ValueSpace: Winning the Battle for Market Leadership [Hardcover]

Banwari Mittal (Author), Jagdish N. Sheth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 2001

This text describes a value-based approach to achieving market dominance called ValueSpace. Using results from a research study the authors show that value is the "missing link" in achieving customer loyalty, and that the three main components of customer value are performance, price and service.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In today's hyperkinetic marketplace, businesses must constantly be on the lookout for ways to separate themselves from their competitors. Banwari Mittal and Jagdish N. Sheth believe the best method is delivering superior value to customers, and in ValueSpace, named for the term they coined to describe the total corporate package top companies create to do just that, they outline specific moves that help leading firms earn and maintain their stellar reputations. Mittal and Sheth, business professors and consultants, thoroughly studied 11 superlative businesses before identifying the three components that all rely upon to provide such value: performance (ensuring products and services work as advertised), price (setting fair and reasonable rates), and personalization (making it easy for customers to deal with them). They then show how each of their leading corporations shine in these areas. AutoNation, for example, initiated "no haggle" pricing at dealerships to ease a common anxiety among car buyers; 3M operates rock quarries so only the highest quality minerals are produced for roofing shingles; American Express is available around the clock, every day of the week, to merchants with problems. The authors helpfully conclude with solid suggestions for adapting these ideas and others from their spotlighted companies--which also include Caterpillar, Xerox, UPS, PPG, Hilton, Sysco, Rosenbluth International, and Fossil--into operations where such "valuespace" is lacking. --Howard Rothman

From the Back Cover

Value-creation strategies of Fortune's most admired corporations

A New Paradigm for Achieving Market Dominance­­Built on the Proven Precepts of Today's Customer Value Leaders

ValueSpace details a dynamic new approach for making your company a market leader, succeeding at levels enjoyed by today's most value-based, customer-centric organizations. It takes you where the true customer value is created­­inside the walls of today's top value-producing firms­­to outline a new program for strengthening the weak links in your customer value chain and achieving market dominance.

Based on a top-to-bottom study conducted by the prestigious, Cambridge-based Marketing Science Institute, this timely book introduces you to:

• Building blocks and drivers designed to create superior performance, price, and personalization­­the 3 key components for creating customer value
• Techniques to enhance loyalty among your existing customer base­­and create loyalty among newer customers
• Case studies and executive interviews from market leaders including UPS, Xerox, Hilton, and others

ValueSpace comprises a hands-on, comprehensive battle plan for transforming your organization into a year-in, year-out market leader. Let it show you how today's most successful corporations are winning the battle by giving customers, shareholders, and employees the same exceptional value­­and emerging the market share winners.

"To understand how market-leading companies create customer valuespace, we researched 11 companies with reputations for delivering exemplary customer value. For each company, we researched published information about its operations, visited the company headquarters, and interviewed senior executives to understand their efforts at value creation. What we learned, from the interviews and from our reflections, we report in this book."

­­Ban Mittal and Jag Sheth, from Chapter 1

UPS ... Xerox ... Caterpillar ... Among today's foremost global corporations, these members of Fortune's most-admired list have established reputations for combining exceptional customer service with impressive profit margins. ValueSpace goes behind the scenes of these and other customer loyalty leaders, discussing strategy with top executives­­and observing those strategies in action­­to construct a blueprint for reaching the top in today's ultra-competitive, global business environment.

What emerges is a portrait of corporate success, of gaining maximum value from each corporate resource and passing that value along­­to customers, shareholders, and employees alike.

"Under the '16X Quality Improvement' program, we literally eliminated repetitive product failures. Now we are attacking random failures with Six Sigma methodology, continuing to drive defect rates so low that no competing machine will even come close."

