If you’ve been following this blog you will know that I have been talking about the need for U.S. businesses to work smarter in this increasingly complex and competitive global economy.  At the heart of this need is for U.S. businesses to understand how to identify value opportunities and to use this information to create and deliver superior value.  Value is what will win best in market status for U.S. firms regardless of what product/markets, national or international, they target.

A report by SRI that was released in 2004, “Globalization: Trends and Input Factors of Globalization of manufacturing Input Factors on Future manufacturing Capabilities” contrasts two models: a traditional model that has governed the thinking and practices of U.S. manufacturing and a new model predicated on the dynamism of global economic factors.  Here is the traditional model:

The traditional model is predicated on a more insular and local focus while the new model, shown below, is premised on the need to capture value and translate this value into winning strategies.

To date, many U.S. manufacturers, based on my experience as a consultant to manufacturing firms and associations, do not have the skill set to identify value opportunities and deploy this information to the key strategic and operational areas of their business that will generate differential value advantages that will allow them to dominate their targeted markets.

U.S. industry has been through a period of cost cutting as a preemptive move to insure their survival.  Hard to fault them for this.  However, there will be a time when the focus of these firms must be sighted on issues of growth – of growing market share and top line revenues.  Value has been shown to be the best leading indicator of market share growth.  Understanding how to measure and manage value will be essential to become best in market competitors.   Dominance will be won market by market.  Forget best in class or world class.  The only metric that will matter is best in market – the market share leader and this will come from a superior value proposition.

It is interesting that the U.S. leads in value technology.  We have the best measurement technology leading to unique and powerful management capabilities.  It’s time to capitalize on this resource, or in the words of Six Sigma Marketing, to leverage our value advantage.  Use this money and opportunity to expand training for business by incorporating value measurement and management into their programs.  The time is right!

In the early 1970s, Schlitz reduced brewery labour per value, switched to low-cost hops, and shortened the brewing cycle by 50%.  Its costs were the lowest in the industry.  To the great pleasure of shareholders, profits soared, and the market applauded.  By 1974, the stock price had risen to $69.

Consumers were slow to react to the degradation of product quality, but by 1976, complaints were continual and market share was slipping.  That year Schlitz destroyed ten million bottles of beer that failed QC tests.  In 1978, Schlitz management tried to get its quality back on track, but consumers had such a low opinion of the product that the company couldn’t recover. By 1981, Schlitz’s market position had fallen to number seven from number two in 1974, and its stock price had dropped to a mere $5 (p. 157).

There are several lessons to be taken from the Schlitz story.

Lesson 1: In the fervor of cost cutting, companies can cut the very value adding costs that drive consumer preference and market share.  This can happen very easily especially if the company is not listening to the voice of the market (VOM).  I have seen this occur in several companies who have an internal focus – one that does not have a clear line of sight to the buyer.  Brand and market decisions are based on intuition and agendas that replace solid customer and market information.

Lesson 2: Customer value is a leading indicator of market share, in fact, the best indicator.  Put another way, customer value is an indicator of the strategic health of a brand or company.  Strategic health is a leading indicator of the financial health of a brand.  Financial health can continue beyond the strategic health of a company or a brand.  But a brand whose strategic health is ailing will more than likely find its financial health in jeopardy.   I have worked with several companies that have developed dashboards to manage their brands.  Unfortunately, many of these dashboards are populated with lagging indicators instead of leading indicators.  This is akin to driving your car looking into the review mirror.

Lesson 3: Once value is lost, it is difficult, if not impossible to regain.  Manage the value proposition of your brands because if you don’t your competitors will.  Value is relative – my brand has greater value than your brand.  A value management failure can result in an inferior value proposition and the resultant decline in market share.  Your brand’s value proposition is an important asset and requires constant vigilance.

Six Sigma Marketing (SSM) is a fact based disciplined approach to growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value.  It does so by means of a structured but modified DMAIC process.  The process begins with a clear focus on the product/markets that have the most economic value to the organization, understands how these product/markets define value and uses this information to acquire and retain customers.  It then places a premium on the management of the brand’s value propositions – to maintain its strategic health.

Marketing has been defined as the creation and retention of customers for the organization.  Current market practice is under scrutiny for its lack of accountability and lack of effectiveness and efficiency.  SSM replaces the agenda driven, intuition based traditional marketing approach with a powerful market focused and disciplined approach for creating and retaining customers.  SSM supplants the traditional marketing cost center with a dynamic machine that generates market share and profitability for the firm.

