Fastest Growing Pharmaceutical Classes Today and Beyond

Luca Dezzani, MD

With the increasing prevalence of different health conditions requiring expensive lifelong treatment, the global sales of therapeutics have been expected to skyrocket in the coming years. In the year 2015, pharmaceutical spending in the United States has reached 1 112.2 USD per capita. This covers expenditures on both prescription medicines as well as self-medication or over-the-counter products.

According to a report published by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, therapeutic classes with the highest level of spending account for 42% of the total pharmaceutical spending. These include treatment for chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and asthma/COPD. Moreover, among these top classes, seven of which are specialty medicines known to have novel mechanisms and improved efficacy that represent the latest innovation in global medicine. Furthermore, global brand spending is also predicted to increase from $596B in 2011 to $615-645B in 2016. On the other hand, global generic spending is expected to increase from $242B to $400-430B by 2016.

The figure below conveys the top 10 therapy areas that account for a huge percentage of the total global pharmaceutical spending.

Oncologics ($83 – 88 B)

In 2014, Rituxan developed by the pharmaceutical company, Roche, was ranked as the top-selling cancer drug that generated total sales of $7546M. By the year 2020, Roche will concede long-running possession of the biggest selling oncology brand. It was predicted that Celgene’s Revlimid will take the top spot with $10110M in total sales.

Antidiabetics ($48 – 53 B)

Based on the 2015 revenue, Lantus and Januvia are some of the top selling anti–diabetic drugs of all time. Though a decline of 10.8% in sales compared to its 2014 revenue, Lantus is still the world’s best-selling insulin brand. It actually generated $6.98B total sales and accounts for 17.2% of Sanofi-Aventis Group's aggregate net sales in 2015. On the other hand, Merck Sharp & Dohme’s Januvia was the major candidate in the company’s diabetic portfolio that accounted for 64.3% of the company's revenue from diabetes drugs in 2015.

Asthma/COPD ($44 – 48 B)

Among all respiratory products sold in the United States, GlaxoSmithKline’s Advair Diskus ranked first in the year 2015. Advair Diskus generated a total revenue of $4835M. This was followed by Boehringer Ingelheim’s Spiriva Handihaler which yielded a profit of $3404M.

Autoimmune ($33 – 36 B)

According to American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA), autoimmune diseases affect almost 50 million Americans. Thus, global sales of autoimmune disease treatment are expected to rise in the coming years. In fact, in a market study titled “Global Autoimmune Drugs Market 2016-2020”, it was discussed that the market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 5.57%.

Lipid Regulators ($31 – 34 B)

AstraZeneca’s Crestor was among the top-selling branded drugs in the year 2015. Its total sales reached $6,090,223,570 which ranked 5th among the top 100 brands. Crestor was also considered as the most prescribed branded drug in the United States, which accounted for approximately 21 million prescriptions.

Angiotensin II ($22 – 25 B)

According to the World Health Organization, elevated blood pressure is estimated to cause 7.5 million deaths, about 12.8% of the total of all deaths. This accounts for 57 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYS) or 3.7% of total DALYS. Hence, interventions to manage such condition have been widely available in order to minimize the risk of developing serious health complications such as coronary heart disease.

HIV Antivirals ($22 – 25 B)

HIV remains one of the major challenges in public health, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Advancement in technology has led to the development of therapeutic drugs to improve the quality and prolong the lives of HIV patients. In fact, out of 36.7 million HIV patients, 46% of them have access to antiretroviral therapy (ART).

Antipsychotics ($22 – 25 B)

In a report published by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), approximately 1 in 25 adults in the U.S. experiences a serious mental illness in a given year that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities. However, not all patients have access to proper and adequate treatment, which may eventually lead to the development of chronic medical conditions. Aside from this, another problem that may arise as a consequence of this issue is its negative impact on the economy. In fact, serious mental illness costs America $193.2 billion in lost earnings per year.

Vaccines ($19 -22 B)

Through the goal of providing health for all, immunization programs conducted in different parts of the world have boosted the sales of vaccines. Considering the estimated profit in the year 2015 and the projected revenue in the year 2022, Pfizer and Daewoong’s Prevnar 13 bagged the top spot. This was followed by Merck & Co.’s Gardasil, Sanofi’s Fluxone / Vaxigrip and Pentacel, and lastly, GlaxoSmithKline’s Pediarix.

Immunostimulants ($16 – 18 B)

Immunostimulants are divided into two categories: specific and nonspecific. Specific immunostimulants stimulate an immune response to specific antigenic types, while nonspecific immunostimulants do not have antigenic specificity and are widely used in chronic infections, immunodeficiency, autoimmunity and neoplastic diseases. One of the most commonly prescribed immunostimulants is Provenge, a registered trademark of Dendreon Corporation.

Как повысить узнаваемость бренда и извлечь прибыль из пустоты

Фото © shutterstock.com 

Цель маркетолога — повысить узнаваемость бренда среди потенциальных потребителей. В этом зачастую помогает интересная рекламная акция или нестандартный продукт. 

