Nirmalya Kumar

Today, marketers in Business Markets face tremendous price pressure from customers. The presentation will outline how to meet this challenge using an customer value management approach, based on a forthcoming book entitled Rare Commodity: Moving Business Markets Beyond Price to Value by Professors James Anderson, Nirmalya Kumar, and Jim Narus. The central argument will be that only by demonstrating and documenting value to customers, can firms be successful in business markets.

Key points:

•  Creating customer value
•  Capturing the value of supplementary services
•  Designing attractive market offers
•  Pricing for profit

Increasingly, companies are serving multinational customers who are demanding in terms of service and prices. These customers expect a high level of service delivery across multiple, globally distributed, locations. Customer delight and customer retention are the key to success especially in the face of aggressive, lower priced competitors seeking to pry the account open. Companies are challenged to provide value added solutions to customers rather than simply selling products.

The session will use the Tetra Pak case to highlight how a company embarked on a journey to get closer to its major key customers by providing solutions and increasing customer satisfaction.

Key Points:

•  How to get closer to customers
•  From selling products to providing solutions
•  Managing customer satisfaction initiatives
•  Successful key account management

The session will examine how IDEO, a design firm, has built a culture of innovation to develop creative new products. A 20-minute video presentation will be followed by a discussion of how competences, processes, structure, people, and assets can help generate a culture capable of producing repeated innovation.

The session will use the Black & Decker case to highlight the essence of successful brand marketing strategies. The case examines how to compete against an industry leader. The presentation will focus on the challenge of building killer brand strategies.

Key Points:

•  How to develop a killer brand
•  Differentiating the brand from competitors
•  Overtaking industry leaders
•  Brand portfolio management

The session will examine innovation from a marketing perspective. The presentation will use examples and videos from consumer products (e.g., Sony), services (e.g., easyJet), and business marketing (e.g., Dow Corning).

Key points:

•  Marketing as a driver of innovation
•  Creating breakthrough customer value
•  Being market driving rather than market driven

The session is based on the article by the same title co-authored with Lisa Scheer and Philip Kotler. It will examine the difference between incremental and radical innovation. How to create breakthrough customer value by being ahead of the customer? How to create radical innovation in established firms? The presentation will use examples and videos from consumer products (e.g., Sony), services (e.g., Zara, easyJet), and business marketing (e.g., Dow Corning).

Key points:

•  Radical innovation in established firms
•  Creating breakthrough customer value
•  Being market driving rather than market driven

Firms today face the challenge of growth and profitability, especially in the face of emerging low-cost business models (e.g., Aldi, Dell, Huawei, IKEA, Southwest). Understanding the key success factors behind these low cost business models as well as how they operate and grow is critical, regardless of whether one wishes to join them or beat them.

The session will use the Wal-Mart case to demonstrate how the company went from a single store in 1962 to the largest company in the world in 2002. A comprehensive approach will be adopted that examines the firm’s mission, strategy, operations, human resources, financial model, and marketing.

Key points:

•  Understanding retailer strategies
•  Partnering with powerful retailers/distributors
•  Growth and execution as differentiators
•  Getting ordinary people to achieve extraordinary goals

Increasingly, companies face competitors with much lower costs and prices. In response, differentiating one’s value proposition and creatively segmenting the market become critical to success. In addition, a disciplined approach to selling value requires documenting and demonstrating the value delivered to customers.

The session will use the easyJet case to demonstrate how a new entrant can create value through creative segmentation and unique value propositions. The presentation will focus on the challenges of developing unique value propositions, competing against low cost players, and value based pricing strategies.

Key Points:

•  Differentiating from competitors
•  Creative segmentation
•  Competing against low cost business models

The presentation will be based on the recently published book entitled Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO’s Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation. Marketing as Strategy is the first book to cast marketing strategy in terms of the CEO’s agenda. Based on more than fifteen years of researching, teaching, and counselling top executives at multinational organizations, the book outlines seven strategic, cross-functional, bottom-line oriented transformation efforts that address the burning issues on the minds of CEOs.

As retailers have become more powerful and global, they are increasingly focused on their own brands at the expense of manufacturer brands. Rather than simply selling on price, retailers have transformed their private labels into brands. Consequently, manufacturers such as Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, and Procter & Gamble, now compete with their largest customers – major retail chains like Carrefour, CVS, Tesco, and Wal-Mart.

The growth in private labels, and its changing character, has huge implications for managers on both sides. Yet, brand manufacturers still cling to their outdated assumptions about private labels. Based on the new book, Private Labels: Competing With and Against Store Brands, this presentation describes the new retailer strategies for private labels, and challenges brand manufacturers to develop an effective response. Most important, it lays out actionable strategies for competing against—or collaborating with—private label purveyors.

Based on the best selling article in the Harvard Business Review (December 2006). It’s easier to fight the enemy you know than one you don’t. With gale-force winds of competition lashing every industry, companies must invest a lot of money, people, and time to fight archrivals. They find it tough, challenging, and yet strangely reassuring to take on familiar opponents, whose ambitions, strategies, weaknesses, and even strengths resemble their own.

CEOs can easily compare their game plans and prowess with their doppelgängers’ by tracking stock prices by the minute, if they desire. However, this obsession with traditional rivals has blinded companies to the threat from disruptive, low-cost competitors. All over the world, especially in Europe and North America, organizations that have business models and technologies different from those of market leaders are mushrooming. Such companies offer products and services at prices dramatically lower than the prices established businesses charge, often by harnessing the forces of deregulation, globalization, and technological innovation.

By the early 1990s, the first price warriors had gobbled up the lunches of several incumbents. Now, on both sides of the Atlantic, a second wave is rolling in. These low-cost combatants are changing the nature of competition as executives knew it in the twentieth century. What should leaders do?