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The Market Driven Organization
Book

The Market Driven Organization

Understanding, Attracting and Keeping Valuable Customers

George S. Day
Free Press, 1999

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Expanding on the groundbreaking concepts first presented in Market Driven Strategy, George S. Day presents a detailed illustration of what a market-driven organization looks like and how it operates. This practical book provides many specific suggestions that executives can implement to get their companies in tune with their customers and their markets. Day also presents contrasting examples that show blunders, setbacks and outright failures among companies that stubbornly retain inward-looking cultures. This book joins Day’s earlier work as a classic in the management field and getAbstract recommends both books to business people at all levels.

Summary

Market Driven

During the last half of the 20th century, common wisdom advised managers to stay close to the customer and ahead of the competition. That advice proved to be true, in that research now shows that market-driven organizations do indeed outperform their competition. But many organizations do not place enough emphasis on becoming market-driven because their internal processes, structures, incentives and controls get in their way. These companies would need to be entirely overhauled - a big step that short-sighted organizations are reluctant to take even though it would lead to greater success.

You can create a market-driven organization in which your three key elements - capabilities, culture and configuration - are aligned to the market. Distinctive market-sensing and market-relating capabilities are at the heart of market-driven companies. Having a market orientation simply makes sense. After all, you are selling to that market. Ignoring its realities is just foolish.

Market-driven companies such as Wal-Mart, Virgin Airlines, Disney and Gillette show how intimate knowledge of their customers and markets gives them a powerful advantage over rivals. ...

About the Author

George S. Day holds the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professorship in the Department of Marketing at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of the Huntsman Center for Global Competition. He has written many articles for marketing and management journals and 14 books, including Market Driven Strategy , the companion volume to this book. A consultant to corporations worldwide, he lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

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