Introduction: The Customer Value Creation Strategy and Transformational Change

In this section, we examine how organisations develop and implement their customer value creation strategies taking the organisation’s whole strategic context into account. It is important to clarify what is involved here because, traditionally, how to best define, create, and deliver customer value has been assumed to be a problem that an organisation’s marketing people solve. However, marketing departments usually have very little say in how the organisation’s scarce resources are allocated or used across their organisations to create customer value and, in turn, generate value for the whole organisation. The two chapters in this section provide insight into these intertwined phenomena. Their authors variously explore how a customer value creation strategy is implemented while transforming an organisation, specifically, by implementing changed multi-level portfolio objectives to better deliver on customers’ current or evolving needs. The two chapters included in this section help us understand the importance of creating and delivering value to customers by carefully considering how customer value creation and organisation-wide portfolio decisions should be made, implemented, and continuously re-evaluated and refined side by side. They also point to how some organisations become transformational project leaders within their industries. Two frameworks that can be used by practitioners and scholars are developed in this chapter based on these authors’ findings.