What gives one business an advantage of another? The ability to turn insight of a market into innovation; in other words, you have the knowledge that a competitor doesn’t have and use it to your advantage before someone else does. Just look at the leaders of such companies as Dell or EBay. These people had a pulse on the market due to being a part of it, seeing that the customer’s needs must come first. This mentality allowed all the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place as a result of this outside-in approach.
When the CEO has a marketing background, the results are greater because they’re obsessed with their customers, taking the knowledge that their competitors don’t have and using their innovative methods to champion their brand.
Outside-In Business Approach
This kind of communication is focused on customer-initiated dialogues rather than just broad-armed campaigns. An outside-in brand defines what it does fro customers rather than for the actual business. It starts by redefining context before considering products and services.
You must see the relation based more on the community of consumers than simply transactions if you want to create an effective strategy that starts with the market – where and how to compete and what to do for short and long-term success.
If we look at CEO Jeff Bezos and how he runs Amazon, they use intelligence and imagination to anticipate and meet the needs of each customer. They seized the new whitespace by leveraging virtual technologies and physical delivery, while harnessing customer power. As a result, they have successfully done business on the terms of the customer.
Clash of Now vs. the Future
Ultimately, business performance is measured by the financial side. How we generate significant value for shareholders is by creating substantial value for customers – profitable growth facilitates this circle.
Stockholders invest in companies in order to get a return on their money. They look at the long-term prospects that a business may offer – future earning potential, generated cash over a given time, new markets and products that will drive it and the strong brands and relationships that will solidify their future.
At the same time, we spend the majority of our time focused on short-term results because money pays the bills and provides some signal of future success. But remember, the long term matters the most; so focus inevitably has to be on brand building and innovation rather than product derivatives and sales promotion.
10 Steps of Supremacy
If you’re going to be one of the innovators of your market, rising above the competition, you must follow these 10 steps:
- Leadership – Bring an outside-in mindset to business, driving focused decision-making and inspiring more enlightened action.
- Strategy – Consider a broader context, focusing on the best few existing and emerging markets and how to be positioned in them.
- Brand – Define your brand by the benefits it offers customers rather than the functional description of your business or solution.
- Customers – Engage more deeply with customers, observing and collaborating to discover emerging and unarticulated needs and wants.
- Innovation – Reframe opportunities in ways that create new spaces in which to try new products and their market applications.
- Channels – Invert channels so that they become the trusted partners of customers, creating solutions based on more personal knowledge.
- Pricing – Actively manage perceived value, changing the frame of reference so that a premium price structure still offers value for the money.
- Communications – Build dialogue with customers on their terms, time and place, rather than product-pushing, mass-market campaigns.
- Relationships – Build loyalty between rather than with customers through branded communities of people who want to come together.
- Performance – Invest in markets, brands and innovation that create a virtuous circle of more value for customer and stockholders, short- and long-term.