Updated 3/30/21
This Blog aims to help illuminate what makes for winning and losing business strategies, discussing what we hope are interesting and relevant examples. In this Blog we will especially view these topics through the lens that we––the DPV Group, LLC––call ‘Delivering Profitable Value (DPV)’ which contends that strategy should focus single-mindedly on profitable, superior ‘Value Delivery.’ That is, sustainable business success, while elusive and subject to good and ill fortune, can most realistically be achieved by a concentrated, deliberate effort to creatively discover and then profitably Deliver (i.e. Provide and Communicate) one or more superior Value Propositions to customers.
While many would perhaps say this idea is ‘obvious,’ most businesses do not actually develop or execute their strategies based on this understanding of the central role of the Value Proposition. A Value Proposition should not be a slogan or marketing device for positioning products/services, but rather the driving, central choice of strategy – fundamental to success or failure of the business. In this Blog we will try to bring that idea further to life for a variety of industries and markets.
As background, Michael Lanning first created and articulated/coined some of these concepts, including ‘Value Proposition,’ the ‘Value Delivery System’ and the related concept of ‘Value Delivery.’ He did so (after his first career, in Brand Management for Procter & Gamble) while a consultant for McKinsey & Company, working closely with Partner Ed Michaels in Atlanta in the early 1980s.
In life after McKinsey, he and his colleagues in the DPV Group built on those seminal concepts. Lanning did so first with then-professor at Stanford and Berkeley Business Schools, Prof Lynn Phillips, and later with his DPV Group colleagues. These include long-time senior P&G-manager Helmut Meixner, and previous McKinsey consultant and long-term executive in the paper industry Jim Tyrone, and others. The expanded concepts of Value Delivery include the Customer’s Resulting Experience and the notion of organizations that, rather than Value-Delivery-Focused, can be understood as ‘Internally-Driven’ and/or ‘Customer-Compelled.’
Today, the DPV Group tries to help clients appreciate, internalize, and apply these Value Delivery strategy concepts, to pursue profitable, breakthrough growth in a wide range of B2B and B2C businesses. We hope that this Blog will also contribute to that goal.