­­James E. Despain, Vice President, Caterpillar

Decision makers at every level can look to these illuminating interviews and analyses to discover specific answers and proven solutions, including:

• 9 organizational processes any company can adopt to drive the 3Ps of customer value­­performance, price, and personalization
• ValueSpace Expanders­­Value-added offerings that go beyond the 3Ps to enhance your service and success
• Techniques to create a culture of innovation that encourages employee empowerment­­and increases customer value

Customers don't enter the marketplace seeking just a quality product, or just prompt service. Customers enter the marketplace seeking superior value across the board! Turn to ValueSpace to learn how today's value leaders reached the top, and how they have positioned themselves to be the value leaders of tomorrow­­planning for and implementing valuespace for customers now and into the future.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 265 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies (May 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071375279
• ISBN-13: 978-0071375276
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,988,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Eye-opener on Business Strategy, September 10, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: ValueSpace: Winning the Battle for Market Leadership (Hardcover)

A few years ago, I read a New York Times bestseller, The Discipline of the Market Leaders, by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema. Since its publication, I have heard a lot of managers quoting from it. In this bestseller, authors Treacy and Wiersema describe three strategies: product leadership, operational excellence, and customer intimacy. My fellow executives translate these as product, price, and service, and we all generally agree that to compete, "You have to be good at two, and be excellent at the third."

Last week I read ValueSpace by Mittal & Sheth. It changed my interpretation of Treacy and Wiersema's book. I realized how wrong every manager's understanding of Treacy and Wiersema's book had been. The confusion is between the Marketspace and Valuespace. Treacy/Wiersema's book tells us WHAT market to compete in (Marketspace); Mittal/Sheth's book tells us HOW to compete in the chosen market (ValueSpace). Their discussion of this distinction in Chapter 12 was an eye-opener. They also do a great job of tying up the theme of their book with the themes of other business bestsellers, such as Tom Peter's In Search of Excellence and Collins and Porras' Built to Last.

I highly recommend this book to anyone concerned with business strategy. If you have read other bestsellers on business strategy, you can't afford to miss this one. I only wish the authors had made Chapter 12 as their first chapter. . My suggestion would be to read Chapter 12 first. Then the rest of the book would be doubly meaningful.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Author Response to FAQs, July 10, 2001

By 

banwari mittal (Cincinnati, OH, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ValueSpace: Winning the Battle for Market Leadership (Hardcover)

.

ValueSpace? What is it? What does it do for my business?

We are constantly asked these questions since the book's release. They are best answered by us in the preface, excerpted below.

PREFACE

ValueSpace -we hold it in utmost admiration.

ValueSpace-it is to us the be-all and the end-all of all business activity; the only purpose of all businesses. It is the only justifiable goal of all reengineering, organizational renewal, entrepreneurship and corporate innovation. And it is the only path for sustained growth; for winning the battle for market leadership. It is the space where true market value is created. For shareholders; for employees; and, most of all, for customers. We present in this book a blueprint on how companies can build enduring ValueSpace for their customers.

This book is at the intersection of our two long-held obsessions: As university professors, we view ourselves as lifelong learners; and for decades, we have been students of customer behavior on the one hand and business organizations on the other. We have studied theories of customer behavior-indeed created some of them ourselves--, and for decades, we have observed, analyzed, and written about business processes, precepts, and practices. In this book, we bring these two streams together-our knowledge of customers and our knowledge of businesses. This is our ValueSpace for you, the reader: Uniquely in the current sea of business advice books, we combine the customer and business perspectives.

We set out to understand what constitutes value for the customer and how companies can create it. With financial support from the Marketing Science Institute (a Cambridge-based nonprofit research organization), .. we studied 11 Fortune's Most Admired Companies. ... Our framework, comprising the components of ValueSpace and its drivers, is quintessential-no matter what else you do or do not do, you must create these value components. Our framework is enduring-it is not the "project of the month"; long after the current fads have vanished, you must still build the value components we describe. Our framework is universal-it applies to all companies: manufacturing and service; small business or global enterprises, business-to-business or business-to-consumer; physical or digital; dot-com or not-com.

