiss triathlete Olivier Bernhard, a triple world champion. Bernhard was looking for a way of overcoming regular running injuries, especially to his knees, but there was nothing on the market that did what he wanted and provided enough cushioning and support."

Atletas de alta-competição com um problema por resolver, com um job-to-be-done por realizar. Um tipo de cliente muito exigente e que anda à procura de algo concreto. O extremo oposta à disrupção, em vez de clientes "overserved", clientes "underserved". Clientes "underserved" estão dispostos a pagar mais por algo que melhor a sua vida, neste caso removendo uma consequência negativa de que padecem.
.
Assim, o produto tem uma vantagem técnica que ajuda a viver a experiência de não padecer do mal, ou de o prevenir. Contudo, não é só tecnologia, o design também é considerado na equação:

"It's important that the shoe catches your eye to catch your foot,' he adds. Even such a sport-focused company as On ('the DNA is performance') can't escape fashion connotations. 'Our core will always be performance running,' says Allemann, 'but they're also sneakers and can be worn with jeans. We can't blame people who want to do that.'

Conhecendo-se bem quem são os clientes-alvo faz todo o sentido trabalhar com eles, interagir com eles, apostar na co-produção e na co-criação, a começar por um dos fundadores e:

"At the time of writing, the team was just about to leave for Hawaii for the Ironman World Championship, where Caroline Steffen, a firm favourite in these gruelling races, was running in On shoes (she came second).
...
With prototypes in hand, the nascent company set about getting their products into the hands and onto the feet of the people that mattered - professional athletes. As well as Steffen, the Kenyan marathon runner Tegla Loroupe and the French triathlete David Hauss, among many others, have put the shoes to the test and been persuaded of their speed-enhancing properties."

Estes clientes-alvo não só ajudam a desenvolver o produto como actuam como poderosos influenciadores no ecossistema da procura. Não fazem publicidade, não são actores pagos para dizer o que está escrito no guião, são pares que influenciam com o seu exemplo, porque procuram o que é melhor para o seu desempenho atlético.
.
Se o produto quer triunfar por causa do desempenho superior, convém que essa pretensão seja documentada e validada:

"luring runners with the promise - scientifically proven, thanks to a survey carried out at ETH Zurich - of improving every aspect of their running.
...
The shoe has also won several sport technology awards and recently took pride of place in the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich."

Claro que para barrar a entrada dos tubarões há que proteger a propriedade intelectual:

"On's patented CloudTec system has given it an edge over its larger competitors."

Por fim, algo cada vez mais associado aos negócios que tentam vencer pelo desempenho superior, trust Kirk, not Spock, ou seja testar, testar e testar outra vez:

"the team worked on countless prototypes and conducted real world research to perfect what Bernhard now terms 'intelligent cushioning'."

Aqui recordo, outra vez, o artigo "Not just a pretty face: economic drivers behind the arts-in-business movement" já aqui citado e também aqui referido:

"-Team New Zealand was able to test many more keels than other teams, which led to their huge win.
...
Team New Zealand reconceived the process of making a racing keel which allowed them to try many ideas cheaply and rapidly -the cheap and rapid iteration approach to production moves us from Industrial to Post-Industrial process -Pre-industrial making generated HIGH COSTS – innovation costs – the cost of having to do things differently each time, to adjust uncontrollable variations in inputs."

Por fim, o site da empresa tem um truque que apreciei bastante para ajudar os potenciais clientes a escolherem o melhor sapato para o seu caso. Qualquer corredor sabe o tempo que faz por quilometro, logo um principiante fará mais de 6 minutos e um atleta de alta competição andará em tempos inferiores a 4 minutos.
.
Por vezes, os potenciais clientes desistem de fazer compras de artigos tecnológicos porque não sabem como escolher o artigo que melhor se ajusta à sua vida, e adiam e adiam e adiam a compra.

Falhar espectacularmente bem o cumprimento das metas!

