Competing for choice

I've just put down an excellent book called Competing for Choice by Lars Finskud. I can't recommend it highly enough it's a real gold mine of insights and logic. I've been using it to help design a consulting offering to tackle the issue of acquisition and retention.

Retention and acquisition is a complex and critical business challenge. The most interesting conversations for me revolve around winning the hearts and mind upstream before consumers make a purchasing decision. What’s more in today’s networked society, dissatisfied customers will not only never buy from the company again, but communicate their displeasure throughout their social network. These dissatisfied customers will rarely convey their displeasure directly and just stop doing business with your company, which keeps brands unaware for some time that there is any problem and how to react.

Current approaches are undermined by failure to accurately interpret the consumer needs, slow response to competitor movements, fact-free decision making, lack of organisation and a high degree of subjectivity and assumptions about the causes.

Finskud asks few key questions that got to the heart of the issue for me:

1. Where should we focus to source growth?
What makes our customers choose our brand?
Which of our customers are defecting and to which competing brand?
How should we divide our resources between acquisition and retention?
Are we sufficiently responsive to market dynamics?

2. How much should we invest in brand building?
Are our brand building investments effective? What returns to they achieve?
Is this a sales, marketing or design issue?

3. Do we have the appropriate systems and structures in place to manage the process?
Do you have the facts we need to make well-informed and robust strategic and tactical decisions?
What are the key indicators and brand performance measures we should be monitoring?

If your brand is struggling with questions like these, Finskud's approach built on a 'resource approach' to management and 'customer choice chain' will provide the basis for a reasoned response.

Best of all it's less than 100 pages! For more information about Lars Finskud visit his consultancy practice Vanguard Strategy.