We intend this book to be a blueprint for thought as well as practice. We present conceptual framework to help you plan; we provide a self-audit form that you can use to assess your company's current standing in the ValueSpace; and we present case histories, stories of the most admired companies, and insights from executive interviews that you would find both inspirational and actionable. It is a hands-on guide to launching your journey into the customer ValueSpace.

Our own journey has been fascinating; we have learned a lot-from the Most Admired Companies we studied; from the executive interviews we did specifically for this research; and from thousands of conversations over the years with consumers, mangers, and corporate leaders just like yourselves. It is a pleasure and privilege to share with you our view of Customer ValueSpace, and our total fascination with it.

(End of Preface) * * *

VALUESPACE FOR BUSINESS EXECUTIVES

How You Can Use the Book:

Knowledge is the foundation for all strategy and sound executive action. This book will give you:

a. A Perspective: A framework for thinking about your customers' ValueSpace, and indeed about your business itself.

b. A Strategic Planning Tool. The book contains an Audit self-survey both for nine ValueSpace components and 40 driver processes. You can use this tool to assess your company's current standing and then plan action to move forward in the ValueSpace.

c. As an Account Planning Tool. For each major customer, you can identify the gaps in the ValueSpace you can fill.

d. As an Executive Training Tool. As a platform for Executive Training, the book can inform, guide, and frame the continuing education experiences in corporate universities and in-house Executive training centers.

Once you adopt the ValueSpace thinking, the potential to explore avenues of value creation are limited only by your creativity and vision.

* * * * * * *

SELECTED EXCERPTS

Value, not money, is the basic currency of all human interaction. When we meet someone, we try to quickly assess how long would it be worth our while to be talking to that person. If an incoming phone call shows up on our called ID, we promptly decide if we would gain anything by taking the call at that time. If we get 10 letters in the mail, we look through them and choose to open only those that we expect to contain some information of value to us. This is even more true for marketplace exchanges.... ...

Companies that invent new values such as these possess certain traits. They observe customers real close. They dig customer need to its essential core. And they keep their eyes on a singular target: creating far fetched new ValueSpace for the customer. These traits indeed lead a business to mold its own self-concept in the customer's image. Rosenbluth redefines the very nature of its business as "business interaction management." And 3M comes to view itself, instead of being a maker of masking tapes, abrasive papers, and adhesives, as a provider of bonding, protection, and masking solutions.....

This reinvention of oneself as a corporate being, this customer-centered adoption of a new self-identity, the constant contemplation of the customer desires -this is what it takes to invent unparalleled ValueSpace for the customer. This is what it takes to win the battle for market leadership. This is what it takes to thrive.

* * * * * * *

IN CONCLUSION

We hope you enjoy the book. We will certainly be grateful for your feedback. You can send it to us at [e-mail].

THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple but Solid Guide for Creating Customer Value, August 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: ValueSpace: Winning the Battle for Market Leadership (Hardcover)

I read the book purely out of curiosity. I co-manage a high tech company so at first I was disappointed since none of the high tech companies are included in the book. But I started reading it anyway because I wanted to read what some of the famous companies like Caterpillar and UPS are doing to gain market-leadership. Although some of the company stories get to be tedious, most are useful and fun to read. And even though none is from a high tech company, it gave me ideas for my own business. Now whenever I am faced with a customer problem, I would be thinking of one or the other story to come up with my own innovative ways of solving the customer's problem and to meet his or her value requirements. Beyond the stories, what I found useful is the customer value framework the authors offer. At first, it looks deceptively basic and simple; but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed valuable. Its simplicity is a good thing. Authors claim that it is comprehensive - I am not sure yet, but so far every value creation activity I could think I could fit into the framework. And I could apply it to my company. Indeed the framework is applicable to any company in any industry. The book offers nothing in the way of quick-fix. And when you finish reading it, don't expect to run with excitement, eager to implement something. Rather, the book's framework gives you a template to use in long term, cool-headed, planning. It does not matter if you are a small business or a large business, and if you are a established company or a start up, the book's framework will be a handy tool for constantly thinking about various avenues of creating "unusual and complete" customer value.