“OKRs push us far beyond our comfort zones. They lead us to achievements on the border between abilities and dreams. They unearth fresh capacity, hatch more creative solutions, revolutionize business models. For companies seeking to live long and prosper, stretching to new heights is compulsory. As Bill Campbell liked to say: If companies “don’t continue to innovate, they’re going to die—and I didn’t say iterate , I said innovate .” Conservative goal setting stymies innovation. And innovation is like oxygen: You cannot win without it
...
[T]he harder the goal the higher the level of performance. . . . Although subjects with very hard goals reached their goals far less often than subjects with very easy goals, the former consistently performed at a higher level than the latter.” The studies found that “stretched” workers were not only more productive, but more motivated and engaged: “ Setting specific challenging goals is also a means of enhancing task interest and of helping people to discover the pleasurable aspects of an activity.”

Conheço algumas empresas portuguesas assim. Quando se compara o desempenho deste ano com a meta, parece que o ano foi mau. No entanto, quando se compara o desempenho do ano com o desempenho do ano anterior constatamos que o ano foi muito positivo. Claro que tem de ser uma cultura de empresa que não cobra por não se atingirem metas exigentes.

Excerto de: Doerr, John. “Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs”.

A vantagem da co-criação

"Competition - "I win if you lose."
Cooperation - "I will agree to go along with you here, if you agree to go along with me here - which might involve some compromise on both our parts - a chipping-off sometimes."
Collaboration - "We work together in a way that includes what is important to both of us and our visions without having to compromise."
Cocreation - "We work together in a way that includes what is important to both of us without having to compromise AND what we emerge is new, unexpected and greater than the sum of our visions."
...
The boundaries between these modes, of course, are permeable with overlaps. The key is that co-creation can contain collaboration, cooperation, and even competition under its umbrella, but competition generally does not contain co-creation. By consciously choosing to expand to a co-creative framework, our playing field opens up and we are at choice when to compete, cooperate, collaborate, or co-create - instead of doing only one of the modes on autopilot.
.
Every time we expand our habitual paradigm or mental playing field, new choices, options and possibilities open up. New interpersonal dynamics are possible."

Trecho retirado de "The Fertile Unknown"

Shift happens!

No Público pode ler-se:

"Estado deve desenvolver uma acção empenhada na detecção e divulgação de mercados potencialmente interessantes e de vantagens comparativas dos recursos portugueses em relação a previsíveis concorrentes."

Lembrei-me logo do Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões.
.
Em "O regresso ao Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões":

"The takeaway is to stop thinking about whether the industry you are in is "good" or "bad" — recognizing that as the wrong question — and to focus instead on what you can do to win where you are." 

Em "Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões (parte II)":

"A filosofia por trás do caso do Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões está relacionada com a proposta de António Vitorino no Prós e Contras de ontem: o Estado é que sabe quais os sectores de futuro em que se deve apostar." 

Em "Lugar do Senhor dos Perdões (parte III)":

"The magnitude of within-sector heterogeneity implies that idiosyncratic factors dominate the determination of which plants create and destroy jobs, and which plants achieve rapid productivity growth or suffer productivity declines."

Lembrei-me logo de um vídeo que vi no sábado passado, em que Gary Hamel ao minuto 25 afirma que a melhor alternativa para os líderes é experimentarem, testarem (o nosso, fuçarem) e aprenderem com os erros, para melhorarem a abordagem seguinte:

"Organizations loose their relevance when there is more experimentation outside than inside"

E, por fim, lembrei-me logo do que comecei a ler em "Business Strategy - Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise" de  J.-C. Spender:

