Delivering differentiation: Building winning enterprises

John Edwards

European Management Journal, 1997, vol. 15, issue 1, 79-91

Abstract: Growth is gradually replacing lowest cost as the main driver for many businesses, and customer focus is heralded, in the management press and in many corporate positioning statements, as a substantial contributor to achieving this growth. Yet customer focus, however sophisticated, cannot simply be bolted on to a business, if the organisation's aim is to differentiate itself through customised services and offerings, while retaining - even improving - operational efficiency. Time and again, the promise of such customer focus fails in the market or, at best, delivers only as a result of grossly inefficient patching together of systems and processes behind the scenes. In this article, John Edwards differentiates between such disconnected customer focus, and a state he calls customer-driven - an alignment of adaptable delivery processes behind the creation of customer offerings at the market level.

Date: 1997
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