Learn the lessons from the Schlitz story.  It’s not as uncommon as you might think and, more importantly, could actually happen to you.  After all, I doubt if anyone at Schlitz actually planned to reduce their value proposition and decimate their market share.  Do you?

Market share is comprised of two major components, customer acquisition and customer retention so it is readily understandable why customer retention is critical to SSM.   Now along comes some very interesting work done by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) on customer effort.  There are several interesting and valuable findings that have emerged from this work.

1. Contrary to the conventional wisdom regarding loyalty, “delighting a customer” doesn’t really work.  “After years of focus on the ‘above and beyond’ service mentality, research from the Customer Contact Council, a division of CEB, indicates that most customers seek only satisfactory solution to an issue, and that companies are artificially inflating expectations in their efforts to oversatisfy them.”
2. Customer satisfaction is a misleading indicator of loyalty, a point discussed many times in this blog.   In fact, customer satisfaction was the least powerful indicator of loyalty following the CES (customer effort score) and NPS (net promoter score).  This finding adds weight to the growing amount of evidence regarding the weakness of satisfaction and the reason why Six Sigma Marketing has adopted customer value as a strategic metric.  The implications of this finding alone should cause many quality initiatives to rethink what they are attempting to do.  Focus on value and not satisfaction at the strategic level and the CES at the transactional level.
3. The CES (customer effort score) is a simple transactional measure that requires asking a single question: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”
   1. None
   2. Low
   3. Moderate
   4. High
   5. Very High

The research shows “that 96% of customers who put forth high effort to resolve their issues are more disloyal – an eye-opening number when companies consider that 59% of customers report moderate – to – high perceived additional effort in a service interaction.  The CEB’s research found that, in aggregate, customer service interactions are nearly four times more likely to lead to disloyalty than loyalty.”

There are a couple of key points about this work.  First, CES is a transactional measure suited for evaluating the customer – organizational interaction.  It captures what we hear in focus groups when customers talk about trying to solve problems – “Is the company hard to do business with?”  Making your customers bust their cookies trying to get a problem resolved is not only stupid but costly.

Second, by providing your customers with superior value you can head off a number of situations that would force you to solve customer problems.  The call center is taking on more and more importance in many organizations making you wonder whether people in the organization are simply passing problems down the line.  “For companies seeking to mitigate disloyalty, reducing customer effort – not delighting the customer – is the greatest lever the contact center can pull.”

Three, superior value is all about making it easier for your customers to do business with you.  Six Sigma Marketing emphasizes understanding how buyers define value and using this information, the voice of the market, to shape and manage their value propositions.  In those cases where problems arise, SSM examines them from a systematic point of view focusing on how to make sure that whatever is causing the problem is fixed and not reoccurring.  Just thinking about having to call the call center to get help is enough for many to seek better value elsewhere.

I strongly urge readers to download the research and make it a topic of conversation at one of your meetings.  It may change the way you think about loyalty and how to manage it.

In an article titled, “China’s Share of Advanced US Manufacturing Market Soars” The US Business and Industry Council points out that the “industrial challenge from Beijing is no longer confined to low-end goods.”

The report points out:

China widely dismissed as a head – to – head economic competitor to America in advanced manufactured goods, has been seizing significant and often rapidly rising share of the US market for dozens of these high value products from American-based producers for more than a decade.

The repot continues:

China’s industrial prowess is beginning to threaten those domestic sectors that Americans have long relied on to create premium – wage jobs and technological innovation, and to undergird national security, the group explains.  Expanding these industries is also key to any sustainable US economic recovery, the council notes.

Here are some numbers to back up these claims:

…in 2008 imports from Chinese – made products alone accounted for 33.2% of all of the computers Americans consumed, 22% of the broadcast and wireless communications equipment, 12.7% of the tires, 12.1% of the industrial valves, 9.9% of the motors and generators, 7.9% of the relays and industrial controls, and 6.1% of the environmental controls.

China is on the march, just like Japan during the 1960s and 1970s when they began to make significant inroads in the US auto industry.  Today, they own it with high quality brands like Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mazda, Subaru, Lexus and Infiniti.

