FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Mike Duff
(703) 647-6214
mduff@alssa.org
Alexandria, VA (May 3, 2011) ¾ Professor Ranjay Gulati of the Harvard Business School, was a featured speaker at the ALSSA Spring Meeting, and his keynote presentation laid out a strategy for achieving growth in turbulent markets. Professor Gulati told the ALSSA attendees:
The drivers of customer choice have changed over the past 10 years as many markets have matured and turbulent markets have shifted the factors that drive purchasing motivators. Today, price often is the biggest driver outweighing efficacy, accessibility, brand and service, and companies that are not careful may find themselves with increasing volume but a declining price-to-cost ratio and declining profits.
Customer centricity as an important key to success in today’s turbulent markets. Although often defined as CRM, aggressive selling customer listening and segmentation, it is more. Customer segmentation is a starting point, and today successful companies segment their strategic customers into basic buyers, relationship buyers and performance buyers and create action plans for top and bottom line growth for each group.
Asking the audience to define what customer centricity means, e.g., “understanding the challenges our customers face on a daily basis and with that understanding adjust our strategies to provide value to the customers”, Professor Gulati cited bagged salad as an example (it’s washed, stacks easily and saves time in preparing a meal) and outlined the attributes of genuine customer centricity – providing innovative solutions to customers’ unique problems. He also described some of the attributes of a customer-centric organization and assessed several challenges.
Professor Ranjay Gulati is the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where his research focuses on leadership and strategic challenges for building high growth organizations in turbulent markets. Professor Gulati spoke at the Spring Meeting as part of ALSSA’s strategy of inviting leading academics to give keynote presentations to promote food for thought on how ALSSA members can better manage and grow their businesses. His presentation was largely based on his recent book, “Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization.”
For more information regarding ALSSA’s Board of Directors contact Mike Duff, President of ALSSA, at 703-647-6214. More information regarding ALSSA can be found at www.alssa.org.
ALSSA is the primary trade association for companies that develop and market technologies and solutions that enable scientific discoveries worldwide and applications which benefit society and lead to advances in healthcare, industrial innovation, and a safe and clean environment.
ALSSA members provide the “tools” and “solutions” essential to conduct research, testing, discovery and product development in a wide range of industries and applications including:
# # #
Press
“Illumina has been a member of ALSSA since shortly after the company was founded in 1998. As we have grown in a market where technologies are rapidly evolving, we have found the ALSSA meetings and the many opportunities for dialogue with other companies and senior executives to be an invaluable benefit of the association.”