Accelerate Market Learning

MarketLeadersGroup LLC

Leadership

The market-oriented organization perpetually transforms itself in a continuous quest to competitively deliver greater customer value. Business leaders are at the forefront of change. They are transformational leaders, routinely making the case for change and installing systems and structures to support it. Leaders are willing to take risks themselves and encourage others to do so. They adequately resource both intelligence gathering and change initiatives. They take a balanced approach to measuring success, evaluating market, learning, operational and financial performance.

Leadership & Market Orientation

Market orientation is a business philosophy in which creating superior customer value for the customer is the firm's top priority. The truly market oriented firm is willing to change everything about its operation in order to be true to that principal. That kind of commitment to be market oriented comes form the top and permeates the organization.

Marketing Leadership is the term we use to describe the dimensions of that commitment. In most organizations, marketing leadership authority resides primarily with the business unit general manager. The GM must be a vocal advocate of the market-oriented philosophy and for an entrepreneurial approach to problem solving. In addition, the GM must be an educator, developing the capabilities of the unit gathering market intelligence and the processes whereby it is put to work. Most importantly, the GM must be a change agent, transforming the organization to continuously innovate in response to constant change.

Leadership & the PriceMaster Audit™

In order to help firms dramatically improve their pricing competencies, MLG's PriceMaster Audit™, in the Leadership section, assesses three dimensions of pricing leadership: Commitment to pricing excellence; communication of that commitment through the organization; and the incentives employed to drive performance.

We often find that:

For most businesses, pricing is at or near the top of the agenda of top management. Further, in most cases leadership is actively involved in pricing and directly oversees pricing practices and measures. Shortcomings of senior management include not generally having explicit pricing targets, and not supporting and rewarding pricing excellence.
These shortcomings become painfully evident in the areas of communication and incentives. In most cases, top management is weak in communicating its interest in pricing performance. Further, top management has generally not created incentive programs that reinforce good pricing behavior.
Top management is usually committed to pricing excellence, but that commitment is generally not translated into action. Their commitment is generally not communicated through the organization and their people are not rewarded for sound pricing behavior. · There are several possible conclusions to draw about why top management falls short. Here are a few possibilities:

In addition we find that top management tends to fall short of the mark because leaders:

Do not understand the profitability power of pricing best practices
Do not believe price is as manageable as other elements of the marketing mix;
Perceive unacceptable the projected risk associated with increasingly proactive price management, and/or;
They are not market oriented in general, and price fares no better, or worse, than the other elements of the marketing mix.

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