Valuespace: Winning the Battle for Market Leadership

by Jagdish N. Sheth and Banwari Mittal

This text describes a value-based approach to achieving market dominance called ValueSpace. Using results from a research study the authors show that value is the missing link in achieving customer... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071375279
• ISBN13: 9780071375276
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 265 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An Eye-opener on Business Strategy

A few years ago, I read a New York Times bestseller, The Discipline of the Market Leaders, by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema. Since its publication, I have heard a lot of managers quoting from it. In this bestseller, authors Treacy and Wiersema describe three strategies: product leadership, operational excellence, and customer intimacy. My fellow executives translate these as product, price, and service, and we all generally agree that to compete, "You have to be good at two, and be excellent at the third." Last week I read ValueSpace by Mittal & Sheth. It changed my interpretation of Treacy and Wiersema's book. I realized how wrong every manager's understanding of Treacy and Wiersema's book had been. The confusion is between the Marketspace and Valuespace. Treacy/Wiersema's book tells us WHAT market to compete in (Marketspace); Mittal/Sheth's book tells us HOW to compete in the chosen market (ValueSpace). Their discussion of this distinction in Chapter 12 was an eye-opener. They also do a great job of tying up the theme of their book with the themes of other business bestsellers, such as Tom Peter's In Search of Excellence and Collins and Porras' Built to Last. I highly recommend this book to anyone concerned with business strategy. If you have read other bestsellers on business strategy, you can't afford to miss this one. I only wish the authors had made Chapter 12 as their first chapter. . My suggestion would be to read Chapter 12 first. Then the rest of the book would be doubly meaningful.

Simple but Solid Guide for Creating Customer Value

I read the book purely out of curiosity. I co-manage a high tech company so at first I was disappointed since none of the high tech companies are included in the book. But I started reading it anyway because I wanted to read what some of the famous companies like Caterpillar and UPS are doing to gain market-leadership. Although some of the company stories get to be tedious, most are useful and fun to read. And even though none is from a high tech company, it gave me ideas for my own business. Now whenever I am faced with a customer problem, I would be thinking of one or the other story to come up with my own innovative ways of solving the customer's problem and to meet his or her value requirements. Beyond the stories, what I found useful is the customer value framework the authors offer. At first, it looks deceptively basic and simple; but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed valuable. Its simplicity is a good thing. Authors claim that it is comprehensive - I am not sure yet, but so far every value creation activity I could think I could fit into the framework. And I could apply it to my company. Indeed the framework is applicable to any company in any industry. The book offers nothing in the way of quick-fix. And when you finish reading it, don't expect to run with excitement, eager to implement something. Rather, the book's framework gives you a template to use in long term, cool-headed, planning. It does not matter if you are a small business or a large business, and if you are a established company or a start up, the book's framework will be a handy tool for constantly thinking about various avenues of creating "unusual and complete" customer value.

Author Response to FAQs

.ValueSpace? What is it? What does it do for my business? We are constantly asked these questions since the book's release. They are best answered by us in the preface, excerpted below. PREFACE ValueSpace -we hold it in utmost admiration. ValueSpace-it is to us the be-all and the end-all of all business activity; the only purpose of all businesses. It is the only justifiable goal of all reengineering, organizational renewal, entrepreneurship and corporate innovation. And it is the only path for sustained growth; for winning the battle for market leadership. It is the space where true market value is created. For shareholders; for employees; and, most of all, for customers. We present in this book a blueprint on how companies can build enduring ValueSpace for their customers. This book is at the intersection of our two long-held obsessions: As university professors, we view ourselves as lifelong learners; and for decades, we have been students of customer behavior on the one hand and business organizations on the other. We have studied theories of customer behavior-indeed created some of them ourselves--, and for decades, we have observed, analyzed, and written about business processes, precepts, and practices. In this book, we bring these two streams together-our knowledge of customers and our knowledge of businesses. This is our ValueSpace for you, the reader: Uniquely in the current sea of business advice books, we combine the customer and business perspectives. We set out to understand what constitutes value for the customer and how companies can create it. With financial support from the Marketing Science Institute (a Cambridge-based nonprofit research organization), .. we studied 11 Fortune's Most Admired Companies. ... Our framework, comprising the components of ValueSpace and its drivers, is quintessential-no matter what else you do or do not do, you must create these value components. Our framework is enduring-it is not the "project of the month"; long after the current fads have vanished, you must still build the value components we describe. Our framework is universal-it applies to all companies: manufacturing and service; small business or global enterprises, business-to-business or business-to-consumer; physical or digital; dot-com or not-com.We intend this book to be a blueprint for thought as well as practice. We present conceptual framework to help you plan; we provide a self-audit form that you can use to assess your company's current standing in the ValueSpace; and we present case histories, stories of the most admired companies, and insights from executive interviews that you would find both inspirational and actionable. It is a hands-on guide to launching your journey into the customer ValueSpace. Our own journey has been fascinating; we have learned a lot-from the Most Admired Companies we studied; from the executive interviews we did specifically for this research; and from thousands of conversa