Dan Griffin's Blog
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Drucker on Market Dominance
April 17, 2007
I’ve been reading "The Essential Drucker," by business guru Peter Drucker, who makes the following assertion on page 188:
"The fact remains that so far, anyone who is willing to use marketing as the basis for strategy is likely to acquire leadership in an industry or a market fast and almost without risk."
That comes at the end of an entire chapter on entrepreneurial business strategy (it’s originally from a book he wrote in 1985). It’s a pretty powerful statement. And, if nothing else, it reminded me of the importance of branding, and of taking a customer-first approach rather than a technology-first approach. Nevertheless, I think that to say a business strategy is ‘almost without risk’ is to exaggerate slightly, or at least to oversimplify.
He’s not talking about marketing hype. He’s talking about the process of listening to customers. He’s talking about supplying something that’s useful and valuable from the customer perspective. Of course, lots of stuff can go wrong, and customers don’t always know what they want. I guess the really shocking thing is that Drucker also asserts that few businesses follow this advice, as fundamental as it seems, and as widely as it’s taught. Is that because it’s genuinely hard to do?
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