MIT Sloan Management Review

Most companies segment their markets by customer demographics or product characteristics and differentiate their offerings by adding features and functions. But the consumer has a different view of the marketplace. He simply has a job to be done and is seeking to “hire” the best product or service to do it. Marketers must adopt that perspective.

Serendipity is not a strategy, yet that’s the extent of most companies’ innovation planning. The importance of innovation to a company’s future is unquestionable. Then why do so few companies have a process for it? The authors of a September 2006 working paper, Crafting Organizational Innovation Processes, address that question.

The paradigm of brand is worn out. Marketing and strategy must now be about shaping the competitive ecosystem.

In January 2005, responding to a class action suit, Netflix Inc., the world’s leading delivery-based DVD-rental company, publicly acknowledged a policy it had practiced since it launched in 1999.

The Internet marketplace allows companies to produce and sell a far wider range of products than ever before. This profoundly changes both consumer behavior and business strategy.

The textbook approach to satisfying customers is simply to give the people what they want — and a little bit more. The trick, then, is to know what it is that customers want.

Too much familiarity with customers can backfire, but engaging them in multisided conversations, or “polylogues,” can manage the risks and get better results.

The growing popularity of cell phones and other hand-held mobile devices has opened up new marketing possibilities.

With increased competition and globally maturing markets, relationship marketing has emerged as the new mantra. Although companies are successfully using customer satisfaction to create closer and more profitable relationships with customers, the myopic pursuit of such relationships often backfires. Consider a U.S.-

Unlike static demographic and psychographic techniques, identity marketing taps into the multilayered and fluid nature of who customers are and who they want to be.

The sale of branded products through unauthorized channels is a growing problem for suppliers. A three-pronged approach can help them fight back.

Green marketing hasn’t fulfilled its initial promise, but companies can be more effective with it if they realize that a one-size-fits-all strategy doesn’t exist. Consumers swear that they want green products, but in checkout aisles, most revert to more common requirements — convenience, availability, price, quality and performance. The authors show how companies today can choose among several different green strategies targeted to specific customer segments.

In spite of the dot-com implosion, Web-based businesses continue growing at a fast clip. Indeed, the Internet is now extending its reach beyond sales of just books, music, PCs and travel services.

Do big discount strategies really prompt new customers to buy more items, more often? Or does promotional pricing actually undermine attempts to increase future spending among existing customers? A recent large-scale study of a U.S. catalog retailer investigated how discount promotion strategies ultimately affect the bottom-line business.

A decade ago, multinational companies seemed poised to dominate in China. Today that picture has changed. Whereas IBM, HP and Compaq had quickly won more than 50% of the personal computer market, for example, Chinese company Legend Group Ltd. is now the number one supplier. Research in 10 industries over the last 10 years reveals a pitched battle of competencies between multinational and local players and points to five strategies that can help multinationals regain the edge.

Every company lives in fear of competitors that offer seemingly similar products for much lower prices. Dealing with such discounters is no simple matter, as Hewlett-Packard, May Department Stores, Salomon Brothers and others have discovered. Nevertheless, various strategies — ignoring or blocking the competitor, strengthening your value proposition or even strategic retreat — can help slow or even stop the low-end competitor without destroying the industry’s profit margins.

Even the best companies let their customers down sometimes, and many disappoint frequently. The authors lay much of the blame for this on companies’ obsession with uniqueness and differentiation. According to their analysis, companies are too quick to dismiss “category benefits” as a source of advantage. They explain why companies such as Toyota, Cemex, Orange, Medtronic and Sony are successful because they are simply better at offering what customers really want.

A four-year study of Japanese business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce initiatives reveals the innovative ways Japanese corporations exploit traditional aspects of Japanese business and consumer retailing — specifically, the consumer’s preference for paying with cash and the willingness of corporations to form cooperative alliances (the keiretsu model) — to further develop the

A focus on design —which translates to a focus on customers’ true needs and unarticulated aspirations — ultimately creates better-informed, more nimble companies.

Customer-focused transformation is producing long-term, sustainable growth through a systemic, tested process. The approach gets all employees collaborating to identify the outcomes that customers need — and to help them get there.