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Better? Says Who?
Key to Success: Focus on Customer's Perception of Value

Having worked in the trenches for two major players in the IT industry for most of the past twenty years, I have learned much about why some companies with technically superior products have not done as well as Microsoft. If I had the ear of senior management, I would plead with them to pay close attention to some key marketing principles. It is evident that adherence to these marketing principles makes the difference between establishing and maintaining market leadership or becoming an 'also ran' or worse yet a historical footnote.

What do Microsoft and Southwest Airlines/Jet Blue have in common? They are leaders in their respective industries because they focus on delivering customer value to their targeted markets. Everyone else offers either an ill-fitting suit or a toilet in the living room. In the mid-1980s in a presentation entitled "Passion for the Customer", Tom Peters warned that if American companies didn't start focusing on the customer, "our jobs and our way of life" would be at stake. What you're hearing now is the deafening silence from those who should but did not follow his advice.

Are We Asking the Right Questions?

As we stumble head first into the morass of off shoring everything possible from programming jobs to middle management, it is evident that we're not even asking the right questions. Is off-shoring enhancing our ability to deliver customer value? How do our customers benefit by moving our development organizations even further away from our customers?

Focusing exclusively on cost reduction to improve profitability is a common and sophomoric mistake because it is based on the assumption that we're already delivering the best possible product value to our customer. Please pardon my impertinence, but we're not even close. Worse yet, interjecting a larger distance between our development organizations and customer input by moving offshore is the last thing we need. What causes so many seemingly bright industry leaders to climb onto the wrong bandwagon? Too many high-tech company leaders are so product-oriented that they fail to adequately understand why customers buy their product.

Southwest/Jet Blue Know Their Value

One of the most important things for a company to understand is why its customers buy its product. This is only possible by getting into the mind of your intended customer and understanding what value they place on your product's attributes. One of many reasons

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