Предлагаем вам оригинальные решения, благодаря которым компаниям удалось повысить узнаваемость бренда. 

Способ повысить узнаваемость бренда №1. Пустое место 

Агентство Century 21 и компания MullenLowe помогли жителям Америки в выборе подарка ко Дню отца. Когда дети интересовались, что подарить любящему родителю, в ответ слышали уклончивое «Ничего». Поэтому риелторы вместе с маркетологами придумали подарочные сертификаты под таким же названием — «Ничего». Они дают право на земельный участок в Аризоне. Правда, там действительно ничего нет, кроме кактусов, перекати-поля и табличек с названием населенного пункта Nothing (Ничего). Креативщики уверены, что подарок подойдет пожилым людям, желающим выстроить дом в тихом месте и отдохнуть на пенсии. Сертификат можно вернуть в течение 24 часов. Но пока клиенты довольны и возвращать подарки не спешат. 

Способ повысить узнаваемость бренда №2. Ужин за километры 

Производитель кроссовок Kalenji нашел оригинальный способ подтолкнуть клиентов к покупке спортивной обуви из новой коллекции Eliorun. Агентство Paris Rosapark запустило для бренда рекламную кампанию под тегом #EatYourRun. Владельцам новых кроссовок предложили выходить на пробежки, а «накопленные» километры потратить в модном парижском ресторане. «Стоимость» самого дорогого блюда составляла 25 км. Успешную акцию расширили и вывели в соцсети. Пользователи Instagram и Twitter делились информацией о «спорте лакомок» и участвовали в конкурсе, где могли выиграть кроссовки и продукты для гурманов. Так компании удалось повысить узнаваемость бренда и лояльность покупателей. 

Способ повысить узнаваемость бренда №3. Последняя капля 

Реклама бренда Pril компании Henkel часто строилась на заявлении: для эффективного мытья посуды хватит и одной капли средства. После этого на производителя сыпались обвинения в недостоверности информации. Но тот отстаивал правоту и проводил исследования в лабораториях. Многочисленные нападки подтолкнули Henkel к созданию новой кампании, которую запустили на Ближнем Востоке совместно с дубайским агентством TBWA\RAAD. Потенциальным покупателям предложили средство для посуды в крошечных бутылочках, которые и правда вмещают только одну каплю. Так потребители убедились, что маркетологи и производители никого не обманывают. Доверие к бренду восстановилось. 

Способ повысить узнаваемость бренда №4. Свет мой, зеркальце 

Компания Rimmel London представила приложение Get The Look. Оно «примеряет» на пользователя макияж популярной модели, бьюти-блогера или прохожего. Акция направлена на представителей поколения Z, которые родились после 2003 года. Такие потребители не воспринимают навязчивые рекламные ролики, зато падки на технологические новшества. Понравившийся макияж снимают на смартфон. Приложение подбирает косметику Rimmel, которая поможет повторить мейкап. Через Google Shopping этот набор можно сразу купить, а образом делятся в соцсетях. Покупатели общаются и в приложении: там можно создать сообщество. 

Способ повысить узнаваемость бренда №5. Истина в вине 

Технологическая компания Uber, которая создала одноименное приложение для заказа такси, пропагандирует трезвое вождение. В московской сети ресторанов «Жан-Жак» на столики поставили особые бутылки вина. Посетители кафе и ресторанов считают этот напиток легким и уверены, что после пары бокалов можно садиться за руль. Однако дизайнерские этикетки предупреждают об опасности этого заблуждения. Привычные пейзажи — поля, замки, виноградники — дополнены изображением аварий. На вторую этикетку, где содержится информация о продукте, нанесен промокод на бесплатную поездку от Uber. Проект стал частью глобальной кампании Don't Drink & Drive. В Uber рассказывают, что в Москве сервис пользуется спросом вечером в четверг, пятницу и в выходные. Значит, россияне стали ответственно подходить к вопросу трезвости за рулем. 

Способ повысить узнаваемость бренда №6. Найти по запаху 

Компания Burger King к Международному дню гамбургера выпустила новый продукт. Это автомобильный освежитель воздуха с ароматом фирменного блюда сети — воппера. Ароматизатор выглядит как бургер и крепится к зеркалу заднего вида. В компании верили, что запах поджаренного мяса понравится потребителям больше, чем синтетический хвойный аромат. Сувениры раздавали автовладельцам в Бразилии, а их реакцию снимали на скрытую камеру. Водители говорили, что запах натуральный и соблазнительный. Он побуждает заехать в ближайший ресторан Burger King и заказать воппер. 

Способ повысить узнаваемость бренда №7. Домашний метеорит 

Федеральный мобильный оператор Yota ко Дню космонавтики провел акцию «Yota воплощает». Клиенты заходили на промосайт компании и при помощи онлайн-конструктора создавали уникальный дизайн чехла для модема. Особенность в том, что все чехлы изготавливали при помощи 3D-принтера из высокотехнологичного композита и частиц настоящего метеорита. Цифры доказывают, что программа понравилась клиентам: за месяц создали 9541 уникальный 3D-проект и напечатали 473 чехла. «Космическая» маркетинговая активность увеличила продажи мобильного оператора на 14 %.

