BY BARBARA E. BUND
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BY BARBARA E. BUND |
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Press Release: For further information, contact: Paul Denning MIT Sloan lecturer warns against losing touch with customers’ needs and behaviors in her new book, The Outside-In Corporation Too many businesses look at the world from the inside perspective of their own organizations and boardrooms rather than from the outside perspective of customers and prospective customers, according to Barbara Bund, an international consultant and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Bund warns that this bad habit leads companies to design weak marketplace strategies, to implement strategies ineffectively, and to lose touch with marketplace changes. The results are reduced profits and sometimes the demise of the company. Drawing on decades of experience working with startups and Fortune 500 companies, Bund has written THE OUTSIDE-IN CORPORATION (McGraw-Hill, 2006), a new book designed to steer business leaders towards competitive advantage provided by the customer perspective. Bund cites examples of how such companies as Dell, Procter & Gamble, FedEx and eBay put customer needs and behaviors at the center of business strategies and specific actions, using in-depth understanding of customers to create unique value propositions. She also highlights companies that lost touch with the changing customer landscape — including IBM and McDonald's in the 1990s and what “outside-in” steps they have since taken to get back on track. Her “outside-in discipline” provides action plans to help readers: • devise and implement customer-based strategies and actions (including pricing, communication, and distribution initiatives) that are based firmly on real-world customer needs and behaviors; • achieve and maintain that customer perspective despite the challenges of the real business world, where it seems business people never know as much about customers as they want or need to know: • gather, incorporate and use new information about customers as they evolve over time. Insights from customer-based business innovators including, among others, Peter Drucker, Jack Welch, Michael Dell and Kenichi Ohmae further illustrate the techniques needed to keep a company firmly on a foundation of thinking about and understanding its customers. “Outside-in is not always easy. It’s usually very uncomfortable at first, so it takes getting used to. It requires re-examination of the attitudes and assumptions and habits you have regarding marketing. It calls for a renewed commitment to constant learning about your customer’s lives,” says Bund. “But if you take the concept seriously and commit the necessary time and effort to requiring an explicit customer reason for everything you do in the marketplace, The Outside-In Corporation will give you the tools you need to make your organization more intuitively responsive and bottom-line successful in its overall marketplace strategy and in every customer interaction.” About the AuthorBarbara Bund, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Credited by Philip Kotler with popularizing the term “relationship marketing”, Bund has also taught at Harvard and is the author of Winning and Keeping Industrial Customers as well as other books and articles. She regularly consults with entrepreneurs and with senior managers at Fortune 500 companies. |