The New Market Leaders: Who's Winning and How in the Battle for Customers [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Fred Wiersema (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2001

Managers are finding it hard to attract and retain customers in the on-line economy. Fresh models are needed to determine what it takes to prosper when customers are the most precious resource. This book does just that by examining the unorthodox companies dominating the market and revolutionizing business. Fred Wiersema explains why traditional methods, such as size of the company or total sales, are no longer adequate markers of a company's prowess or future prospects. By providing new sales growth and market value indexes this book shows readers how to recognize the movers and shakers in the industry.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wiersema (coauthor of the bestselling The Discipline of Market Leaders) offers insights into customer service strategies that win. Based on a six-year study of 5,000 global companies, this book examines 100 of these companies in detail, including General Electric, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Intel and AOL Time Warner, arguing that executives and managers can no longer blame the Internet or the New Economy for their customer service failings. Wiersema finds that the most successful companies focus on being at the forefront of new technology and, most importantly, try to learn from other winning companies. Top companies also view "customer loyalty as a fragile condition that requires fastidious attention." For example, McDonald's focuses on customers who eat McDonald's food several times a week, knowing that any new offerings on the menu have to appeal to this core 20% of their customers in order to succeed. Similarly, AOL retains 97% of its customers by simplifying its billing. The book is particularly insightful when discussing Internet companies, including Amazon and Yahoo. Clearheaded and practical, Wiersema's book will be valuable to managers, executives and anyone focused on improving customer service. Agent, Helen Rees. (June)Forecast: While this book falls into an arguably overpublished niche, Wiersema's track record (The Discipline of Market Leaders appeared on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, and remained at number one on Business Week's list for five months), along with a 20-city radio satellite tour, should help it break through the noise.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Business strategist, consultant, and author Wiersema (The Discipline of Market Leaders) reiterates what others have said before: owing to increasingly crowded and competitive markets, market leaders face demanding challenges to attract and retain customers. Through company reports, regulatory filings, business publications, and the Internet, the author tracked thousands of companies and identified 100 top market leaders, from a variety of industries, who generated an average annual return of 48 percent for their investors. Out of this group, he profiles several, explains what made them so profitable, analyzes how they outperformed their peers, and discusses how they cope with the new realities of customer scarcity. Wiersema's extensive research started in the late 1980s and ended May 31, 2000. Since then, however, increases in U.S. interest rates and the economy's dramatic slowdown have changed the state of global stock markets and further exacerbated a reduction in spending. The question of who the "new market leaders" are has become moot. As a result, this book is already outdated. A marginal purchase. Belinda Wise, Nassau Community Coll., Garden City, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 262 pages
• ISBN-10: 0743204654
• ASIN: B0000645WU
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,271,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Study of Those Growing Market Share and Stock Price, May 24, 2001

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The New Market Leaders: Who's Winning and How in the Battle for Customers (Hardcover)

Dr. Fred Wiersema (of The Discipline of Market Leaders) returns with a look at how the disciplines of becoming a market leader have evolved since the earlier book was written. This book is much better done in terms of analysis than the prior one, and comes closer to capturing the state of the art. Basically, Dr. Wiersema argues that the most effective companies are now gaining customers by employing more than one of the original disciplines (customer relationships, having cutting-edge innovative offerings, and being operationally superb). The book's main weakness is that by selecting companies based on a high market capitalization/sales ratio the book strays from a focus on finding companies that are the best at adding customers and making money serving them. As a result, some pretty marginal companies made it into the study group (Priceline is one example).

The companies in the study are compared to the Fortune Most Admired List. The companies outlined here are much more consistently interesting than the aging behemoths losing market share that the Most Admired list carries. Looking at 5009 companies, 640 were identified as being high in gaining market share (growing much faster than competitors) and in stock price (having a higher market capitalization/sales ratio than competitors). The top names you will recognize: Cisco, GE, Microsoft, Intel, Yahoo!, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Oracle, Nokia, and AOL Time Warner. If you follow technology stocks, most of the rest will also be known to you. These include companies whose stocks have fallen mightily like JDS Uniphase, Dell, QUALCOMM, Hewlett Packard, Lucent, PMC-Sierra, and At Home.

The book makes many observations about the new economy. The basic point is that technology has permitted such substantial productivity gains that there is a lot of excess capacity with low costs. As a result, what companies have to manage is getting customers. Those are the scarce resource. Well, I always thought that you had to start with customers. Peter Drucker once said that the purpose of a business is to create a customer. What does seem different now is that people go to greater lengths to add customers.

Dr. Wiersema says that new aspects include: (1) creating a larger-than-life market presence; (2) seeking out customers who stretch capabilities; (3) ensuring that the customer obtains full benefit from your offerings; and (4) acting more boldly (this often means having outsized ambitions). Obviously, the drawback of this approach is that if the business environment turns out differently than you forecast (the norm, not the exception) you are likely to crash and burn. How do you feel about that?

