Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers
Niraj
Oct 2013 · Harvard Business Press
4.2star
5 reviewsreport
Ebook
256
Pages
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About this ebook
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.
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.
Ratings and reviews
4.2
5 reviews
Kamal Soni
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October 11, 2014
Must read for any marketer. Specially for the developing economy and working with product and services.
About the author
Niraj Dawar is a strategic thinker and author who has worked with leading organizations on three continents. He is Professor of Marketing at the Ivey Business School in Canada and Hong Kong. He has worked with senior management teams in companies in the technology, banking, and consumer goods industries. His published work appears in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and in the leading academic journals in marketing.
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