"Strategy’s meanings are always “situated” reflections of the knowledge absences the strategist chooses to grapple with in the pursuit of profit. “What are we going to do now?” is the key question, and time matters. In our capitalist system these choices are incredibly varied, and strategic work is a corollary of this freedom of choice.
...
So this chapter moves towards a notion of strategic work as the practice of managerial judgment, choice, and persuasion rather than observation, computation, and instruction...
Any definition that ignores the particularities and difficulties of the context in which the goal is pursued is useless “one-handed clapping.” Because particulars are crucial to the nature of strategic work, no general definition can work. Second, not every distinction helps. Sometimes market segmentation will matter, sometimes not. Likewise technological evolution will sometimes matter and sometimes not. Strategic work begins with finding the specific distinctions that are appropriate to help us wrap our arms around the particular collision of intention, context, and difficulty that is the firm.
...
Merely being in a context does not mean you need a strategy; you may have no intention of changing your situation. Intention is not simply about reaching for a goal, it is also about purposively or intendedly moving away from your current position and towards another particular situation. Thus intention and strategy are bound up with the specific changes we want to make in specific situations. The essence of the managers’ strategic work lies in the difficulties that stand in the way of satisfying their desire to make these changes. Paradoxically we have to know who we are—strategically speaking—before we can delineate the context of our goal seeking. Socrates was absolutely right on this—know thyself! Strategy is as much about choosing who we are as about choosing a goal or the context in which to pursue it. Again, strategy lies at the intersection of the actor’s chosen identity, her/his intention, and the difficulties s/he faces in a specific context."

Quem define o que é um mercado potencialmente interessante? Quem define quais são as vantagens comparativas dos recursos portugueses?
.
Vamos escolher um burocrata para tomar essas decisões?
.
Não! Que horror"
.
Vamos escolher um académico? Recordar Daniel Bessa e o calçado.
.
Vamos escolher um jornalista? Recordar André Macedo e o calçado e o têxtil.
.
Vamos escolher um empresário? Recordar Paulo Vaz da ATP e o têxtil.
.
Vamos escolher um governante? Recordar Pinho e a Qimonda.
.
Vamos escolher um político? Recordar ...
.
Todos falharam as previsões! São burros? Não! A realidade é que está em permanente dança e o que é verdade hoje amanhã é mentira. A única coisa que interessa em economia é o trecho de poesia que li em Setembro de 2004 na revista HBR:

"Life is the most resilient thing on the planet. I has survived meteor showers, seismic upheavals, and radical climate shifts. And yet it does not plan, it does not forecast, and, except when manifested in human beings, it possesses no foresight. So what is the essential thing that life teaches us about resilience?
.
Just this: Variety matters. Genetic variety, within and across species, is nature's insurance policy against the unexpected. A high degree of biological diversity ensures that no matter what particular future unfolds, there will be at least some organisms that are well-suited to the new circumstances."

Como se diz em inglês, "Shift happens!" e só a diversidade de opiniões e apostas cria a antifragilidade do todo e, mesmo as escolhas que parecem absurdas para uns, podem ser a solução para outros.
.
E volto ao texto do Público:

"Contudo, produzir e vender para o exterior em quantidades significativas, exige um forte empurrão por parte do poder político, particularmente do Ministério da Agricultura." 

Luxleaks em versão portuguesa?
E basta produzir? E conhecer os canais de distribuição? Seremos competitivos, nestas quantidades significativas, com as entregas aéreas diárias do Quénia? E o que fazer depois do final da Primavera até ao Inverno seguinte? Por que é que quem já está no terreno e com sucesso, não segue essa via?

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.
.
Um excelente livro com alguns capítulos de ouro.
.
"“… 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.
…
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.)
…
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.
…
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.
…
… 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.
…
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".)
.
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.")
…
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.
…
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.
…
We have before us a great opportunity. Supply wildly outpaces demand right now. The global economy has become unbalanced.
…
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.")
.
Continua.

"Risk is failure of a projected narrative"

A ISO 9001 aborda a abordagem baseada no risco. 

“The Oxford Dictionary defines risk as ‘the possibility that something unpleasant or unwelcome will happen’,

…

Risk in its ordinary meaning concerns unfavourable events, not beneficial ones.