Источник: http://www.kom-dir.ru/article/1453-qqq-16-m10-06-10-2016-kak-povysit-uznavaemost-brenda

Best Business Books 2016: Management

Pre-Suasion, Problem Solving, and Process Design

by Theodore Kinni

Illustration by Adam McCauley

Robert Cialdini
Pre-Suasion: A  Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade (Simon & Schuster, 2016)
* A TOP SHELF PICK

Joseph L. Badaracco
Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016)

Joel Brockner
The Process Matters: Engaging and Equipping People for Success (Princeton University Press, 2016)

---

It’s satisfying when corporate wrongdoing comes complete with a villain, preferably someone larger than life and twice as mean. Having an evil mastermind à la Bernie Madoff to pin things on sets up a happy ending. The bad guy or gal is brought to justice and, voilà, all is right in the business world.

Unfortunately, we are often denied that satisfaction. Some organizational disasters — such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Dieselgate — seem to occur as a result of unintentional internal combustion. Scapegoats always seem to be found, but it’s a stretch to argue that there was a black-mustachioed villain who put match to fuse. Instead, when the investigations are over, the real culprit turns out to be a hodgepodge of systems, processes, or managerial decisions that didn’t raise alarms until the consequences suddenly exploded.

This year’s three best business books on management offer compelling and useful advice on how to avoid such problems. In Pre-Suasion, the best of the group, Robert Cialdini explains how managers can be predisposed to make constructive decisions and can predispose others to take constructive action. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph L. Badaracco shows how managers can make difficult decisions in a more responsible manner. And in The Process Matters, Joel Brockner explores how the decisions that managers make when constructing processes can help prevent undesirable outcomes.

Can You Hear Me Now?

More than 30 years ago, a psychology professor at Arizona State University named Robert Cialdini wrote a book that, like most other books, quickly and quietly sank beneath the relentless waves of new releases. But then, a few years later, Influence: Science and Practice resurfaced, buoyed by the growing interest in the mashup of psychology and economics now called behavioral economics. An eager audience of marketing and sales pros, including, ironically, the very “peddlers, fundraisers, and operators of one sort or another” whom Cialdini had been hoping to arm his readers against, ate it up. Influence, with its six principles explaining how others get us to do what they want, went on to sell more than 2 million copies.

Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade is an intellectual prequel to Influence. It explores an insight that came to Cialdini when he “infiltrated the training programs of a broad range of professions dedicated to getting us to say yes.” While shadowing top-performing professionals in such fields as sales, direct marketing, corporate recruiting, and frontline management, he discovered that “the best persuaders become the best through pre-suasion — the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it.”

There was, for instance, the fire-alarm system salesman whose behavior puzzled Cialdini. This guy forgot something in his car on every appointment, and always remembered it while the homeowners were completing a knowledge assessment. He would ask permission to leave and re-enter the house, often getting handed a door key in the process. “Think, Bob,” the salesman eventually explained to the author. “Who do you let walk in and out of your house on their own? Only somebody you trust, right? I want to be associated with trust in those families’ minds.”

Cialdini found that the most effective persuaders are, like the alarm sales rep, experts at channeling our attention in order to create what he calls privileged moments — “identifiable points in time when an individual is particularly receptive to a communicator’s message.” It is possible to create these moments, research reveals, because we not only assign undue levels of importance to whatever captures our attention at a certain point in time, but also assign causality to it. This explains why CEOs get outsized credit for the success of their companies — and also why they make such satisfying scapegoats when disaster strikes. “The person at the top,” says Cialdini, “is visually prominent, psychologically salient, and hence, assigned an unduly causal role in the course of events.”

Channeling our attention, it turns out, is not all that difficult, even in this age of the smartphone and constant interruption. In fact, three attention attractors reliably cut through the fog: sex, violence, and (perhaps more appropriately for managers) novelty. Pavlov’s dogs, Cialdini points out, didn’t always salivate when the bell rang. When visitors arrived at Pavlov’s lab to witness the reflexive drooling, the bell didn’t produce the desired result. Pavlov gained a new insight: The strangers triggered an “investigatory reflex” in the dogs, a reflex more powerful than the dinner bell.

Further, once something attracts our attention, a number of “magnetizers” can be used to hold it in place. These include self-relevant cues, like the word you; unfinished ideas or tasks, which stymie our desire for cognitive closure; and, as the enduring popularity of a 130-year-old consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes testifies, mysteries. Why not simply deliver your message as soon as you have created a privileged moment? “The communicator who can fasten an audience’s focus on the favorable elements of an argument,” explains Cialdini, “raises the chance that the argument will go unchallenged by opposing points of view, which get locked out of attention as a consequence.”

