Customer Based Business Strategy

Start Date: Jul 28, 2016 End Date: Jul 30, 2016
Last Date for Application: July 14, 2016 Last Date for Early Bird: July 7, 2016
Programme Fee: 80000 INR

Plus, GST

Early Bird Fee: 74400 INR

Plus, GST

It is becoming much harder for businesses in India to meet their growth aspirations in spite of continued real GDP growth, though somewhat volatile, of 6.5% to 8%. However, the nature of the opportunity has changed and has become far more challenging. In the first two decades after liberalisation, companies were able to grow by just "being there" with modern products and services, wide distribution and operational efficiency as the key to driving profitability. Today this is no longer good enough and a lot of companies are stuck for improved top line growth as efficiency gains have started diminishing and "muscle" driven growth is proving to be costly with declining effectiveness.

Companies are struggling to cope with many sources of disruption like changing consumer expectations, their behaviour and what they value and do not value, caused by changing consumer demographics, lifestyles and also supplier activity in general. As supply choices explode and many totally new products and services are on offer, what happens in one category is re-shaping consumer expectations in other categories as well. Regulatory changes are having frequent and far reaching impact on products, distribution, pricing, customer service norms, etc, reshaping competitive advantage in a big way. There is a lot of competitive disruption too ranging from ‘old game’ new entrants to ‘game changing small upstart new age companies’ who use technology innovatively to create new kinds of business models offering discontinuously better value to customers.

This environment is proving very stressful for companies and forcing them to think seriously about their business market game, i.e., where in the market they are best off playing with what intensity and a carefully crafted way of how they will play to win in different segments/market and/or against different forms of competition. Companies who do not have a clear business-market game end up with a business which has no strategic coherence with increased cost of complexity as they respond to every disruption individually and “follow the market”. Also are in trouble those companies who have a clear business-market game but who define their markets in a supply sided way as a collection of current and future products/technologies/competitors and not in terms of customers’ needs, perceptions and what they value. They end up having to change their business market game frequently as competitive activity increases. Thus competing within a product or service category is becoming obsolete when customers have many more radically different options from very different types of suppliers to satisfy their needs.

The need of the hour and of the future is for companies to craft their business strategy in a customer centred way with the philosophy that

“The heart of strategy is not about beating the competitor but about creating value for the customer” (Kenichi Ohmae) and we add "and by creating value for the customer, generate wealth for the business.”

Such a strategy has to have at the "front end" a business market strategy that defines exactly what game the company will play in the market in order to win, and “at the back end” how it will align the rest of its activities to play this game.

This course is designed to:

• Enable companies to read all external changes(including environmental and competitive), assess how these will impact customers and in turn how they all will shape the business strategy

• Understand customer centricity and embed it into the strategy development process itself and not just into the downstream functional marketing and sales activity of executing the strategy in the market

• Provide with frameworks, tools and methodologies to include the customer in whatever strategy development process the company uses

• Clarity across business domains about frequently used but fuzzy ideas like customer’s role in business strategy, value proposition, market segment and competitive advantage

• Understanding 'disruption' and increased competition in terms of changes in customer behaviour, customer demand structure and implications for your business

• Understanding business-market game, its link to business strategy and frameworks, tools and methodologies for developing a company's business market game

• Customer Based Business Strategy framework, its advantages and how is it different from other supply side or microeconomic strategy development frameworks

• How can customer centricity be embedded into business strategy frameworks



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