Unique Value: The Secret of All Great Business Strategies by Andrea Dunham and Barry Marcus

Discusses the applications of the five fundamental and four building blocks of a Unique Value strategy for management to monitor and respond to change.

Since many of the assumptions and instincts that have guided corporations for generations are no longer valid, this insightful book provides a comprehensive strategy for monitoring and responding to change. A systematic approach to understanding the strategic drivers of a business can lead to continuously improving management over the near term while laying the foundation of knowledge required to create the unique value strategies for the future. Even the greatest success cannot be sustained without constant vigilance and strategic learning. This fascinating book lays out the reasons for costly mistakes and the markers for great successes. It should be required reading for every business manager, and will prove illuminating for every person interested in business success stories.

From Peter S. Dimsey, President of the U.S. Region, MasterCard International:

Developing unique value is a mandate in an increasingly competitive and globalizing marketplace. This book provides valuable insights as to what it takes to develop a unique value strategy.

From Richard D. Recchia, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America, Inc.:

I feel this is a great book which uses real-life business examples (both successful and unsuccessful) to illustrate the dynamics involved in strategy formulation...

At a time when both the development of effective strategies and the reevaluation of current plans have the imperative priority for management, Unique Value will be an invaluable tool...

This book is about why businesses succeed...and fail. For the first time, in clear, unequivocal language, the fundamentals of strategy are explained in a manner that offers a blueprint for business success. Drawing on a wealth of current real-world examples, it deals with the root causes of both the successes and the failures of today's large business enterprises - the multinational corporations whose millions of employees, contractors and suppliers make up a large part of the work force in developed economies. It explains how large corporations in trouble brought disaster upon themselves by failing to manage their businesses in accordance with the fundamentals of strategy. Unique Value is global in scope. It incorporates in-depth interviews with today's most successful strategists at industry leaders such as AT&T, Deutsche Bank, Fuji-Xerox, General Electric, Guinness, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pepsico, Revlon, Sara Lee, Time Warner, Unilever and many more, covering strategy and implementation at its most current and dynamic. Unique Value dissects the reasons for IBM's failure to transform itself from a mainframe and hardware business into a modern leader in technology; General Motors' failure to maintain its dominance in automobiles; and European and Japanese failures such as Nixdorf Computers and Sony Betamax - all in the context of the fundamentals of business strategy. The common theme in cases of avoidable business failure is the lack of a framework for evolving strategy in response to changing customer, manufacturing, distribution, technology and competitive realities. This book supplies a detailed description of strategic fundamentals and provides a process for strategy evolution. But it goes further, making a distinction between what too often passes for strategy and the superior strategies that build the world's greatest business enterprises.

This book offers an analysis of the modern corporate enterprise that is both descriptive (the way things are) and prescriptive (the way things should be). The authors expose reasons for a company's failure, for example, the destroyed People Express airline, and highlight the steps taken for a company's success, for example, Joseph E. Seagram and Sons. The Unique Value= ROI Model, which has been developed by consulting firm Dunham and Marcus, is an analytical framework that structures the issues and requisite information for strategy formulation; it intends to help business executives prioritize and evaluate their options along four critical axes: the dynamics of the market; business systems and skills requirements; more advanced products and technologies; and competitive firms.

Barry Marcus is one of the founders of Dunham & Marcus, a preeminent general management and brand marketing consulting firm. He is currently Chief Executive Officer of Unique Value International, Inc. a business, marketing and brand consultancy where he helped develop the proprietary Unique Value = ROI model, a model used to create many successful businesses and brands in the US for Fortune 500 companies. Photo from the back cover.

Andrea Dunham, now deceased, was one of the founders of Dunham & Marcus, Inc., a preeminent general management and brand marketing consulting firm.

Acknowledgments		xiii
Preface		xxi
Introduction		xxiii
1.	The Power of a Unique Value Strategy	1
2.	The New Importance of Strategy	12
	Accelerating Globalization Rapidly Advancing Technology
3.	Benchmarking Strategy: The Need for a Standard	29
4.	Strategy in Action	38
	Nintendo: Redefining an Industry Seagram: A U.S. Leadership Strategy Holiday Inn: A Global Acquisition and Investment Strategy
5.	Action Without Strategy	66
	IBM: The Need to Learn a New Set of Fundamentals Sony Betamax: The High Cost of Ignoring the Fundamentals
6.	How to Develop a Unique Value Strategy: The Questions to Ask about Your Business	84
	Unique Value = ROI Model Consumer and Customer Analyses Business Systems and Skills Analyses Product and Technology Analyses Competitor Analyses
7.	What Happens When You Don't Ask the Right Questions	124
	Questions That Were Not Asked About Consumers and Customers Questions That Were Not Asked About Business Systems and Skills Questions That Were Not Asked About Products and Technologies Questions That Were Not Asked About Competitors
8.	Seagram's Success Story: "We Didn't Presume We Knew Anything"	144
	Consumer/Customer Learning Business Systems/Skills Learning Product/Technology Learning Competitor Learning
9.	Taking Strategy to Market	163
	Consumer and Customer Substrategies Business Systems and Skills Substrategies Product and Technology Substrategies Competitive Substrategies
10.	Strategy Formulation Using the Unique Value = ROI Model: A Case Study	187
	Background Preliminary Assessment of Key Issues Preliminary Issues and Findings Preliminary Hypotheses and Potential Unique Value Strategies In-Depth Research to Test and Refine Hypotheses Integrated Findings Key Findings Refined Strategies and Hypotheses Reality Checks, Costs, Risks, Corporate Agenda Requirements Unique Value Strategy Recommendation Final Recommendation
11.	Profitability, Productivity and the Strategic Organization	215
	Overcoming Structural and Attitudinal Barriers to Learning What Seagram Learned About Consumers and Customers What Seagram Learned About Business Systems and Skills What Seagram Learned About Products and Technologies What Seagram Learned About the Competition
12.	Unique Value Strategies of the Future	237
Appendix A		255
Appendix B		258
Appendix C		262
Appendix D		265
Notes		267
Bibliography		272
Index		277