Cialdini offers many more tips and tactics in this handbook on the ways and means of pre-suasion, which managers can and should use to become more effective influencers. But he also devotes considerable effort to persuading us to wield pre-suasion in an ethical manner. Surprisingly, Cialdini considers and rejects the idea that the risk of getting caught is a compelling enough reason to avoid devious practices, because studies show that “uncomfortably large numbers of [senior business leaders] are willing to undertake misconduct anyway.” Instead, he focuses on the organizational consequences, citing his own research, which reveals that companies that condone and use deceitful tactics raise the risks of an implosion triggered by poor employee performance, high employee turnover, and employee fraud and malfeasance.

The bottom line in the best business book of the year on management: Pre-suaders are more effective influencers, and they reap what they sow.

The Anatomy of Gray

Cialdini’s obvious concern about his work being misused, combined with the studies he cites in which “close to half of high-ranking executives reported that they would act unethically to get or retain business,” suggests that the way in which many managers are making decisions needs some serious reframing. No book published this past year makes this case better than Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work, by Joseph L. Badaracco.

Badaracco, who was the first tenured professor of ethics at Harvard Business School, has been writing about leadership integrity, responsibility, and ethics since the 1980s. He does so in a nuanced and empathetic manner that clearly recognizes the challenges and conflicts routinely faced by well-meaning managers as they strive to make decisions.

With Managing in the Gray, Badaracco jumps into the deepest thickets of decision making. “Gray areas are basically organizational versions of the classic Gordian knot: that is, they are dense tangles of important, complicated, and uncertain considerations,” he writes.

Gray areas harbor the big and small decisions that not only try managers’ brains, but also can come back to lop off their heads. Your company needs to cut costs and maximize the flow of oil. Should you postpone that costly safety check that’s going to take 90 days to complete? It’s impossible to meet the conflicting demands of low emissions and high gas mileage without a misleading software fix. Should you use it?

Remembering that the above questions sound like no-brainers only in hindsight, how should a manager respond when confronted with similar dilemmas? “The answer, in its shortest form,” writes Badaracco, “can be stated in a single sentence: When you face a gray area problem at work, you should work through it as a manager and resolve it as a human being.”

That might sound a touch cavalier. But Badaracco backs it up with a five-question process to help managers meet the challenge. First, ask what are the net, net consequences. This means thinking deeply and broadly about the available options and “asking what you will be doing for other people and to other people, depending on the options you choose.”

Next, the ethics professor goes all humanist on us. “What are my core obligations?” he wants us to ask. This is a doozy of a query, because Badaracco isn’t talking about a manager’s obligation to his or her employer. Rather, he means “one’s basic duties as a human being.” It’s not exactly clear what those duties are. But Badaracco suggests that they stem from two fundamental dictates: the human right to live without needless danger, pain, and suffering, and the human right to be treated with respect and dignity.

Then, Badaracco begins channeling Machiavelli, focusing on the practical aspects of decision making. “What will work in the world as it is?” he suggests we ask next. Of course; decisions that won’t work in the real world are useless.

With his final questions, Badaracco gives managers the queries they need to zero in on their final answer. The fourth — “Who are we?” — requires seeking “options that will reflect, express, and give reality” to the norms and values of the company and community to which the manager belongs. And the final question gets to the self-perception of managers as human. “What can I live with?” The crux of gray-area problems is that there is no right answer, and that means managers must create an answer. Then, right or wrong, they must be able to live with its consequences.

Resolving gray-area problems won’t always be pretty, no matter what process managers follow. Throughout Managing in the Gray, Badaracco keeps coming back to the story of Aaron Feuerstein. Feuerstein owned Malden Mills, a fabric company that had invented Polartec fleece. In 1995, when its factory was destroyed in a fire, Feuerstein made headlines with his heroic and hasty decision to rebuild the fabric factory with the latest technology and keep all of its employees on the payroll throughout the construction. He did just that, but the company never recovered and went bankrupt in 2001. Afterward, Feuerstein was asked what epitaph he wanted on his tombstone. “After a long pause,” reports Badaracco, “he said simply, ‘He did his damnedest.’”

The Power of the Process

Asking Badaracco’s five questions suggests that even when managers get the final answer wrong, the process that they follow can be a source of solace and redemption in and of itself. The idea that how we do things can be as important as what we do — a concept popular in psychology circles — is supported strongly in The Process Matters: Engaging and Equipping People for Success, by Columbia Business School professor Joel Brockner.

Process plays a much more significant role in corporate performance than is commonly understood, according to Brockner. But unlike most business process engineers, he isn’t interested in cycle time, volume, and quality. Instead, he focuses on how employees perceive processes — and how by constructing processes in certain ways, managers can bolster the success rate of change initiatives, enhance employee productivity and morale, and promote ethical behavior.

That perception is rooted in the concept of fairness. “Process fairness has a huge impact on how well employees react to a wide array of organizational events and decisions,” writes Brockner. “Whether you are trying to gain support from many people or even a single person for a particular decision, you better make sure that they believe the process is fair.”

Brockner finds evidence for this assertion in numerous studies, including a study of expats, which he conducted with Ron Garonzik of the Korn Ferry Hay Group and Phyllis Siegel of Rutgers Business School. It found that expats who were having trouble adjusting to their new surroundings — for family and other reasons — were less likely to return home prematurely “if their employers allowed them to have input into decisions and if they felt that their employers generally treated them with dignity and respect.”

