Competitive forces in business reduce products and services to commodities over time, creating adverse consequences. Businesses are driven to reduce margins and lower profits while engaging in price competition. This text demonstrates how companies can avoid commoditization by delivering superior customer value with product and service benefits.

How do leading retailers create value for their customers? They craft unique experiences at compelling prices. This book introduces a new and effective way to manage those experiences based on three critical factors – environment, selection, and engagement (ESE) – that separate successful retailers from those that fail and are forgotten. The ESE framework is derived from the academic literature on retail management and consumer marketing, and supplemented by hundreds of hours of interviews with executives and marketers from Canada's leading companies, including Loblaw, Indigo Books and Music, and Lululemon. Kyle B. Murray illustrates the components of this framework with examples and case studies that examine how the shopping environment, product selection, and customer engagement each affect consumer decision and create competitive advantage. Whether you are an aspiring merchant or an industry veteran, this book's strategic framework will help you build a solid foundation for your business in today's ever-evolving retail marketplace.

Crafting Customer Experience Strategy: Lessons from Asia looks at how Customer Experience Management can be vital in providing a competitive advantage for businesses. This is essential reading for marketing scholars and practitioners looking for insights into improving their customers' experiences.

The authors of the international bestseller Business Model Generation explain how to create value propositions customers can’t resist Value Proposition Design helps you tackle the core challenge of every business — creating compelling products and services customers want to buy. This highly practical book, paired with its online companion, will teach you the processes and tools you need to create products that sell. Using the same stunning visual format as the authors’ global bestseller, Business Model Generation, this sequel explains how to use the “Value Proposition Canvas” to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers actually want. Value Proposition Design is for anyone who has been frustrated by new product meetings based on hunches and intuitions; it’s for anyone who has watched an expensive new product launch fail in the market. The book will help you understand the patterns of great value propositions, get closer to customers, and avoid wasting time with ideas that won’t work. You’ll learn the simple process of designing and testing value propositions, that perfectly match customers’ needs and desires. In addition the book gives you exclusive access to an online companion on Strategyzer.com. You will be able to assess your work, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more. Value Proposition Design is an essential companion to the ”Business Model Canvas” from Business Model Generation, a tool embraced globally by startups and large corporations such as MasterCard, 3M, Coca Cola, GE, Fujitsu, LEGO, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more. Value Proposition Design gives you a proven methodology for success, with value propositions that sell, embedded in profitable business models."

In this visionary book, C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy explore why, despite unbounded opportunities for innovation, companies still can't satisfy customers and sustain profitable growth. The explanation for this apparent paradox lies in recognizing the structural changes brought about by the convergence of industries and technologies; ubiquitous connectivity and globalization; and, as a consequence, the evolving role of the consumer from passive recipient to active co-creator of value. Managers need a new framework for value creation. Increasingly, individual customers interact with a network of firms and consumer communities to co-create value. No longer can firms autonomously create value. Neither is value embedded in products and services per se. Products are but an artifact around which compelling individual experiences are created. As a result, the focus of innovation will shift from products and services to experience environments that individuals can interact with to co-construct their own experiences. These personalized co-creation experiences are the source of unique value for consumers and companies alike. In this emerging opportunity space, companies must build new strategic capital—a new theory on how to compete. This book presents a detailed view of the new functional, organizational, infrastructure, and governance capabilities that will be required for competing on experiences and co-creating unique value.

Success in solution business starts by accepting that solution business is a separate business model, not simply another product category or an extension of the existing product business. This book identifies the business model areas that firms need to focus on when transforming into solution business. It further organizes these areas into three sets of capabilities and practices: commercialization, industrialization and solution platforms. This is the first book to take a comprehensive view of success in solution business and its relevance therefore extends to all functions of firms wanting to become solution providers as well as to many managerial levels. The book will also help you self-assess how ready your organization is for success in solution business.

The customer value proposition articulates the specific benefits and costs that a company’s offering aims to create for its target customers. The customer value proposition guides all tactical decisions involved in designing, communicating, and delivering the company’s offering to its customers. The key aspects of developing a customer value proposition are the focus of this note. The discussion of the value proposition and positioning is complemented by an in-depth overview of two additional topics: developing a positioning map and the Blue Ocean strategy. This note is an excerpt (Chapter 7) from Strategic Marketing Management: Theory and Practice by Alexander Chernev (Cerebellum Press, 2019).

Is the customer in your boardroom? The business strategies of most companies in India are marked by the supply-sided, tunnel vision of the market and obsessively competitor-centred approaches. Customer in the Boardroom highlights the need for companies to embed customer centricity into the heart of their business strategy development process, if they are to continue to grow profitably and secure their future. Rama Bijapurkar presents a compelling treatise on how to develop business strategy around the world of customers rather than the world of competitors. She draws a sharp distinction between the 'market = industry size' and the 'market = customers with needs' bases for developing business strategy. Replete with anecdotes, examples and cases from India Inc, the book draws on the author's vast experience in consulting and teaching and places equal emphasis on both the theory and the practice of bringing the customer into the boardroom.

Enables readers to use real-world data from connected devices to improve product performance, detect design vulnerabilities, and design better solutions Quality in the Era of Industry 4.0 provides an insightful guide in harnessing user performance and behavior data through AI and other Industry 4.0 technologies. This transformative approach enables companies not only to optimize products and services in real-time, but also to anticipate and mitigate likely failures proactively. In a succinct and lucid style, the book presents a pioneering framework for a new paradigm of quality management in the Industry 4.0 landscape. It introduces groundbreaking techniques such as utilizing real-world data to tailor products for superior fit and performance, leveraging connectivity to adapt products to evolving needs and use-cases, and employing cutting-edge manufacturing methods to create bespoke, cost-effective solutions with greater efficiency. Case examples featuring applications from the automotive, mobile device, home appliance, and healthcare industries are used to illustrate how these new quality approaches can be used to benchmark the product’s performance and durability, maintain smart manufacturing, and detect design vulnerabilities. Written by a seasoned expert with experience teaching quality management in both corporate and academic settings, Quality in the Era of Industry 4.0 covers sample topics such as: Evolution of quality through industrial revolutions, from ancient times to the first and second industrial revolutions Quality by customer value creation, explaining differences in producers, stakeholders, and customers in the new digital age, along with new realities brought by Industry 4.0 Data quality dimensions and strategy, data governance, and new talents and skill sets for quality professionals in Industry 4.0 Automated product lifecycle management, predictive quality control, and defect prevention using technologies like smart factories, IoT, and sensors Quality in the Era of Industry 4.0 is a highly valuable resource for product engineers, quality managers, quality engineers and quality consultants, industrial engineers, and systems engineers who wish to make a participatory approach towards data-driven design, economical mass-customization, and late differentiation.