Consumers buy on value – high quality at a fair competitive price.  And understanding how the market perceives an organization’s value proposition is critical.  Every brand has a value proposition and it requires close management.  It is the value proposition of the brand that emits a strong compelling buying signal to the consumer.  It either says “buy me – I’m a good deal” or “don’t buy me – I’m not worth it – you can get a better deal elsewhere”.  This is an incredibly important asset for any enterprise.  Value propositions are formed in the marketplace, not the boardroom.  They result from buyer experience with a brand and with competitive brands.  In this sense they are relative.  An increase in value in your competitor’s brands means a diminution of value in your brand.  Accordingly, value propositions require constant monitoring, not neglect.

To stem the penetration of US markets by Chinese manufacturers will require US manufacturers to hone their value identification, creation and delivery skills.  What is impeding their value conversion is a strong product orientation that many embrace.   A focus on defect reduction and cost cutting engendered by the deployment of six sigma and lean has limited their view of the market place.  It is in the market place where definitions of value and quality reside, not on the manufacturing floor.  As I have said a number of times, when quality and value are divorced from the market place, they have no real meaning.  US manufacturers challenge is clear: learn how to measure and manage value or suffer the consequences of abdicating their position of market leadership and contenting themselves with being a follower.

Why this is so interesting is that for decades banks have been treating these free checking accounts as a commodity – undifferentiated as pieces of raw corn or pork bellies.  Now they want to put a price on the commodity that will greatly impact its value proposition.  In other words, for years the banking public has seen little value in checking services offered by banks.   Banks offered little compelling quality in checking and in the minds of the public that quality was worth what they paid for it – nothing.

Commercial banking has had a long and difficult time understanding and managing the value they offered their customers.  Remember the days when you would open an account at a bank and you would receive a toaster, a blanket, an umbrella?  That morphed into a more sophisticated approach where they offered computers and other electronics if you would sign on the dotted line.  Banks understood that the way they were marketing their products that there was nothing inherent in what they did as an institution that added value to their customers.  They had to import value from outside of the industry.

This drove them to treat checking services as a loss leader hoping to attract customers to the bank and then cross sell the customer other products that had fees associated with them.  Many banks adopted a sales philosophy and began to hire salespeople.  Banking schools added programs on selling and discussions such as “Is it easier to turn a banker into a salesperson or a salesperson into a banker” were seen in many banking journals.  Unfortunately, this didn’t work as many customers simply accepted the transaction nature of free checking and bought few other services.

Now the issue comes full circle where once free products with little worth in the eyes of the customer are going to carry a price.  Value is the relationship between the organization’s product or service quality and the price that buyers have to pay to obtain that quality.  See the problem?   Banks, more than likely, will resort to “bundling” where they package several products together and put a price on them.  Or they will more than likely require minimum deposit levels in other accounts to receive free checking or free ATM services.  Regardless of what they do, they will have an uphill battle providing customers with a compelling value – based reason to buy their products as opposed to the products of competitors.

This is the time to be a member owned institution like a credit union.  They have a real opportunity to sharpen their value propositions and attract many customers not convinced of the value they are going to receive from commercial banks.  To do so, they must understand both value and quality from the buyers’ perspective, not their own.  Traditionally they have done this better than commercial banks.  Now they have to step up their efforts.

Some commercial banks have improved on their customer focus but this is an industry ripe for Six Sigma Marketing – a disciplined fact-based approach for growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value.  Market share is at stake as banks are faced with the seemingly contradictory situation of increasing their prices and growing their share, made even more difficult in an industry not known for its ability to create and deliver value.

There are a couple of factors at play in this satisfaction dynamic that so many businesses deem critical to their strategic health.  First, as individual businesses we “teach” customers what they can expect.  We do this in a number of ways.  The first is through advertising such as Ford’s claim during the past decades “At Ford quality is Job One.”  They were telling us that they were producing high quality automobiles when most of us were saying Ford means “Fix Or Repair Daily.”  Creating too high a level of expectations obviously is stupid since it is sure to create a satisfaction gap.

Second, repeated dissatisfaction leads to a condition called “learned helplessness” where we become conditioned to low expectations and an anticipation of being dissatisfied.   Over time we give up being able to get a positive response from the airlines, the cable company, the auto dealer, or any other entity with which we interact.  One of my greatest fears is having to call into the technical desk of a software or computer company to get something fixed.  This is typically exacerbated by being directed to a phone tree (press 1 if you want to get jacked around, press 2 if you want to speak with someone who does not speak English….).