The real payoff for process fairness comes when outcomes head south. Brockner finds that employees are far more willing to accept negative outcomes when they feel that the process was fair. Conversely, if outcomes are negative and the process is seen as unfair, it adds insult to injury.

For instance, Brockner’s own research into the reactions of employees who remained on the job after layoffs found that their productivity and morale suffered when they felt that the layoff process was unfair to their former colleagues. Moreover, it revealed that process fairness could compensate for smaller severance packages in the estimation of the remaining employees. “Survivors responded about the same when they believed the package was moderately generous and the process was handled fairly as they did when they believed the package was highly generous and the process handled not so fairly,” writes Brockner.

The Process Matters also explains the instrumental role of process in the ethical behavior of employees. “First, those on the receiving end of high process fairness behave more ethically. Not only do they steal less, but they also show their ethicality by behaving with greater process fairness toward others,” says Brockner. “Second…the more that the process causes people to see themselves as having esteem, identity, or control [that is, global self-integrity], the more ethically they behave.”

The business school professor casts a wide net into a seemingly bottomless pool of research to help managers design better processes. Occasionally, the net gets tangled, and The Process Matters drifts into the weeds. But most of the time, he hauls in a promising catch. “Doing the process well often entails simple things like involving people in decisions, showing respect, and doing things transparently. Not exactly rocket science,” Brockner writes. “Furthermore, doing the process well may not require much in the way of tangible resources.”

Reprint No. 16415

10 Principles of Customer Strategy

It’s no longer enough to target your chosen customers. To stay ahead, you need to create distinctive value and experiences for them.

by Thomas Ripsam and Louis Bouquet

Illustration by Lars Leetaru

After losing the fourth major deal in a row to a rival, the CEO of a technology solutions company turned to his team leaders to ask what was going wrong. The sales team doesn’t have the right relationships, marketing reported. Our products lack key features, sales replied. The offerings are too expensive, finance explained. None of these answers seemed right. The products were made in the countries where manufacturing was cheapest, had high ratings from analysts, and included new features that people raved about. So the CEO finally called the client and bluntly asked: “Why did you give this deal to our competitor?”

The response: “Your products are great, but your competitor gives me what I’m looking for.” As they talked, the CEO realized that closing this deal — and other deals — didn’t come down only to product price, quality, features, or sales capabilities. The competitor spoke the language of the customer. Its salespeople knew how to anticipate the customer’s needs, work closely with its leaders, and come up with solutions to problems that hadn’t even been voiced yet. The CEO now saw that his company lacked a key ingredient necessary for serving its clients: a deliberate, well-designed, and perceptive customer strategy.

This real-life scenario is all too familiar. The conventional approach to gaining customers, which was based on picking a segment of purchasers to target and developing products for that segment, is no longer sufficient. A customer strategy goes further: It is the articulation of the distinctive value and experience your company will deliver to a chosen set of customers over three to five years, along with the offerings, channels, operating model, and capabilities you will need. In 2016 a team of researchers and advisors from the customer strategy practice at Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting group, conducted a global survey of 161 executives. And the findings indicated that having a customer strategy was high in importance. More than 80 percent of the respondents said their investment in customer strategy during the next three to five years would be equal to or greater than the amount invested this year.

In developing a successful customer strategy, you must provide answers to questions such as these: Who are our customers? Which of their needs can we address? Given our company’s overall value proposition and strategy, what customer experience should we create? What capabilities do we need in order to deliver that experience? How should we organize ourselves accordingly, and what aspects of our culture can help us?

A well-designed customer strategy will coordinate many different functions, skills, and practices. For example, it should encompass data analytics; go-to-market and channel choices; and the delivery of products, services, and experiences.Ten principles are at the heart of any effective customer strategy. These principles are universally applicable, regardless of what industry a company operates in, whether it focuses on a business or consumer clientele, where it does business, or what products and services it offers. Based on long-standing practice and observation — along with our survey and interviews with key players in eight industries — these principles show how companies can position themselves for customer success.

1. Master the art of the possible. Because technological breakthroughs are now common in nearly every industry, customers expect big changes to be a regular occurrence. The most successful companies continually experiment with innovations that make life better for customers. Customers appreciate companies that can do this effectively, time after time. That doesn’t mean asking your customers what they will find indispensable in the future; they can’t tell you. Consumers also don’t know what they want from new innovations, and they don’t always anticipate what will happen when they adopt them. They often know what they want only after they see it.

No one, for example, asked for ride-sharing apps before Uber appeared, followedby Lyft, Sidecar, BlaBlaCar, Haxi, and other similar services. Digital and mobile devices are now endemic to customer experience, and new kinds of apps (for example, for mobile payments) emerge regularly. No one knew these apps were indispensable until they were, suddenly, everywhere.

Therefore, when launching innovative products and services, develop your own informed judgment about technology. Carefully consider which new technologies will appeal to your customers at just the right time, in just the right way, so that customers become more loyal. This is particularly important for digital and mobile technologies, which continue to fundamentally alter the ways people interact with businesses and the types of products and services they favor.

