Simply Better

Fülszöveg

What Do Your Customers Really Want?
MOST EXECUTIVES BELIEVE that winning and keeping customers requires offering something unique. But as physi-cal products are seen as increasingly hard to differentiate, companies resort to branding, gimmicks, and "thinking outside the box." Meanwhile, customers are less satisfied than they were a decade ago.
Patrick Barwise and Seán Meehan argue that most companies have taken differentiation so far that they've left their customers behind. Customers don't want bells and whistles and don't care about trivial differences between brands. What they really want are quality products, reli-able services, and fair value for money. Yet most companies consistently fail to meet these basic customer needs.
Simply Better is a no-nonsense, back-to-basics manifesto for today's businesses. Barwise and Meehan argue that success-ful differentiation lies not in unique selling propositions, but in generic category benefits, such as good service, on-time... Tovább

Fülszöveg

What Do Your Customers Really Want?
MOST EXECUTIVES BELIEVE that winning and keeping customers requires offering something unique. But as physi-cal products are seen as increasingly hard to differentiate, companies resort to branding, gimmicks, and "thinking outside the box." Meanwhile, customers are less satisfied than they were a decade ago.
Patrick Barwise and Seán Meehan argue that most companies have taken differentiation so far that they've left their customers behind. Customers don't want bells and whistles and don't care about trivial differences between brands. What they really want are quality products, reli-able services, and fair value for money. Yet most companies consistently fail to meet these basic customer needs.
Simply Better is a no-nonsense, back-to-basics manifesto for today's businesses. Barwise and Meehan argue that success-ful differentiation lies not in unique selling propositions, but in generic category benefits, such as good service, on-time deliv-ery, and quality products, that any company can provide. The key is to deliver these consistently better than competi-tors. Illustrating this customer-focused differentiation through vivid examples of companies, including Toyota, P&G, Hilti, Tesco, and Ryanair, Simply Better outlines an actionable framework managers can use to:
• Understand what customers really value and why they buy the brands they do
• Discover basic, unmet needs ripe for reliable solutions
• Channel customer d/ssatisfaction into performance improvements
(Continued on back flap)
(Continued from Iront flap)
• Balance in-the-box thinking in strate-gy and innovation with out-of-the-box thinking in advertising and communications
• Create a learning culture that con-tinuously responds to changing cus-tomer needs
While being unique might be exciting and appealing, it doesn't drive business success. Simply Betíer shows how meeting and exceeding the most ordi-nary of customer expectations can lead to extraordinary—and lasting—rewards.
Patrick Barwise is Professor of Management and Marketing at London Business School. Seán Meehan is the Martin Hilti Professor of Marketing and Change Management and director of the M.B.A. program at IMD, in Lausanne, Switzerland.
For more information about the book, please visit www.simply-better.biz.
Jacket design by: Mike Fender Jacket Photo: C Squared Studios/Getty
Harvard Business School Press 60 Harvard Way Boston, ma 02163
Learn more about our books and view our latest catalog at: www.HBSPress.org
Vissza