My wife and I recently flew on Delta to attend a funeral in Detroit.  We had to check a bag since my wife was not sure of what the weather would be or what clothes would be suitable or what sartorial options she would need.  The result was a huge bag with three quarters of her closet in it.  This checked bag cost an additional $50 (roundtrip), a small price to pay for matrimonial harmony.  When we returned to our departing airport we had to wait 20 minutes to retrieve a bag that we had to pay for.  When it came on the belt it had a huge stain on it that had permeated the outside of the bag onto our clothes.  My wife who does not fly often and had not been subjected to the poor service and nonresponse of the airlines wanted me to get into a fist fight with the baggage person over the treatment of our bag.  My response – “Why bother?  They won’t do anything!”  This is learned helplessness fostered by years of flying dissatisfaction.

Your organization’s value proposition – the evaluation by the market of the level of quality that they can expect to receive from you and the price they have to pay for it becomes one of your most important assets.  I have been asked by several companies to help them craft a value proposition.  What they mean is to draft an ad that will tell buyers what they can expect from the quality of their offerings and the price that they will have to pay to get those offerings.  And, too often this crafted value proposition bears no reality to the one that the market has already formed based on your actions.  This creates a value gap – one that will surely damage your ability to both attract and retain customers.

It’s well worth while for management to get a firm and realistic understanding of what their value propositions are.  Note the plural form.  You will have a value proposition for each product/market that you serve.  Delta has a value proposition for its business travelers, its vacation travelers, and any other segments that it serves.  Each value proposition is based on different quality factors that are important to the product/market that is targeted.  Best in market organizations carefully manage their value propositions because they understand that they send a compelling buying signal to their targeted product/markets.  Traditional marketing is not equipped to do this.  Value is the DNA of Six Sigma Marketing and only SSM has the tools to measure and manage it.

Do you know what your value propositions are?  If not, you’d better check.

For a complimentary copy of my new book: Best in Market: The New Imperative for U.S. Manufacturing go to www.6sigmarketing.com and download a free pdf version from the contact page.

From a functionalist perspective, pricing decisions would probably be housed in Finance.  Doing so places a strong emphasis on the economic impact of price.  In some companies, the Finance area and the Sales area are continually at war over how to manage price.  For example, in one client company, price programs were sent out to dealers on a monthly basis, much to the consternation of the dealers.  This was done to create a “pinch point” for “slow buyers”.  But dealers would quote a customer on a piece of equipment and that price might change within a week.  Dealers would go back to the Finance people and ask if they could honor the first price that was quoted – sometimes they could and sometimes they couldn’t.  The confusion that this type of pricing policy creates may actually outweigh its stated objective of forcing a customer to buy.

In this same company, the Finance area was under pressure from top management that had to show sales results on a monthly basis.  Sales would increase but profits would not.  That apparently did not matter (at least not this month).

In those organizations competing on a value basis, pricing decisions take on a new relevance.  Value is the interaction between quality and price.  Buyers assess the quality in your products or services and then ask a simple but incredibly important question – “Is it worth it?”  They are doing the cognitive calculus that assesses the value of the purchase – the interaction between quality and price.  Within the context of the value equation price has to work with quality to create a competitive value proposition.  Clearly, moving price up and down to set up “pinch points” confounds the value message that you are sending.  One month you might be sending a message of high value while the next a message of poor value.  A value driven organization has to marry the pricing function with the quality process.

There are a couple other issues.  First, price is often a qualifier – your price must be in a range with the price of your competitors.  The magnitude of that range will vary from product/market to product/market.  A price outside of that range (on the high side) will disqualify you from consideration.  Fortunately, the efficacy of your quality/pricing decision can be evaluated by comparing your value proposition with that of your competitors.

Second, since value will vary from product/market to product/market, the pricing functions will have to take this into account.  Market focused organizations have structured around the targeted markets that they choose to serve.  This put the pricing decision in the hands of the market manager, if not completely, certainly in a strong advisory role.

In an organization that embraces Six Sigma Marketing and is competing on a value basis, the pricing decision is greatly impacted by the Six Sigma Marketer.  This is the individual that is in charge of the organization’s value proposition within a targeted product/market.  Pricing decisions must be coordinated with the other areas of the organization, but since the organization’s value proposition is one of its most important assets, it must be servant to the strategy within the product/market.  Absent this decision making capacity, the organization’s competitive value proposition and market share objectives are jeopardized.