.

Risk is asymmetric. We do not hear people say ‘there is a risk that I might win the lottery’ because winning the lottery is not something they would describe as a risk. They do not even say ‘there is a risk I might not win the lottery’ because they do not realistically expect to win the lottery. The everyday meaning of risk refers to an adverse event which jeopardises the realistic expectations of the individual household or institution. And so the meaning of risk is a product of the plans and expectations of that household or institution. Risk is necessarily particular. It does not mean the same thing to J. P. Morgan as it does to a paraglider or mountain climber, or to a household saving for retirement or the children’s education.

…

Very often, the risks that concern us are not risks to the status quo, but risks to our plans to change that status quo.

…

We believe the best way to understand attitudes to risk is through the concept of a reference narrative, a story which is an expression of our realistic expectations. For J. P. Morgan, the overarching reference narrative is one in which the bank continues profitable growth. A large corporation will have many strategies for achieving that overarching objective in particular areas of its business and there will be a reference narrative relating to each business unit. Some of these business unit reference narratives may be very risky, but the corporation may tolerate such risks provided they do not endanger the reference narrative of the organisation as a whole.

…

And since different people start with different reference narratives, the same risk may be assessed by different people in different ways. Risk may not be the same for those who work in an organisation as it is for the shareholders of that organisation.

…

Risk is failure of a projected narrative, derived from realistic expectations, to unfold as envisaged. The happy father anticipating his daughter’s wedding has in mind a reference narrative in which events go ahead as planned. He recognises a variety of risks – the prospective bridegroom has cold feet, a torrential downpour drenches the guests. There is an implied measure of risk in such assessment – an outcome can fall short of expectations by a narrow margin or a wide one. The scale of that risk may or may not be quantifiable, before or after the event. But this interpretation is very different to the view that has come to dominate quantitative finance and much of economics and decision theory: that risk can be equated to the volatility of outcomes.”

Trechos retirados de “Radical Uncertainty” de John Kay e Mervyn King 

A informação é preciosa

A propósito de "Chatting With the Spanish Wine Diva":
.
"What advice would you give to winemakers in lesser-known markets today?
The U.S. wine consumer is generally curious, restless and always looking for something new. High quality wines combined with clear packaging design, a flavor profile that is approachable, and a compelling story (which so many wineries have), can go a long way in helping sell wine."
.
Recordo estas palavras:
.
"Companies have traditionally been interested in how customers view them and their products. The greater share of a customer's mind that a company can win, the greater the likelihood that the customer will buy products from that company.
...
The customer usually looks for rational reasons (Moi ici: Eu escreveria, o cliente procura desculpas em vez de razões e, acrescentaria, razões racionais para ele e, eventualmente irracionais para outros) for making a purchase, and finding these reasons is only possible when the customer has enough information about the company and the relationship it is offering."
...
Não é publicidade tout court. É informação, é conhecimento, é matéria-prima para sonhar, para arquitectar experiências.
.
"Knowledge enables the customer to fully benefit from the products or services he has received. Knowledge can significantly increase the value of a relationship in cases where products are complex.
.
The problem with complex products and services is that often the customer lacks information about provider competencies. (Moi ici: Acontece tantas vezes. De que vale o supermercado ter quinoa na prateleira se os clientes não a sabem cozinhar?) The customer, in other words, has not received sufficiently clear information to benefit from the relationship and all of its potential. Companies should make information more readily available to customers about how to act as effectively as possible in a relationship and truly benefit from the company's competence."
.
Trechos retirados do livro "Customer Relationship Management" de Kaj Storbacka e Jarmo Lehtinen.

