IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/eurman/v15y1997i1p79-91.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Delivering differentiation: Building winning enterprises

Author

Listed:
  • Edwards, John

Abstract

Growth is gradually replacing lowest cost as the main driver for many businesses, and customer focus is heralded, in the management press and in many corporate positioning statements, as a substantial contributor to achieving this growth. Yet customer focus, however sophisticated, cannot simply be bolted on to a business, if the organisation's aim is to differentiate itself through customised services and offerings, while retaining - even improving - operational efficiency. Time and again, the promise of such customer focus fails in the market or, at best, delivers only as a result of grossly inefficient patching together of systems and processes behind the scenes. In this article, John Edwards differentiates between such disconnected customer focus, and a state he calls customer-driven - an alignment of adaptable delivery processes behind the creation of customer offerings at the market level.

Suggested Citation

  • Edwards, John, 1997. "Delivering differentiation: Building winning enterprises," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 15(1), pages 79-91, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:eurman:v:15:y:1997:i:1:p:79-91
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026323739600076X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Philip, George & Booth, Marilyn E., 2001. "A new six 'S' framework on the relationship between the role of information systems (IS) and competencies in 'IS' management," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 233-247, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:eurman:v:15:y:1997:i:1:p:79-91. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/115/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.