Trying to keep the customer satisfied

http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article3443207.ece


Rama Bijapurkar's  book titled

`Customer in the boardroom?'
- Crafting customer-based business strategy

Trying To Keep The

Customer Satisfied

Consumer might be the king, but in this Net Age, however, he remains a largely misunderstood king! No doubt, all and sundry in an enterprise fall head over heels to win over this king. How to win the trust of this king, who is without a kingdom but helps others to build a business empire? If the answer is as simple as it appears, every enterprise would have been a successful one. Understanding this king is easier said than done. While trying to understand their consumer, enterprises, often times, end up misreading them. Nevertheless, failures are squarely blamed on insensible consumer who can't appreciate the value for money the enterprise is offering him/her! To discover the truth, an enterprise has to do two things — take a deep look into itself and wear the hat of a consumer.

Consumers are, more often than not, treated in a generic way. What is missed in the process is the fact that consumer minds are not standard processing machines. No two minds think alike though they both yearn for the same product. Understanding different consumer minds which have unique processing capabilities is indeed the key to the success of a business enterprise in the evolving marketplace.

The author of the bestseller, We Are Like That Only, Rama Bijapurkar argues how an enterprise “can't be like that” if it were to win the consumer and yet remain profitable in an intensely competitive environment. Rather than focusing on “what a consumer does?”, it should train its eyes on “why a consumer does what he does?”

We have come a long way since the 1990s when the country opened up for liberalisation and globalisation. India, with an over a billion plus population, has been a star attraction since then. Its sheer size has excited many to make a beeline for India. If size can be translated into market, success is an assured thing. But it doesn't happen that way. “The demand side is not going to be easy to manage in the future as it has been in the past because there are far greater customer, competitor and environment challenges that the next trillion dollar of GDP (gross domestic product) will pose,” she points out in this book under review, Customer in the Boardroom — Crafting customer-based business strategy.

Rama Bijapurkar articulates with simple and yet insightful examples the need for the business to align with the consumer thinking. “One man's food is another man's poison,” she points to the adage. She goes on to reiterate the strangely often ignored fact that two minds approach a similar issue differently. The success of an enterprise depends largely on its ability to decipher this facet of a consumer mind. A restaurant at an airport serves tea at differentiated price points — tea with sugar at low price and that without sugar at a higher price! With vending machine in the vicinity dispensing only sugar-mixed tea, the restaurant has sensed an opportunity to serve the needs of tea drinkers who avoid sugar. Take ice cream, for instance. For a young one eating ice cream is akin to ‘rebellion'; for teenagers, it is a mood elevator; and for older ones, it is “stomach fill pleasure at the lowest possible cost''. The value spaces for coffee are relaxation, stimulation, social symbol et al. So, discovering ‘why he buys' is a sure fix answer to success than understanding ‘what he buys'. Once it discovers the ‘why' of it, an enterprise then needs to work out ways and means of delivering the value to a consumer without hurting itself.

Classic examples

Though winning a consumer is the much-professed objective of all business strategies of enterprises, more often than not, the path pursued by them is set in the light of competition. This, according to the author, results in sub-optimal business strategies. The South West Airliners abroad and Nano near home are classical examples of shapers. There was something unorthodox about their ideas. But their success owes largely to their customer-based approach. Ipso facto, the book underscores the need to look beyond and at the larger picture and not be bottled down by the industry definition of market. In this modern age, too many things chase the consumer. Unfortunately, “most business strategy development processes do not work with the notion that markets are made up of money that people spend to fulfill a need or want and not of the sales of companies that sell a certain widget,” she says. The supply-side orientation to business strategies can go terribly wrong and hurt an enterprise. “Businesses that look like dogs when viewed from the supply-side lens become stars when viewed through the customer lens,” she argues. Understanding the entire ‘need area' of a consumer opens up huge possibilities for an enterprise beyond the industry-restricted opportunities. A lack of knowledge on the ‘whole need area' can result in under-investment. One needs to “escape the myopia of the served market and the current product concept” and emphasise on “human needs”, argues the book. And, it is not just enough to identify and design a product that suits the customer need and elevates his experience. How an enterprise delivers it by walking the talk is very important and will identify the ultimate winner, Rama Bijapurkar argues, making a strong case for bringing the king consumer back to his rightful place at the discussion table in the boardroom of an enterprise.

The book is extraordinarily simple for the way it goes about revealing the mind of the king consumer. And, it gives more than a clue or two for the failure of an enterprise. An easy-to-read-and-comprehend writing style with mundane facts as illustrations and logically flowing presentation – they all make for a nice reading and fresh education.