"a strategy of attracting customers"

"In other words, there is a core group of 13% who are only interested in a cheaper price – and don’t really care where they get it.
...
Walmart focused on being the top choice of the 13%.
.
Here’s the good news: this means that 87% of the marketplace remains in play for you -- even if you do not have the cheapest price.
.
Here’s the better news: you don’t have to have the cheapest price to be a distinctive market leader… and, in fact, you shouldn’t!
.
Second, however, the problem is – you may be asking the wrong question! Here’s what retailers should be asking in a hyper-competitive, globally interconnected marketplace:
.“Why would a customer choose to do business with us, as opposed to our competition?”  (… regardless of whether they are physical or online competitors!)
...
The ONLY way you are going to win the battle is if you alter your approach from a policy of capturing customers and restricting their ability to showroom to a strategy of attracting customers by being so distinctive – by digging such a deep well – they do not have a desire to stray."

Trechos retirados de "Digging Wells or Building Fences" de Scott McKain.

"The problem with priorities"

“Of course, strategy is usually about market domination, not erudition. It’s about where to play and how to win. But in an Evolutionary Organization it can be hard to tell the difference between doing something because it’s strategic and doing something because it’s the right thing to do.
...
When purpose is paramount, anything that serves the purpose is strategic, even if it’s not overtly commercial.
...
Regardless of your values, strategy is about identifying that which is critical—the factors that will make the difference—and determining how to leverage what is at your disposal to maximize your chances of success.
...
The problem with priorities is that we have too many. The word “priority” didn’t even have a plural form until the 1900s; before that it meant “the very first thing.” Unfortunately, when you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing. Just because you want absolute low cost and absolute quality doesn’t mean you can have both in equal measure. When push comes to shove, something’s gotta give. The “Agile Manifesto” used “over” statements such as “responding to change over following a plan” to make trade-offs explicit in service of better software.
...
Your purpose is clear. Your essential intent is well defined and regularly tuned. Using these beacons, people are “voting with their feet” and energizing the projects that matter most. Your even over statements are shaping a thousand smaller decisions. It’s fair to ask, Do we even need a plan? Yes, but not a plan that says what must happen, a plan that says what might happen. Scenario planning has the potential to open us up to possibilities that we might otherwise not consider."

Trechos retirados de “Brave New Work” de Aaron Dignan

Cheira a 2007...

Duas notas deste artigo, "ANA critica contas e projeções da Comissão Independente em relação ao novo aeroporto de Lisboa":

"A ANA considera ainda que a CTI foi "otimista" em relação à projeção de tráfego, tendo previsto 66 a 108 milhões de passageiros em 2050, quando "entidades internacionais altamente credenciadas", preveem entre 40 a 52 milhões de passageiros em 2050.

Adicionalmente, também considera "otimistas" os cronogramas de construção e contesta o entendimento da CTI de que a opção Montijo levaria seis anos a ser construída."

Entretanto no Twitter descobri outra:

A linha de alta velocidade Madrid - Barcelona tem 6M de passageiros. Num país com quatro vezes mais população que o nosso. Cada vez mais me convenço que não temos grande talento para estes estudos. pic.twitter.com/Qvb4GDdQan

— Moita de Deus (@Deus_outro) January 30, 2024

Como não recordar leituras já feitas... 

• em 2012 (como o tempo voa) O problema não é étnico... talvez genético, citação de "Thinking, Fast and Slow" de Daniel Kahneman:

"A 2005 study examined rail projects undertaken worldwide between 1969 and 1998. In more than 90% of the cases, the number of passengers projected to use the system was overestimated. Even though these passenger shortfalls were widely publicized, forecasts did not improve over those thirty years; on average, planners overestimated how many people would use the new rail projects by 106%, and the average cost overrun was 45%. As more evidence accumulated, the experts did not become more reliant on it"

• em 2023 li "How Big Things Get Done" de Bent Flyvbjerg e Dan Gardner. Os autores escrevem sobre a "Planning fallacy" e sobre a "The commitment fallacy":

"Research documents that the planning fallacy is pervasive, but we need only look at ourselves and the people around us to know that. You expect to get downtown on a Saturday night within twenty minutes, but it takes forty minutes instead and now you're latejust like last time and the time before that. You think you'll have your toddler asleep after fifteen minutes of bedtime stories, but it takes half an hour —as usual. You're sure you will submit your term paper a few days early this time, but you end up pulling an all-nighter and make the deadline with a minute to spare —as always.

