I have a question concerning on using of business strategy or customer strategy by product group according to the purpose. Our current customer working on a project has run a long-established mid-sized company implementing a customer-oriented management. A business growth has been slow and the sales has been increased slightly. However, I believe that the company has survived until now thanks to customer-oriented management. They are recently working on changing our business strategy (by product group), but it is not going as planned. As an alternative, they are thinking about applying a customer-oriented strategy (product group unit) business strategy or an integrated type strategy. In the case of applying the integrated strategy, what kind of system would be good to take on? Good means realistic. I am thinking about identifying the level of customers, and respond individually to those of higher-level while conducting business strategies (by product group) for the customers of remaining levels. Is there any customer strategy with a (business group) business strategy behind that? I know that the latter is better as a CRM strategy, but I'm not confident.
A: A business strategy centered on the products may be suitable for the company with a strong "product appeal". The product life cycle of mature markets have been shortened, and it is doubtful that a company will lost in business even if there is temporary prosperity. The period that ideas which relied on product strength is over in the 1980s of the bubble period. Many of the "excellent companies" since the 1990s have the need to pay attention to the fact that companies have shifted their focus to customer centrism. That is obvious from the example of the weakening of manufacturing companies in Japan and the prosperity of mass retailers such as ASKUL or DELL makes it clear.
In a conventional business model where they organize the sales by product group, it can only satisfy a specific part of the customer's requests. In addition, what the customer is seeking for is not the "product itself" but is to "solve a problem" and attain the overall "satisfied service experiences". These are fundamental problems that cannot be solved by with the application of the "customer satisfaction management" such as by raising the question "Sell objects (goods) by each customer".
CRM cannot exist without a direction to think about a medium to long-term business strategy before the individual business strategy and position it based on the customer as its axis. It is true that this is an "integrated type", but it is a difficult task since the existence value of the enterprise itself is questioned. With the "Think big and start small" direction, it is first of all important to build success models in department units. Considering the high failure rate, you should create a pilot as a CRM success experience before cooperate reforms taking into consideration.
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