Rethink, Reinvent, Reposition

12 Strategies to Make Over Your Business

Leo Hopf, William Welter

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781440507168
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Nachhaltige Entwicklung

Is your business struggling to stay afloat? Are you overwhelmed by the challenge of building an organization that can be a market leader? Well, now is the time to stop going in circles—find a new direction and re-imagine your company. In this hard-hitting guide, renowned international corporate consultants and professors Leo Hopf and William Welter show how to breathe new life into your firm.Using revealing case studies from Seagate to Harley-Davidson, they offer such key strategies as:

• Repackaging products to widen the range of your target demographic
• Revising your profit model to improve your margins
• Moving up- or down-market to attract new customers
• Using core competencies to enter new markets
• Conducting business at a different time to reach new customers

You'll need to take a risk to reap the rewards. But this blueprint for growth will supply you with the confidence to start on a different path. So forget the same-old tired tactics. Instead, make things happen by making over your business! It's crucial to the livelihood of your enterprise, and Hopf and Welter give you everything you need to get it right.

CHAPTER ONE

Twelve Strategies for
Organizational Renewal

Before beginning our journey, we have to know the destination. Our objective is for you to successfully execute a renewal strategy that creates a growing and profitable future for your organization.

The way to reach this goal is by applying one of twelve renewal strategies to your business. These are not one-size-fits-all strategies. Each must be tailored to fit the needs at hand. Exclude those that are obviously inappropriate to your situation and choose from the remaining ones that seem closest to your needs. Then tailor your chosen strategy to meet your specific requirements. In this way, you will be able to efficiently and effectively create a strategy that is right for you.

This chapter provides an overview of the twelve basic strategies, along with a handful of examples to show how they've worked in practice. We'll undertake a deeper explanation of each strategy in Chapter 6.

What Drives the Twelve Strategies?

All businesses, large or small, public or private, selling products or services, face the reality of lifecycle maturity and decline. In preparing this book, we wanted to make its lessons apply as broadly as possible. We finally boiled it down to the root question: “What do all businesses have in common?”

The answers are straightforward:

1. All companies have customers who purchase their goods and services to satisfy their needs.
2. All companies have assets (both hard and soft) they use to create these offerings.

Customer relationships and assets take time to build and require focus and investment to maintain. By examining different combinations of customer needs and company assets we developed the twelve strategies.

Sometimes customer needs are long-lived. Cooks have needed salt for all of recorded history, and in the industrialized world oil has been a mainstay of commerce for over 100 years. But more often (and increasingly so), the time from the introduction of an offering to the end of its profitable life is getting shorter. For example, companies needed “Y2K” expertise for 1999 and not much beyond that. Only a decade ago, people could make a decent living manufacturing and repairing video cassette recorders. Today, VCRs have been supplanted by digital recording devices. Customers' needs evolve, and if you don't match them, your formerly attractive offerings become obsolete.

Assets, too, may have a long or short life. Andersen Corporation opened its Menomonie, Wisconsin, manufacturing facility in 1904, and it is still producing top-quality windows there today. On the other hand, Intel's semiconductor chip fabrication plants cost more than $1 billion to build and will be obsolete within a decade.

A firm's hard assets are easy to see. But its soft assets are much more difficult to visualize. A company's soft assets are found in the interaction among the design engineers, the manufacturing personnel, the equipment, the suppliers, and so on. The soft assets reside in the skills, knowledge, attitude, and culture of the people in the organization.

The Twelve Strategies

The twelve strategies are driven by different combinations of customers and assets, as shown in the chart below.

For clarity's sake, we've divided the twelve strategies into four groups of three strategies each. The four groups are:

1. New Concept (Catch the New Wave; Put Old Wine in New Bottles; Revise Your Profit Model).
2. Extension (Aim Higher or Lower; Make a Time Shift; Get a Personality Transplant).
3. Solutions (Build Share of Wallet; Shift to the Sweet Spot; Leverage Your Core Competencies).
4. Transformation (Declare Victory and Move On; Keep the Knowledge, Switch the Business; Cash Out and Double Down).

Let's examine each group in detail.

New Concept Group (Existing Customers / Existing Assets)

If you can repurpose your existing assets to address different needs within your current customer base, you may be able to create a new concept at relatively low risk. The challenge of New Concept strategies is to make sure the change is significant enough that customers recognize what you are doing and react to it. Too often people try one of the three New Concept strategies and end up modestly changing their business model in a way that is insufficient to truly renew the business.

How Can We Renew Our Business?	Description	Topics to Consider
Catch the New Wave	Shift your current business to the next hot thing.	You look at your market and see both emergence and obsolescence. New customer wants and needs are replacing those you have satisfied in the past. How can you identify and jump to the next new thing?
Put Old Wine in New Bottles	Repackage/rebrand your offerings to make them seem fresh and original.	Your underlying offerings still provide value to customers. How can you make offerings that have been around for a long time seem fresh and new?
Revise Your Profit Model	If the way you are charging for your products and services is no longer effective, find other ways to generate revenue and profits.	You look at the marketplace and see value migrating away from your current profit model. How can you structure your model differently to accelerate growth and increase profitability?

STRATEGY 1: CATCH THE NEW WAVE

CASE STUDY For most of us, getting our clothes dry cleaned is as exciting and rewarding as taking out the trash. Dry cleaning is just something that has to be done every week or two; at best, you will get your clothes back as they were so you can start the cycle again. Most people look at dropping off dry cleaning as a necessary evil to be done with the least hassle and annoyance possible.