These aren't intentional miscalculations. Much of the voluminous research on the subject involves people who are not trying to win a contract, get financing for a project, or ...

For us to be so consistently wrong, we must consistently ignore experience. And we do, for various reasons. When we think of the future, the past may simply not come to mind and we may not think to dig it up because it's the present and future we are interested in. If it does surface, we may think "This time is different" and dismiss it (an option that's always available because, in a sense, every moment in life is unique).

...

Purposes and goals are not carefully considered. Alternatives are not explored. Difficulties and risks are not investigated. Solutions are not found. Instead, shallow analysis is followed by quick lock-in to a decision that sweeps aside all the other forms the project could take. "Lock-in," as scholars refer to it, is the notion that although there may be alternatives, most people and organizations behave as if they have no choice but to push on, even past the point where they put themselves at more cost or risk than they would have accepted at the start. This is followed by action. And usually, sometime after that, by trouble; for instance, in the guise of the "break-fix cycle" mentioned in chapter 1.

I call such premature lock-in the "commitment fallacy." It is a behavioral bias on a par with the other biases identified by behavioral science. 

...

One is what I call "strategic misrepresentation," the tendency to deliberately and systematically distort or misstate information for strategic purposes. If you want to win a contract or get a project approved, superficial planning is handy because it glosses over major challenges, which keeps the estimated cost and time down, which wins contracts and gets projects approved. But as certain as the law of gravity, challenges ignored during planning will eventually boomerang back as delays and cost overruns during delivery. By then the project will be too far along to turn back. Getting to that point of no return is the real goal of strategic misrepresentation. It is politics, resulting in failure by design.

...

But as projects get bigger and decisions more consequential, the influence of money and power grows. Powerful individuals and organizations make the decisions, the number of stakeholders increases, they lobby for their specific interests, and the name of the game is politics. And the balance shifts from psychology to strategic misrepresentation."

"You aren’t going to out-Amazon Amazon"

Em vez de retalho físico pensemos em imprensa, pensemos em empresas stuck-in-the-middle

"As scarcity disappears across so many areas, as the pace of change accelerates, and as newly empowered customers flex their muscles, the definition of boring has changed, in many cases radically. The bar for good enough has been raised. Not only do customers today know when they could do far better, it’s increasingly easy for them to demand what they want. And they can find many new and innovative brands willing and ready to respond. Today, even very good often doesn’t make the sale.

...

Yet even if you have a product or service that is unique, highly customer relevant, and not the least bit boring, getting noticed and commanding attention is increasingly difficult.

In this age of digital disruption we are drowning in a tsunami of information and deluged by all manner of distractions. The exploding world of choice that the internet and smartphones offer has delivered great benefits, but it has also created a tremendous amount of clutter.

...

What it takes to get noticed, to command attention, to be remarkable enough that whatever product, service, or idea we are selling gets adopted and spread, requires us to boost today’s signal many times more than would have worked in the recent past. Anything else risks not getting heard or seen, much less acted on, in our ever-noisier world.

...

what so many get wrong is believing that merely being better gets the job done. Better is not always the same as good. Far too often what is touted as innovation is providing a slightly better version of mediocre. Slowing the rate of descent is, in some sense, progress, but without a major change in direction, eventually we still crash.

...

You aren’t going to out-Amazon Amazon. Maybe Walmart, Target, or a very short list of other well-resourced retailers can in certain instances.

...

