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Wanted: CEOs from India

: It’s bad enough that markets are becoming competitive by the day. As technology becomes easily accessible to many, product parity is the biggest threat facing marketers. So how does the marketer make it worth the consumers’ buck so that she walks up to the store and picks up his product time and time again? Or avail of his service every time without batting an eyelid?

To state in the simplest terms, companies are on an endless search, looking for ways to make products at the service and quality level that customers demand, while also continually finding ways to reduce the incremental cost of production.

No points for guessing that technological advances and broad functional improvement programmes alone aren’t quite the answer. The need is to devise a way to improve the processes and the organisation supporting those processes to achieve performance results that are recognised by those who count the most — the customers and stakeholders.

In their book Value Merchants, James C Anderson, Nirmalya Kumar and James Narus, argue that hard evidence of the value you can deliver to customers will set your company apart from commodity suppliers, and show how you can become indispensable to all the stakeholders. But does the task get any easier if you are able to lay it down in simple terms? You know the answer. There is no easy way out. There can be a few broad pointers as to how you can protect both your customers and your bottomline from the onslaught of nifty competitors. It goes without saying this book is not what you can classify as an “easy read”. But if you really put your mind to it, this book can be of great value.

To begin with, the book is well organised. It provides a road map that introduces the concept of value, how to conceptualise and formulate value propositions — even going so far as distinguishing between value merchants and value spendthrifts — and describes how to practice the art of investing in the long-term value generation.