Case study: Can't Differentiate

Sean could remember when everyone in the industry though that regulation was at the heart of all their problems. They couldn't set their own prices and margins, they couldn't bundle products, they couldn't advertise "specials" that competed with their distributors. They couldn't compete, and they couldn't differentiate.

The day the legislation was passed, the same day that they and dozens of their peer and competitor companies went into private or quasi private hands, champagne corks had popped all over the country. They celebrated their freedom to take their businesses to places they had never been before.

And they certainly had gone to new places - the surprise was that without regulation, they could certainly compete - but they still couldn't differentiate. And this took them to a worse place than they could ever have imagined. Although they were very excited about their "new" products, and their intelligent metering and costsaver plans, their retail customers remained stubbornly unresponsive. The only thing that seemed to get attention was a price cut - and then another price cut. Pretty soon all of the competitors were following each other in a downward spiral, and their previously boring fixed margins were going through the floor and into the red. With the market expecting the unsustainable low prices, the obvious way to save themselves had been cost cutting. Customers howled as service commitments slid out from days to weeks, and the queues for the call centre operators grew longer and longer. Employees who hadn't been laid off started to quit, morale was terrible, and the once boring but honourable industry was vilified by the press and politicians daily.

To get his mind off his troubles, Sean had gone with a colleague to a conference where Zaffyre was speaking. Far from distracting him from his own business, the speaker stimulated Sean to see it in a whole new light. With the breakthough that was triggered in his thinking, he began to see his product as the output of a process, rather than a stand alone item from an unknown and irrelevant source. Maybe the public couldn't work up much emotion about the product, but they could certainly get very excited about where it came from and how it was generated and delivered.

Sean decided to invite Zaffyre in to support him and his team in lifting their level of thinking. Then, when they looked at the whole end to end process, they came up with dozens of potential points of differentiation. Zaffyre supported them to set breakthrough goals, and to take the previously unheard of approach of marketing their process as well as their output. Of course this meant lifting their own game to new and previously unthought of standards, and they all took enormous pride and satisfaction in the benefits that their leadership was delivering to the community. The shareholders were both proud and super pleased with the profits they were achieving, as customers switched from competitors in droves.

Over time, the impact of their work with Zaffyre rippled right out of their business, throughout their industry, beyond their industry into other utilities, and even into financial services, where their stock was the darling of the newly conceived "ethical" investment funds.

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