Ask yourself: how can retailers with higher costs than Amazon possibly win a price war? How is offering free shipping or BOPIS going to counter Amazon’s dominance in product assortment and delivery convenience? Any strategy like that is based on a hope that Amazon will follow the same profit and investment calculations that “normal” retailers do. How do you know, even if some of these efforts manage to gain some traction, that Amazon won’t respond even more aggressively or find some other way to make your life miserable?

...

Matching Amazon on prices and/or delivery times may seem like a good move, until you actually have to bear the cost of doing it. You are starting a race to the bottom that you can’t possibly win.

So what can be done? For most retailers, particularly those that lack the resources and capabilities that the mega-brands have, the only decision is to double down on (or lean into) those improvements that make your brand more customer relevant, more unique and sustainable over the long term.

...

For retailers that still garner most of their sales from their physical stores, that means appreciating and nurturing the unique advantages of brick-and-mortar locations: personal service, compelling visual merchandising, unique products, well-curated assortments, social experiences, instant gratification, and the like. You can complement that in-store experience with a well-harmonized e-commerce offering. Mostly you can embrace the choice to be remarkable on retail elements that Amazon can’t match.”

Trechos retirados do capítulo 10 “An Especially Bad Time to Be Boring” do livro “Remarkable Retail”

Tríade, Taylor, Mongo e a Al Qaeda

Em "Team of Teams: The Power of Small Groups in a Fragmented World" de Stanley McChrystal e Chris Fussell encontro um paralelismo que faço há muitos anos e que traduzo em linguagem colorida como em "os encalhados da tríade".

O mundo que formatou a tríade (políticos, académicos e comentadores) foi o mundo de Metropolis, o mundo de Magnitogorsk, o mundo da eficiência, um mundo criado pelo taylorismo:

"Taylor created a clockwork factory, systematically eliminating variation, studying all labor until he understood it inside and out, honing it to peak efficiency, and ensuring that those precise procedures were followed at scale. Because he could study and predict, he could control. He dubbed his doctrine "scientific management."
.
Taylor became the world's first management guru. At a paper mill in Wisconsin, he was told that the art of pulping and drying could not be reduced to a science. He instituted his system and material costs dropped from $75 to $35 per ton, while labor costs dropped from $30 a ton to $8. At a ball bearing factory, he experimented with everything from lighting levels to rest break durations, and oversaw an increase in quantity and quality of production while reducing the number of employees from 120 to 35; at a pig iron plant, he raised worker output from 12.5 to 47 tons of steel per day, and decreased the number of workers from 600 to 140.
...
Taylor’s ideas spread from company to company, from industry to industry, and from blue collars to white (there was one best way to insert paper into a typewriter, to sit at a desk, to clip pages together). They seeped into the halls of government. His philosophy of replacing the intuition of the person doing the job with reductionist efficiencies designed by a separate group of people marked a new means of organizing human endeavors. It was the behavioral soul mate for the technical advances of industrial engineering.
.
Taylor’s success represented the legitimization of “management” as a discipline. Previously, managerial roles were rewards for years of service in the form of higher pay and less strenuous labor. The manager’s main function was to keep things in working order and maintain morale. Under Taylor’s formulation, managers were both research scientists and architects of efficiency.
.
This drew a hard-and-fast line between thought and action: managers did the thinking and planning, while workers executed. No longer were laborers expected to understand how or why things worked—in fact, managers saw teaching them that or paying a premium for their expertise as a form of waste.
...
Military planners had relied on many of Taylor’s strategies—the segregation of planning and execution, standardization, and an emphasis on efficiency— for centuries before Taylor was born. But Taylor’s ideas inspired many military leaders to find fresh ways to create a more efficient fighting force.
...
“by the late 1920s, it could seem that all of modern society had come under the sway of a single commanding idea: that waste was wrong and efficiency the highest good, and that eliminating one and achieving the other was best left to the experts.”"

