The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers
According to this turgid volume of business metaphysics, dwindling profit margins caused by intensified competition, a glut of commodity production and knowledgeable, web-empowered consumers will usher in "a new industrial system" characterized by "co-creating value through personalized experiences unique to the individual consumer." Under the new regime, headstrong consumers will "seek to exercise their influence in every part of the business system," and companies will accommodate them by, for example, allowing them to design their own individualized cosmetics and houseboats (an innovation whose benefits include "emotional bonding with... the company" and "a greater degree of self-esteem"). Rather than simply selling their products and services, companies will design "experience environments" that comfort the consumer in any contingency, such as General Motors' On-Star satellite communications system, which can summon help after an accident, open the car doors if the driver is locked out and direct motorists to the nearest Italian restaurant. Beneath the avant-garde terminology, the book mostly boils down to a medley of strategies to make business more consumer-friendly, like flexible pricing schemes, electronic gadgets that are easy to use instead of baffling, options and add-ons, meticulous market research and lavish customer service and support. But business professors Ramaswamy and Prahalad, coauthor of Competing for the Future, inflate this rather familiar "customer-is-king" approach to a level of abstraction and mystification-the health-care industry, for instance, is actually "a complex, evolving wellness space"-that is needlessly opaque and portentous. Managers who thought their job was to make or do something that people might want to buy will be scratching their heads over this book.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.