There is a hefty risk management component to this principle. While you try to anticipate emerging technologies, others are doing the same. No one will get everything right; your ability to outpace your competitors depends on your cultivating better judgment, and then placing bet after bet, refining your acumen all the time. Not only do you have to decide what technologies will be most valued, but you have to know how far ahead of your customers to be, and you have to learn from every foray.

In our customer strategy survey, 40 percent of the respondents said that one of their top five priorities was mastering the art of the possible, particularly in digital and mobile technologies. Of these, 67 percent reported that they conducted regular assessments of digital and mobile technologies they might adopt or improve, but only 28 percent truly analyzed the financial impact of being early or late with their own innovations or those developed by others. The ability to analyze what you should bring to market and when will give you an edge, because better judgment relies on informed experimentation: trying new things at a reasonable scale, and paying enough attention to the results to be able to learn from each new launch.

Consider how Nest Labs, a maker of smart home devices owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, continually gains competitive advantage through its adroit use of technology. Nest takes ordinary home fixtures and makes them smart, beautiful, and energy efficient. For years, the marketing research at established companies found that consumers wouldn’t pay more than US$200 for a thermostat. But Nest developed a stylish, self-learning, and intuitive thermostat that could be controlled using a smartphone. After carving out a market by targeting the subsegment of highly educated, energy-conscious customers willing to pay the $249 list price, Nest began building an ecosystem of Internet-connected devices, including smoke detectors and security cameras. The company is now the leader in the smart thermostat market, which is expected to grow over the next several years and generate revenues of more than $1.3 billion by 2019, according to Sandler Research.

2. Know your customers at a granular level. Leading companies are moving beyond traditional quantitative segmenting. They’re developing much more sophisticated customer analysis that draws from a variety of sources, including customer behavior and psychographic data gathered online and offline, real-time information collected from sensors and other tracking mechanisms, and geographic and mapping data. Business leaders understand how critical this shift is. The executives we surveyed rated “segment and know your customers” as the second most important principle of developing a great customer strategy. (The first, “Link your company’s customer strategy to its overall identity,” is included as principle number three below.)

Many companies claim to have mastered this principle. Among the companies we surveyed that said customer insight was a top priority, 73 percent said their business had the capability in hand. Still, even at these organizations, there’s plenty of room for improvement. For example, only 46 percent said they regularly translate their customer knowledge into business platforms, actionable expansion plans, or new business models.

To raise your own customer analytics ability, start by thoroughly defining your market and customers. Deepen your knowledge by applying techniques such as mapping the customer journey. Seek out data from a variety of sources at the most granular level: for example, activity tracked by the Internet of Things, real-time interactions with your own Web and e-commerce sites, social media, and online communities such as customer advocacy councils. Use all of these, and more, to embed the voice of the customer in your decision making.

3. Link your company’s customer strategy to its overall identity. Every successful company has a strong value proposition that distinguishes it from rivals. It consistently offers something for its customers that no competitor can match. To deliver on this promise, it must develop and deploy a group of interrelated, distinctive capabilities. All of these must work together across the full portfolio of products and services. This combination of value proposition, capabilities, and offerings, when they all fit together in a coherent way, gives the company its identity. The company’s customer experience can be thought of as the visible edge of that identity: the way in which people interact with the company and learn to appreciate it.

It is more challenging than it may seem to develop a strong identity. Many businesses don’t truly know what they stand for, especially when they face so many outside influences and threats. Companies often find themselves playing defense, calibrating their value proposition against what rivals offer, instead of basing it on what they can do distinctively well.

Linking your customer strategy to your company’s value proposition goes beyond lining up the right processes from marketing, sales, and data analytics. It means aligning the emotional elements of your customer strategy, and all customer touch points including pricing, with the strongest capabilities your company has.

Apple has mastered this type of appeal. It offers customers a sense of superiority, grounded in an intuitive and productive experience and beautifully designed devices. Everything Apple does reinforces these attributes. It sticks to premium pricing and high margins, creating an association with status on which the company has refused to compromise — even when its sales slowed in fiscal year 2016. Its stores are spacious, open, and sophisticated, its website is sleek, its customer service is knowledgeable and savvy, and it doesn’t waste its customers’ time. Apple’s cultish fan base is a testimony to the emotional connection it builds by consistently delivering on its value proposition.

This principle requires a commitment from every part of the organization. If your company has many different groups that aren’t tightly connected or that can’t even agree on what they represent, you will need to bring them together around a common identity.

4. Target customers with whom you have the “right to win.” When your company has a strong identity, you don’t need to compete in every marketplace — only in the categories where you are reasonably confident of succeeding. Your value proposition will be consistent enough to appeal to a group of customers whom you can serve profitably. This is where you have the right to win — that is, a reasonable expectation that you can compete effectively against rivals.

If you try to grow your business where you don’t have the right to win, you risk investing time and resources on indifferent customers. You can and should branch out to other customers and markets. But those new customers and markets should be reachable with the same capabilities that gave you an edge with your base.

