STRATEGY

Profitable growth is built on five pillars of strategic insight and innovation:

• Market insight/ intuition – from where will growth come and why? Is it/ can it be made to be profitable growth? Can we foreknow with a reasonable amount of certainty where to go after it, and pre-empt competition to service it?
• Segmentation - the most valuable skill for any manager to possess, and the hardest to learn. It is the process by which the needs and behaviour of different markets and/or customer groups are distinguished one from another, enabling actions to be taken and results measured
• Capabilities - what the company is good at embedded in its brand, people, technologies, knowledge, processes, scale or a combination of these, and how these capabilities might be applied to different segments
• Differentiation – finding ways to be different and more valuable in the eyes of customers is the life-blood of the company. The most successful companies continuously reinforce it by ‘layering’ advantage on advantage, leaving competitors struggling to keep up.
• Economic analysis - insight into where the business generates growth and profit and why, how that has been changing, and where future investments would deliver highest 'bang-for-buck'.

 

Understanding performance by segment