For a complimentary copy of my new book: Best in Market: The New Imperative for U.S. Manufacturing go to the contact page at www.6sigmarketing.com and download the pdf version.

• “High quality and low costs are no guarantee for profits.”
• “..in many industries, achieving high quality and lean operations have become the price of admission to compete in those industries.  By themselves, these approaches are no longer sufficiently strong sources of uniqueness to assure a firm’s business sustainability.”
• “..improving profitability is not just about reducing costs.  Reducing cost is only one way to improve profitability.  Rather than using approaches such as lean to simply reduce costs, consider how revenues may also be increased.”

Let me take a look at each of these points and offer an additional amplification or two.

High quality and low costs do not automatically translate into a strong value proposition especially if buyers do not see the effects of the low costs.  Cost is an internal term while price is an external one.  Many companies take lower costs to the bottom line by way of higher margins leaving an unchanged price.  Value is the relationship between the organization’s quality offering and the price that buyers have to pay to get that quality.  In other words, high quality at a high price may not be an attractive value proposition to buyers in targeted product/markets.  Moreover, higher quality has to be in line with how the targeted product/markets define quality.  Conformance to internally generated standards that are divorced from the market does not mean that the organization is providing higher quality.

His second point is one that I have written about on numerous occasions.  Because of the emphasis on quality, higher quality, in many markets is a qualifier, a “must have” or “table stakes”.   If you can’t provide the minimum quality, as defined by the buyers in the targeted product/market, you won’t qualify and penetration into the product/market will either be limited or non-existent.  In many industries it is hard to buy something of poor quality.  Competition has elevated the quality hurdle and if you can’t jump that hurdle you can’t run in the race.

Third, and a point that will take on even greater importance in future days is the need to focus not only on cost reduction but also on revenue and market share growth.  Neither lean nor Six Sigma, in my opinion, can readily make the transition from an internal focus on cost reduction to an external focus on markets and value creation.  This will be a huge challenge for many organizations that are product focused and do not have the culture, mindset, or tools to identify, create and deliver value to their targeted product/markets.  The simple application of lean or Six Sigma to the revenue side of the business may result in more efficient marketing activities but will it result in more effective activities.  The difference is a sales process that costs less but may not fill the funnel with qualified targets.

Six Sigma Marketing (SSM) is a fact – based disciplined approach for growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value.  Because the DNA of SSM is value, it recognizes the interaction between quality and price, the latter impacted by costs.  Because value is the best leading indicator of market share, SSM recognizes that market share dominance will accrue to the enterprise that can measure and manage value better than its competitors.  It further recognizes that value is product/market specific and that no single definition of value applies to all buyers.

Mr. Anderson concludes with a compelling question that all organizations must address.

“How will your firm avoid becoming homogenized into sameness with the competition?  What makes companies truly competitive are their unique advantages.  If your advantages become diluted or copied, how will you (sic) preserve your uniqueness?”

My answer to this critical question is simple  – become the superior value provider which will make your firm best in market and keep a close eye on your competitive value proposition.

For a complimentary copy of my new book: Best in Market: The New Imperative for U.S. Manufacturing go to www.6sigmarketing.com and download a pdf version from the contact page.

During the planning session this belief was not questioned.  It was simply accepted.  After all, they had once been a dominant player in the industry so that there was no real need to question the belief.  Because they were deploying Six Sigma Marketing to drive the planning process we were collecting market information not only about the client but also the different competitors.  The analysis revealed a couple of belief busting pieces of information.  Perhaps the most important was that they were not a challenger but a follower.  They were not the number two in the product/market but had slipped to a number four or five.  New entrants that were derided as “not worth paying attention to” had supplanted them.  Their quality had fallen and the price they were charging, based on their belief that they were number two, could not sustain a value proposition that was competitive.

In this same organization “lore” focused on a definition of quality and value that was limited to the product and product features.  “Lore” ignored the other factors such as product support, technical support, field and shop repair services, warranty support that the market included in their value definition.  “Lore”, in other words, blinded the organization to the realities of the market place.

This is an organization that relied on “lore” to develop its competitive strategy.  “Lore” is a traditional knowledge or belief.  As a youngster I was a member of Indian Guides that relied heavily on tribal lore to nourish its culture and belief system.  It’s fine for Indian Guides but “lore” has no place in corporate decision making.