The Trader Joe’s grocery chain has a right-to-win customer strategy that provides a clear example of this principle. From the start, instead of trying to reach a mass market, the company built a devoted following by providing budget-friendly products for health- and diet-conscious shoppers. It caters exclusively to these consumers, working consistently to source and offer a tightly edited range of private-label, hard-to-find epicurean items. With $11.3 billion in sales and 457 stores in the U.S., Trader Joe’s sells more than twice what Whole Foods, its next biggest competitor, sells per square foot, and consistently tops the rankings for customer satisfaction.

5. Treat your customers as assets that will grow in value. Not every company cultivates long-term customer relationships in a constructive way. Leading companies do. They continually create better reasons for their customers to identify with the company and its products and services.

Building great customer relationships is a long-term game. It goes against many common practices, such as tracking the short-term return on customer acquisition investments. It even goes beyond quantifying the lifetime cost of a customer relationship, at either the individual or segment level, though that’s an important first step.

You can build on this quantitative understanding by analyzing your customers’ paths to purchase. This analysis gives you the insight you need to expand and tailor your customer relationships, investing in meeting the evolving needs of your customers. The results of this analysis, particularly when customer data is included, can affect every aspect of your customer relationships, including the emotional attributes of your brand and the consistency of your pricing.

Few companies treat customers as assets more effectively than Salesforce.com. The company disrupted the low end of the customer relationship management market by positioning its “Success. Not Software” advertising campaign against competitor Siebel’s higher-priced, more complex on-premise software applications. Salesforce.com created a platform that customers license on a subscription basis rather than buy. This powerful model, known as software-as-a-service (SaaS), allows customers to use software without a large up-front purchase, and Salesforce.com can regularly add features based on customers’ feedback. The company also offered training and certification programs that made customers a critical part of the branding and sales engine. Through this customer partnership, and by exploiting SaaS to meet clients’ needs as computer prices dropped, Salesforce.com redefined the software market.

To treat your customers as assets, you need clear accountability in your organization. When anyone who buys from you has a problem or complaint, there must be a way of resolving it and someone responsible for doing so. You also need a culture that motivates relationship building and joint problem solving — a partnership with the customer as opposed to transactional selling.

6. Leverage your ecosystem. Your company exists in a broad network of relationships that form an ecosystem. These relationships are not just with customers, but also with suppliers, distributors, retailers, industry associations, institutional partners, and government agencies. You can tap into this ecosystem to engage your customers in ways that go beyond what has been relevant to your business relationship in the past. A broad ecosystem can provide data your customers' interests, thereby opening up ideas for new product and service offerings and growth opportunities.

Using the ecosystem is different from managing a value chain. You develop partners that can help spur innovation and more venues for going to market. They might also help win new customers for you by endorsing your brand.

Developing brand ambassadors is crucial to this approach — including some who work directly for you, some who work for other companies in your ecosystem, and still others among your customers. These advocates promote your brand to attract and win over new consumers. To be sure, you can’t control them the way you control your direct advertising and communications. However, with the right talent, training, and cross-organizational oversight, you can manage the risks and engage your customers through a far-reaching community that becomes central to your ecosystem. Companies such as Lego, Harley-Davidson, and BMW, whose enthusiastic customers communicate regularly with one another, successfully use this principle.

7. Ensure a seamless omnichannel experience. We all know the importance of omnichannel experience — a consistent look and feel in all customer touch points, including brick-and-mortar, face-to-face, online, voice phone, and mobile. Successful companies develop these channels using customer expectations, brand positioning, customer value, and cost-to-serve. They analyze the full cost and full set of benefits of each channel. The result is a seamless experience for the customer across every point of contact, so that shopping with an app feels reasonably similar to a face-to-face transaction.

Maintaining consistency across channels will be even more important during the next three to five years, because customers expect it. They count on being able to hop between call centers, websites, mobile apps, retail stores, and sales calls, getting the same experience at each stop. This raises the bar for every part of the organization — from product development to supply chain management.

The apparel startup Bonobos adapted its omnichannel approach after looking closely at its customers’ expectations. Initially, Bonobos’s ambitions were limited. It was a Web store designed to make it easy for male shoppers to find pants that fit. By chance, when the company opened a fitting room in its New York office, company leaders realized that although they could broaden their reach by letting customers see, touch, and try on apparel, most of the walk-in customers were not buying on impulse. Rather, they would come in to try on the clothes, and then order them later. The “guideshop” concept was born. Now shoppers book an appointment to try on clothes with the help of a stylist, or guide. The guide places the order, and the item is sent to the customer’s home from a warehouse. This multichannel strategy meets customers’ needs and streamlines costs because Bonobos doesn’t need stores that carry full inventories. The company is using a large part of the $55 million it has raised to open new guideshops.

8. Excel at delivery. The physical delivery of products and services is critical to keeping your customers happy. Whether or not you compete directly with Amazon, you are affected by its delivery innovations. These include recruiting individuals to do on-demand delivery, experimenting with drones, and signing up the U.S. Postal Service to handle Sunday deliveries. Customers now expect something similar to Amazon’s effectiveness from every company.

