Tim Williams

Positioning for Professionals

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

It's not the best companies that prevail in the marketplace, but rather the best brands. The goal of business strategy is not just to be better, but different. Learn how to build a differentiating value proposition by clearly and carefully defining your brand boundaries: Calling, Competencies, Customers, and Culture.

Positioning for Professionals shows how a well-defined value proposition can help professional service firms create their own success instead of copying the success of others, including such concepts as:

How and why professional service brands become homogenized
Why standing for everything is the same as standing for nothing
Why there's no such thing as full service
Deep and narrow as a strategic imperative
Why it's better to be a profit leader than a market leader
Differentiation and price premiums
How to map your brand on the matrix of relevance and differentiation
How to define a value proposition that will make your firm intensely appealing to the customers who want you for what you do best

Based on the proven premise that the most profitable business strategy is not to aim at the center of the market, but rather at the edges, Positioning for Professionals is written for leaders, managers, and other senior executives of service companies in with a particular emphasis on professional service firms.

Produktdetails

• Wiley Professional Advisory Services
• Verlag: Wiley & Sons
• 1. Auflage
• Seitenzahl: 208
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. August 2010
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 235mm x 157mm x 16mm
• Gewicht: 388g
• ISBN-13: 9780470587157
• ISBN-10: 0470587156
• Artikelnr.: 29337305

Autorenporträt

TIM WILLIAMS leads Ignition Consulting Group (www.ignitiongroup.com), a business consultancy devoted to helping professional knowledge firms create and capture more value. As a recognized thought leader in marketing, Tim is a frequent speaker for marketing and business organizations worldwide. He is a regular contributor to business and professional publications and is author of Take a Stand for Your Brand, ranked by Amazon as one of the top ten books on brand building. As an adviser in developing professional service brands, Tim has worked with both large and small professional service firms--most notably advertising agencies and other marketing communications firms--in both the U.S. and abroad. He began his career on Madison Avenue working for large multinational advertising agencies and later served as president and owner of several midsize independent firms.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction. Chapter 1 Size Is Not a Strategy. Maintaining Pricing
Integrity. Better to Be a Profit Leader than a Market Leader. Why Bigness
Doesn't Lead to Greatness. Hired to Be Effective, Not Efficient. Chapter 2
How and Why Brands Become Homogenized. The Urge to Copy. The Folly of
All-In-One. Line Extension Is Not Branding. There's No Such Thing as Full
Service. The Natural Fear of Focus Chapter 3 The Mature Company's Identity
Crisis. Differentiation and Price Premiums. Columbus, Not Napoleon. The
Diffusion of Identity. Landing in No-Man's Land. Strategy at the Edges. Not
Best Practices, but Next Practices. Chapter 4 Expanding Business by
Narrowing Focus. There's No Such Thing as a General Market. Vertical
Success versus Horizontal Success. The Strategic Value of Going Deep.
Chapter 5 Positioning as the Centerpiece of Business Strategy. What Are You
Really Selling? Becoming Hard to Imitate. Two Critical Dimensions of an
Effective Value Proposition. A Category of One. A Brand Is the Customer's
Idea of the Product. Natural Outcomes of a Powerful Value Proposition.
Chapter 6 Building Brand Boundaries. Brand Boundary 1: Calling. Brand
Boundary 2: Customers. Brand Boundary 3: Competencies. Brand Boundary 4:
Culture. The Confluence of Calling, Customers, Competencies, and Culture.
Chapter 7 Validating the Value Proposition. Be Rooted in the Future, Not
the Past. The Value Proposition Team. Asking the Right Questions. Chapter 8
Without Execution, There Is No Strategy. Services. Staffing.
Self-Promotion. Systems. Staging. Executing a Positioning Strategy with
Alignment Teams. Rebuilding Your Ship While at Sea. Chapter 9 Getting Paid
for Creating Value. The Perils of Cost-Based Compensation. Changing the
Language. Pricing as a Core Competency. Why a Value-Based Approach is in
the Client's Best Interest. The Alignment of Incentives. Creating a
Virtuous Circle. Chapter 10 A New and Better Way to Price Professional
Services. Forms of Value-Based Pricing. The Right Clients for Outcome-Based
Agreements. The True Meaning of Partnership. Uncovering Missed
Opportunities to Make Pricing a Core Competency. Key Questions in Setting a
Value-Based Price. If Complex Global Companies Can Do It, So Can You.
Better Time Tracking Is Not the Answer. Thinking of Compensation Plans as a
Stock Portfolio. Setting the Stage for a Value-Based Approach to
Compensation. A Declaration of Value. Appendix A: The Before-and-After
Survey. Appendix B: More Ways to Differentiate Your Brand. Appendix C:
Indicators of the Firm's Success. Notes. About the Author. Index.