“Lore” is the result of unchallenged beliefs that are allowed to continue and grow over time.  They are especially strong in companies that do not allow new knowledge into the decision making process.  Often “lore” is championed by someone who was once involved in the situation that created the “lore” and has the power to repel any challenges to it. It is particularly pernicious because it is like trying to compete by looking backwards.  It ignores the changing dynamics of market competition and the changing dynamics of market behavior.

Six Sigma Marketing (SSM) is an antidote to “lore” as a guiding information source.  SSM is a fact – based, disciplined approach to growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value.  I emphasize the phrase “fact – based”.    SSM is based on the VOM (voice of the market) and how it defines quality and value and how it assesses the organization’s competitive value proposition.  It makes the buyer, current and potential, a partner in identifying, creating and delivering value.  Organizations that rely on “lore” and have no established link to the markets they serve tend to view value as an abstraction.  Moreover, quality can easily turn into conformance, having no real relationship to buyers.

Symptoms of “lore” can be found in several pat phrases such as”

• “We’ve always done it this way”
• “Why change a winning formula?”
• “Let’s dance with the one who brought us to the party”
• “This company was built on ….”

The new global environment and the competitive pressures on value identification, creation and delivery will place a greater emphasis on facts about your targeted product/markets.  What worked in the past may not work in the future.  What was right then may not be right now.  If your organization relies on “lore” it’s time to replace it with real information about your markets and products.

For a complimentary copy of my new book: Best in Market: The New Imperative for U.S. Manufacturing go to www.6sigmarketing.com and download the pdf version from the contact page.

The article promises the following:

• Increased customer satisfaction can lead to increased market share and profitability.
• There are several ways for organizations to link satisfaction data to financial performance data.
• Organizations can choose their methods depending on the amount and type of data available.

Alas, there is nothing new here.  The article lays out a conceptual argument linking satisfaction with market share growth and profitability.   Unfortunately, neither in the article nor in the real world, is there any empirical evidence that shows a satisfied customer is a profitable customer.  This is what I call the “contented customer theory” which may make some intuitive sense but folds like a house of cards in the light of reality.

The article quickly devolves into a discussion of research design with measurement implications leaving the reader asking a ton of questions.  The basis of the article is summed up in a single sentence:

“The focus of this article includes variables presumed (emphasis added) to be the result of internal and external satisfaction, such as profitability, revenues, market share and share of wallet.”

Well there you have it.  Satisfaction is presumed to be a leading indicator or correlated with factors such as market share, revenues, etc. when it is not.  The author ignores a lot of research showing that satisfaction is not linked to market performance.  At best, satisfaction is a good transactional measure.  By that I mean it provides an assessment of how well the organization has performed on any number of customer interactions such as a sales experience, parts purchase, service work, billing inquiry, etc.

What the Six Sigma and quality community as well as the marketing profession should be focusing on is value – customer value.  This has been shown to be the best leading indicator of market share and top line revenue gains.  Check out Brad Gale’s book, Managing Customer Value or some of the articles written by Frederick Reichhold that provide a solid empirical foundation for eschewing the satisfaction – market share linkage.  In Best in Market: The New Imperative for U.S. Manufacturing (see end of blog for a complimentary copy) I detail the empirical research of Magnus Soderlund and Mats Vilgon who show that satisfaction has no linkage to market performance.  It’s well worth looking at.

As I indicated earlier, customer value is the best leading indicator of market share and top line revenue gains.  Enterprises that seek a systematic approach to market growth need to switch from customer satisfaction as their strategic metric to customer value.  But since measurement alone does not guarantee share growth, the enterprise will have to learn how to manage value to grow share.

The DNA of Six Sigma Marketing (SSM) is value.  SSM uses a fact based disciplined approach for growing share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value.  It is a systematic approach that replaces the hit-and-miss guessing, agenda driven approaches that are in place in many organizations by providing a strong accountability to the real role of marketing which is to drive business growth.

If your organization is still coupled to satisfaction and believes that the way to build market share is to grow satisfaction, start asking some hard questions about the satisfaction – share linkage.  Start by asking “What proof do you have that investing in satisfaction actually grows market share or revenues?”  If there is one single thing you can do to jump start your growth in market share that is learn to measure and manage the value you are providing to your targeted markets.

For a complimentary copy of my new book: Best in Market: The New Imperative for U.S. Manufacturing go to the contact page of www.6sigmarketing.com and download the pdf version.