Este é o molde que ao chocar com Mongo deixa de funcionar. Assim como o percebi algures entre 2006 - 2008, McChrystal começou a intui-lo em 2004 ao chocar com a Al Qaeda do Iraque. (Ao longe intuí o mesmo ao aconselhar às PMEs que seguissem o exemplo da Al Qaeda: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 e 2006)

"This new world required a fundamental rewriting of the rules of the game. In order to win, we would have to set aside many of the lessons that millennia of military procedure and a century of optimized efficiencies had taught us.
...
In 2004, as we planned clockwork raids designed to make the most of every drop of fuel, we were manning a managerial Maginot Line: our extraordinarily efficient procedures and plans were well crafted and necessary, but not sufficient.
...
Over the past century, the kind of organizational measures that ensure the success
of combat parachute assaults have proliferated throughout the military, industry, and business. In today’s environment, however, these solutions are the equivalent of the provincial apprenticeship models that Taylor stumbled upon in 1874. In Iraq, the inexplicable, networked success of our underresourced enemy indicated that they had cracked this nut before we had. Managerially, AQI was flanking us."

Big data e experiência dos clientes

A propósito de "Customer Experience in the Age of AI":

"brands can win by tapping a deep store of customer information to transform and personalize user experiences. From the pre-internet dawn of segment-of-one marketing to the customer journey of the digital era, personalized customer experiences have unequivocally become the basis for competitive advantage. Personalization now goes far beyond getting customers’ names right in advertising pitches, having complete data at the ready when someone calls customer service, or tailoring a web landing page with customer-relevant offers. It is the design target for every physical and virtual touch-point, and it is increasingly powered by AI.

...

We are now at the point where competitive advantage will derive from the ability to capture, analyze, and utilize personalized customer data at scale and from the use of AI to understand, shape, customize, and optimize the customer journey."

Recordei o que li em "The Data Detective" de Tim Harford:

"The algorithms that analyze big data are trained using found data that can be subtly biased.

...

One thing is certain. If algorithms are shown a skewed sample of the world, they will reach a skewed conclusion.

...

There are some overtly racist and sexist people out there—look around—but in general what we count and what we fail to count is often the result of an unexamined choice, of subtle biases and hidden assumptions that we haven’t realized are leading us astray.

...

Big found datasets can seem comprehensive, and may be enormously useful, but “N = All” is often a seductive illusion: it’s easy to make unwarranted assumptions that we have everything that matters. We must always ask who and what is missing. And this is only one reason to approach big data with caution. Big data represents a huge and underscrutinized change in the way statistics are being collected, and that is where our journey to make the world add up will take us next."

Volume e vaidade

Recordar:

Volume (quota de mercado) é vaidade
Lucro é sanidade

Mais um excelente texto de Rags:

"Apple never chased market share and was more than willing to let others fight for the low end of the market.
.
Apple with just around 15% market share has 90% of profit share of the market.
...
Market share is simply the wrong business metric to chase as I have written several times before. Businesses exist to create value for all stakeholders – customers, investors, partners and employees. Businesses must take actions that maximize this value pie so everyone’s share, however small the ratio is, is better than it would have been otherwise. The question of chasing market share does not come into play at all in this quest unless it is a side effect of increasing value pie.[Moi ici: Consequência ou obliquidade]
...
Price is not a goal, it is not something you optimize for. it is not something your product deserves. It is not an invariant that must be adhered to. Price is a lever you have under control to maximize your share of value created.  You do not fix a price point to maintain perception rather you ensure the price point is aligned with the segment you choose to target and its needs.
.
Religiously fixing a price point is an assured way to destroy value for customers and investors.
...
Customers come first. We win customers by creating net new value to customers that is far more than other alternatives. We maximize the value to customers we become the preferred product and hence maximize our share of this value pie. Price is a way for us to get our fair share of that value created. Price is not the end, it is the means."

Trechos retirados de "Apple’s Focus- Market Share? Profit? or Price?"