Hassle and annoyance are what we associate with dry cleaning if we think about it at all. “Honey, did you remember to pick up the dry cleaning?” “What do you mean it is not ready?” “The button was on the shirt when I dropped it off!” “I'm sorry, dear. I know your flight is Monday morning, but it is Sunday and the dry cleaner isn't open.”

Unless, that is, they live in Burbank, California, where Milt & Edie's Dry Cleaners is located. Milt & Edie's has defined the new wave in dry cleaning and in so doing turned it from an annoyance into a pleasure. Most dry cleaners think of their industry in terms of plant throughput; Milt & Edie's think in terms of service.

Here is what happens at Milt & Edie's. You arrive in the spacious parking lot at any time. They are open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Music is playing, and you pass a koi pond on the way in. You smell the complimentary popcorn and cookies as you enter. You are greeted at the door (usually by name) and directed to one of the nine fully staffed counters.

Every single item of your clothing is inspected as it is cleaned. If you have a loose button or torn pocket, one of their seven tailors will fix it free of charge. The tailors will also make more significant repairs such as mending a ripped sleeve. When you pick your clothes up you will be told of the repair and asked if you choose to pay for it. Virtually everyone gladly pays for the repairs, but you have the right to say no since you did not ask them to do the work; they just did it for you.

Your clothes come back in better shape than you left them. You receive friendly, personalized service. You are treated as a valued customer and hailed by name. If Milt & Edie's was in your neighborhood, what reason would you have for not giving them your business? Milt & Edie's serves the same customers from the same location with the same building and other major assets as they always have. But by pushing the service envelope the company has created a new wave. They put the “Wow” in dry cleaning.

Successful businesses don't just stand still; they follow customer tastes. Today a restaurateur may be opening an Italian pasta bar, while tomorrow it will change to a Mexican taco stand. The building and equipment for a restaurant are pretty much the same, no matter while kind of cuisine it serves.

The difference between success and failure as you switch from one kind of restaurant to another may not be in the physical assets as much as in your brand, your knowledge assets, and your reputation. Does your chef know Mexican food as well as she knows Italian food? Will customers flock to the trendy new Mexican spot if it's still called Luigi's?

Lettuce Entertain You in Chicago has been on the leading edge of food trends and they have a loyal following. Their organization makes tough decisions regularly, and mature restaurant concepts are killed off to make room for fresh new ones. Their continuous search for new ideas has brought over thirty different restaurant concepts to the market. Among these are Big Bowl (Chinese/Thai), Nacional 27 (Central and South American), and Tru (French.)

STRATEGY 2: PUT OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

CASE STUDY The University of Utah is held in high esteem by Utahns. But over time the university's health care brand had fractured into many pieces as individual services went their own way. These services had developed their own, sometimes conflicting, brand images.

The result was more than sixty different logos and inconsistent use of names within the university health care system. Because the institution didn't present a unified face to the market, people didn't know which health care services were university affiliated and which were not. The absence of a unified brand made it impossible for people to say what was distinctive about the university health care system, and what set it apart from other health care providers.

The challenge, therefore, was to get the physicians who were running the different groups to agree on a single brand and logo. Most of them agreed in the abstract but resisted changing to any logo but their own. Others were not convinced that a university-wide health care would be any more effective than any of the individual service brands.

Anyone who has dealt with physicians knows that they like to tell other people what to do. They're less keen on being told that they themselves must change. How do you build a commitment to standardized branding among people who resist authority?

The university formed a team and began doing research within and outside of the university community. They conducted phone surveys and focus groups with patients, but they also interviewed the governor of Utah, a high official in the Mormon church, and health care and insurance CEOs and presidents. They also carried out a statewide survey of users.

At the start of the survey, interviewees were asked where they would like to receive their health care. They were then informed of the different pieces that made up the university system. Many were surprised at the extent and reach of the system. At the end of the interview the participants asked again, “Where would you like to receive your health care?” Once people understood the system as a whole there was a 15 percent increase in the number who said they would prefer to use the university's health care system.

The university researchers also put all of the different logos on a computer screen together with logos from different industries. Survey participants were then asked to pick out which of the logos were health care related and, of those, which service each logo represented.

Eighty-five percent correctly recognized the red “U” and caduceus (the staff with two intertwined serpents) logo that was being used by a few services. Almost no one recognized individual logos for the different services. Participants identified only two as health care related, and of those the recognition rate was comparatively low.

In the end, confronted with the results of this systematic research, the physicians came to an agreement. The Red U and caduceus became the centerpiece of the unified University of Utah Health Services brand identity and logo.

By putting Old Wine in New Bottles the University of Utah was able to bring all of its branding and logos under a single format, which is now recognized and respected by the marketplace. Their product had always been fine. The challenge was to make it seem fresh and compelling to patients and the surrounding community.

The key to this strategy is to recognize that while your products and services may still be delivering value, you need to find a new way to present them to your customers. By finding a new, innovative way to brand and represent their offerings, many organizations have been able to find new life and energy.

All across the country, symphony orchestras have been struggling to fill their seats and connect with new audiences. Those who love classical music continue to attend and support their local symphonies, but even these people are not always interested in an evening of classical music. Sometimes they prefer lighter, more popular fare.

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