How would you accelerate revenue growth for the products inside a competitive market?
That's the issue (and challenge) facing senior management in many companies. For that Drucker School's Bernie Jaworski and his co-author, Robert Lurie, the very best answer involves shifting away from the standard marketing approach that focuses mainly on differentiating your product from competitors.
Instead, in The Organic Growth Playbook: Activate High-Yield Behaviors To Achieve Extraordinary Results – Every Time (American Marketing Association, $14.95), Jaworski and Lurie draw on their extensive experience of the marketing field and also the detailed stories of four companies that sparked fast revenue growth to argue for any more \”holistic approach on customers' purchasing behaviors.\”
Rather than use the same marketing playbook to each product, Jaworski (the Peter F. Drucker Chair of Management and Liberal Arts in the Drucker School) and Lurie (V.P. of Corporate Strategy, Eastman Chemical Company) insist that legitimate revenue growth rests squarely on identifying and activating a small amount of behavior changes during the end-to-end customer buying process.
Identify and change such patterns, they argue, and revenue growth is sure to follow.
Starting using the illustration of the drug Terrafix, whose growth rate stalled until that pharmaceutical company’s marketing team took Jaworski and Lurie's more holistic approach, it ranges across industries and brands. In the process, the authors set down five principles (one principle is: \”Unearth the critical drivers and barriers of target behavior\”) for any systematic method of help companies overcome the typical dead-ends of more traditional methodologies.
If a company still wants fast growth but does not want to follow this approach, there's just one alternative: They will have to purchase that growth by acquiring another company.
\”Growth through acquisition is certainly easier and quicker than growing by outcompeting rivals,\” the authors write at the start of the book. \”Nonetheless, profitable, steady organic growth-be it if you take share of the market from competitors or by convincing existing people to consume more of the product-is the acid test for businesses and managers.\”
Considering that the authors provide a proven approach here (it is already utilized by numerous Fortune 500 companies), a marketing team that ignores such helpful advice does so at their peril.