Customers are then segmented by the degree of their preference for being self-reliant versus ready for help, and their eagerness to change versus their preference for stability. These scales turn into the searchers (self-reliant, eager to change), collaborators (ready for help, eager to change), streamliners (self-reliant, seeking stability), and the delegators (seeking stability and ready for help).

You are encouraged to keep enticing the searchers (Yahoo! is the case study); reassure the streamliners (EMC is the case study); free up the delegators (Solectron is the case study); and team up with collaborators (UPS is the case study). I found the case studies to be pretty superficial compared to what I know about these companies.

The book also has a good discussion of what kind of internal environment is needed to act boldly and with enough unity of purpose to succeed. You need a process for facilitating change, an agreement on shared ambitions, clear goals, and knowledge of where you stand.

Your mantra should be "customers, customers, customers."

The book's main weaknesses relate to not considering enough about how to gain market share profitably (any idiot can gain market share if they don't care what it costs, and have enough resources), what the emerging state of the art is (the examples here are slightly out-of-date and incomplete), and an overfocus on the customer-facing dimension of gaining customers. That last point probably sounds strange. More innovation in getting customers comes today in creating new business models for serving customers than in marketing, sales activities, or new technologies. This book missed that point.

Compared to the recent raft of quantitative studies published by Harvard Business School Press, this is by far the best of the lot despite its weaknesses. Read this book, and you will benefit by focusing on more relevant role models and understanding more about how you have to reshape yourself to compete for market share gains.

May your profit and personal growth always exceed your boldest dreams!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How to win against fragmented markets and customer scarcity., April 17, 2003

By 

Harinath Thummalapalli (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Market Leaders: Who's Winning and How in the Battle for Customers (Hardcover)

The value of customer service is known to almost every one of us. So, what is new about this book? More detail on how to win customers in these days of fragmented markets (mass media can't help us anymore) and customer scarcity (it's really product/service glut). The author studied the best 5,000 companies in the world and came up with some valuable information that we can copy from these market leaders.

The author starts out by establishing the evaluation criteria that got a company into the study and he coins two new terms to describe these criteria - sales growth index and market value index (details of these terms on pages 7-13 of the book).

The author then summarizes the industries in which all these companies fall under - Consumer Products, Media and Entertainment, Heavy Industry, Technology Products, Technology Services, Financial Services, and Other Industries (healthcare, consumer services, and other).

A whole chapter is then dedicated to why we are feeling a scarcity of customers. The author names the reasons for this sitaution (new realities) - competitors proliferate, all secrets are open secrets, innovation is universal, information overwhelmes and depreciates, easy growth makes hard times, customers have less time than ever. He does a good job of justifying these obvious reasons with some supporting data.

So, if the new realities are that harsh, how are the market leaders managing? The author describes FOUR STRATEGIES that seem to work for these market leaders in overcoming the obvious difficulties in these days of customer scarcity. The four strategies being -

1. being the best and showing it
2. the customers who can make or break you
3. making sure customers 'get it'
4. outsized ambition.

To support why the market leaders have adopted these strategies, the author then labels all customers as falling into four categories and spends 4 chapters explaining how to work each of these groups

1. Searchers (eager to change and self-reliant)
2. Collaborators (eager to change and ready for help)
3. Streamliners (seeking stability and self-reliant)
4. Delegators (seeking stability and ready for help)

The rest of the book consists of some case studies to reinforce the above mentioned concepts and ideas. Overall, a simple book to read and valuable information considering the source data (the top 5,000 companies in the world). The criteria that the author used to come up with this list does seem reasonable. The best part of the book is that this book was originally written before the dot com bubble burst. If the author's claims are true, the companies short-listed by using his criteria survived the burst (except a small percentage attributable to other factors)! We don't know if the author's claims are true that his list didn't change much (as the book was published after the burst even though he wrote it before the burst). But if they are true, it is valuable information for any business that plans on emerging from this gloomy economy as one of the market leaders. The ideas presented meet the common sense test, so we are following these ideas quite a bit in our new company to achieve success.

The book is definitely worthwhile to look at. There are so many books in this niche (business help) that it can be overwhelming for anyone to make any sense out of this glut. But this book is really such a quick read and the concepts are so simple and small in number that I think the 2-3 hours time spent is time well spent. Good luck and I hope you get something good out of this book!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not a lot of meat, December 19, 2001

By 

Robert Kelly (Santee, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Market Leaders: Who's Winning and How in the Battle for Customers (Hardcover)

I loved Discipline of Market Leaders. As a business owner I read and listen to a lot of books and Discipline of Market leaders was great. Unfortunately this follow up book by only one of the authors didn't have much to offer. Lots and lots of words but not much being said. There are a few nuggets of knowledge, as there are with most books, but unlike the Discipline of Market leaders that I went through 3 times and even took notes while going through it, this new book was just short of a waste of time. Wish I could say it was better...