Tilt

Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers

Dawar

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781422187173
• eBook ISBN:
  9781422187197
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Shift your strategy downstream. Why do your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors? If you think the answer is your superior products, think again. Products are important, of course. For decades, businesses sought competitive advantage almost exclusively in activities related to new product creation. They won by building bigger factories, by finding cheaper raw materials or labor, or by coming up with more efficient ways to move and store inventory—and by inventing exciting new products that competitors could not replicate.But these sources of competitive advantage are being irreversibly leveled by globalization and technology. Today, competitors can rapidly decipher and deploy the recipe for your product’s secret sauce and use it against you. “Upstream,” product-related advantages are rapidly eroding. This does not mean that competitive advantage is a thing of the past. Rather, its center has shifted. As marketing professor Niraj Dawar compellingly argues, advantage is now found “downstream,” where companies interact with customers in the marketplace. Tilt will help you grasp the global nature of this downstream shift and its profound implications for your strategy and your organization. With vivid examples from around the world, ranging across industries and sectors, Dawar shows how companies are reorienting their strategies around customer interactions to create and capture unique value. And he demonstrates how, unlike product-related advantage, this value is cumulative, continuously building over time.In an increasingly customer-centered world marketplace, let Tilt serve as your guide to shifting your strategy downstream—and achieving enduring competitive advantage.

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Pt 1: Your Center of Gravity
• Ch 1: Finding the New Locus of Competitive Advantage
• Ch 2: Slashing Your Customers' Costs and Risks
• Ch 3: Seizing the Downstream Advantage
• Pt 2: The Perch: Mapping Market Networks
• Ch 4: Seeing New Value in Your Customers
• Ch 5: Extracting Value from the Big Picture
• Pt 3: The Deep Dive: The Competitive Playing Field Inside the Customer's Mind
• Ch 6: Scoping Out the Playing Field
• Ch 7: Taking Control of Criteria of Purchase
• Ch 8: Knowing Who Your Competitors Are
• Pt 4: The Bottom Line
• Ch 9: Busting Myths in the Marketplace Wars
• Ch 10: Understanding Why Downstream Competitive Advantage Is Sustainable
• Ch 11: Tilting Your Strategy and Organization
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author