Profit Patterns for Business Success

Customer Patterns

Customers are the ultimate choosers of value. Every day they vote with their time, with their word of mouth, with their money and with their allegiance, for the business designs that best serve their evolving priorities. Customers determine profits.

Across a variety of industries, the behaviour of the customer base is changing in many ways. These changes continue to transform the strategic landscape in nearly every business.

Customers hold more of the power in the supplier-customer equation and they possess the information as to what will be valuable tomorrow.

Product To Customer Knowledge

In the product to customer knowledge pattern, profit-oriented suppliers convert a flow of product transactions into profound and systematized knowledge of customers' preferences, price sensitivity and buying behaviour.

This knowledge can produce new profit streams in many different ways; category management, precision merchandising, or dramatic increases in the innovation success rate.

Listen to what your transactions are telling you about the customer. Hear and capture the message. Apply it to, create new offerings, develop new systems and improve the customer's economics and your own.

Develop An Action Plan

A frequent obstacle to acting on profit patterns is reversion to the tried and tested approach, the strong urge to stick with the company's traditional strategic playbook. Mindful of their company's past successes, failures and limitations, managers often advocate sticking to the existing set of options that have worked for the company in the past.

They are reluctant to formulate new types of actions that may be necessary to exploit the high value opportunities emerging in their industry. Rather, they prefer choosing from the known quantities, the narrow set of moves defined by past experience and traditional industry experts.

The reality is that expanding your repertoire is never a bad move. In every case, the player with the most options and moves is in the best position to adapt quickly to new economic realities and take advantage of the profit patterns altering the strategic landscape. By exploiting non-traditional options and approaches, the profit pattern thinking organization can create extraordinary value and capture strategic control in its industry.

The repertoire is limited only by one's own strategic imagination and the imagination of other strong players on your team.