Research from Deloitte Consulting shows that the rate at which large companies lose industry leadership has doubled in the past four decades.
This should make marketing a central concern of company Boards of Directors. As I wrote in this week’s Monday Morning Marketing Memo on Sustaining Competitive Advantage, in almost every case of decline the blame lays clearly at the feet of poor marketing execution and organizational cultures that are not customer centric and therefore not capable of sustaining market leadership.
Here’s what William Parrett, Chief Executive at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, wrote in the December 11, 2004 issue of The Economist:
“A recent survey by Deloitte and the Economist Intelligence Unit found that management and boards of directors focus far too much on financial results that represent lagging indicators of past performance. We believe they should pay far more attention to non-financial factors such as customer satisfaction, product and service quality, operational performance, and employee commitment – leading indicators of future performance that firms can use to navigate confidently toward a sustainable future. We also encourage corporate management to communicate with stakeholders about these indicators in quarterly and annual reports.”
The long-term winners in any industry are never the cost cutters and the retrenchers. The winners are always the marketing innovators and the ones who create, protect, and enhance the values customers receive and perceive from transacting business with them and from being associated with them.
The long-term winners are those who understand, if it touches the customer, it’s a marketing issue.™
In short, everything you do should be done to create value for customers. That is, of course, if you wish to stay atop your industry’s leader board.
What do you think?