This is a daunting challenge. Amazon’s continually improved supply chain is designed to give it an edge. By managing its own inventory and that of third parties, Amazon gets volume discounts with shippers. Through co-locating small, dedicated distribution centers within key suppliers, such as Procter & Gamble, it lowers warehousing costs. By shipping a growing number of items using the Amazon freight network, it saves on shipping costs.

But you can emulate some aspects of Amazon’s practices, even if you don’t deliver nearly as high a proportion of merchandise directly. You can tailor delivery options on the basis of margin, brand positioning, and customers’ value expectations — while staying in step with technological advances. Data and analytics are the keys to these efforts. The use of relevant metrics, including customer experience, cost, and productivity, can help ensure high-quality delivery without sacrificing profitability.

9. Reorganize around the customer. Your organization should be “fit for your customer”: that is to say, it should be designed to make it easy to deliver a great customer experience. If you have already gone through the first eight principles, you should have a clear idea of your chosen customers, your identity, and your capabilities — and why these give you a right to win. Now redesign the organization accordingly. This might involve changing decision rights, shifting roles and responsibilities, establishing new teams, and aligning incentives, norms, and practices, always with your preferred customer groups and value proposition in mind. In other words, you may need to take the formal mechanisms and hierarchical structures of the existing company — your organizational DNA — and wire them differently.

Resist the temptation to adopt elements of agile development from technology companies and apply them to customer strategy. These elements include rapid mobilization on new projects (“sprint and scrum”), multidisciplinary teams, greater and faster information sharing, rapid decision making, and continuous collaboration and problem solving. Agility of this sort gives you flexibility, but it can also lead you to distracting, unprofitable endeavors. Don’t try to be agile just for the sake of being agile. Clearly articulate how these methods will help you develop a powerful customer strategy.

You also need to attract and retain the right talent. This means not only people with technological skills, but also those who understand customer experience and the practices needed to deliver it.

Many companies have instituted a chief customer officer (CCO) role. But quite often the CCO isn’t able to create the kind of customer-centric organization we’re talking about, because responsibility and accountability for customer strategy remains highly fragmented among sales, marketing, service, and other functions embedded in business units and geographies. Make sure your CCO (if you have one) directly or indirectly oversees every part of the organization that touches the customer’s experience.

10. Match your culture with your customer strategy. A relevant culture is a bigger advantage than ever for customer-facing companies. In our survey and interviews, a majority of executives said that the biggest barriers to a successful customer strategy were finding the right talent and developing the right organizational culture. Yet among companies that ranked meeting customer expectations as one of their top priorities in our survey, just 51 percent said they used culture as an accelerant and a differentiator.

Keeping your culture vibrant takes diligence. You might feel that your embedded cultural inhibitors hold you back. Veteran managers may mistrust the social collaboration tools that younger and more digitally adept employees use freely. The rank and file may be skeptical about the cultural changes you are trying to implement.

Don’t try to fix these problems directly; instead, focus on the few critical behaviors that exist in your organization in which people are doing well for their customers. These might include mobilizing a cross-functional team to help a customer solve a particular problem quickly, saying no to a potential deal with a customer with whom you don’t have a right to win, or starting each meeting by explicitly asking how the topic under discussion is relevant to the customer strategy. Then help spread these behaviors through the rest of the company, in part by explaining why these behaviors matter.

You may also need to lead by following — becoming a visible master of these behaviors yourself — while cultivating advocates among employees. Keeping a culture moving forward is one of the hardest tasks companies take on, which is why many don’t evolve.

Customer-Oriented Leaders

The 10 principles we’ve laid out are familiar to many companies. But few companies consistently practice them with the level of finesse that’s called for.

What, then, should you as a C-level or senior executive do? First, check your current customer strategy and see to what extent all 10 principles are addressed. Rather than just focusing on one or two measures, such as annual sales, incremental sales, market share, or return on investment, establish a scorecard that captures several of these dimensions. Then conduct a qualitative assessment of what your company does well and poorly. As you adjust your practices, focus on a clear identity. If everything you do makes sense in a coherent way, you can build customer relationships that help your business thrive.

About the Survey

Our researchers emailed the 2016 PwC Strategy& Customer Strategy survey to more than 15,000 executives in a variety of industries in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia in April 2016.

Of the recipients, 161 completed the survey; 56 percent of the companies that responded were headquartered in North America. Industries in which the respondents sold their products or services included construction and real estate, energy, entertainment and media, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, mining and agriculture, retail, technology, and transportation.

Annual revenues for responding companies ranged from US$100 million to more than $10 billion. Of the respondents, 17 percent were at the C-suite level, and 80 percent were at the level of president, senior or executive vice president, vice president, or director. Sixty-four percent were highly involved with their company’s customer strategy, and 26 percent were somewhat involved. Of the companies responding, 44 percent served primarily the B2B market, 14 percent served primarily the B2C market, and 43 percent served both.

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