How To Grow When Your Markets Dont

The premise of the chapter, Information Everywhere: Tsutaya, Dassault

Systemes, and GE Medical Systems, is that established companies have
countless of hidden assets such as customer contacts, technical expertise and
efficient business models that can be exploited to grow the business.
Companies that the authors use as examples found on their hidden assets
ways to leverage them to generate new opportunities for profitable growth.
Those hidden assets are among the most wasted; we are talking about
information assets, the value/cost of what they know. Information assets can be
define it as systems and software which capture the customer needs that can
be used in our favor at a future time cause we can decipher and anticipate
those needs, Now despite the fact firms have invested in software and systems
to capture, monitor and control information about their businesses just a few
companies have used these investments to serve customers higher-order
needs and create new growth, in other words, a tiny portion of this potential
information is being used for driving new growth. The reason is that executives
are not aware of the powerful tool that offers information technology.
Tsutaya, a Japan company, evolved from a small retailer renting videos to
become one of the top retailers not only with videos but also music and books.
Moreover, such growth does not come about of its own accord. This was
possible thanks to the use of its customer data assets to drive marketing and
sale efforts. They decided to collect customer data and later figuring out how
this information could both provide value to buyers and make better their
company performances. While Tsutaya's database grew its knowledge and
individual behaviors of customers become precise. This helped the Japans
company and its ambitions plans: it was introduced Tsutaya Online (TOL) a
website which combined and reinforced with data captured from the stores
allows the company to refine its offerings even further, since the data can be
useful to understand client's interests a little bit more, it can be used to offer
recommendations, among another things, which generate more interactions
between the company and the customer and more sales.
Tsutayas success can be explained with a simple quote from their CEO: "We're
not interested in merely renting videos to people. We're collecting lifestyle
information and the possibilities that flow from that are over time, enormous."
The above case is just one example that can help us to understand how well
used this information can generate success. It is important to devote resources
to the collection, digestion and distribution of information, but more importantly,
understand the proper role of this information systems and what can managers
do or need for make decisions. It is important to understand how this

information asset is a continuing and interacting structure of people, equipment

and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate, and distribute pertinent,
timely and accurate information for use by marketing decision makers to
improve their marketing planning, implementation, and control. When
companies build on this flow of data, created as a by-product of effectively
managing its monitoring business, it must offer services that address its
customers ultimate higher-order needs: cost predictability and risk minimization.
In conclusion, this chapter shows us how you can turn information into profit
growth, with the stories of Tsutaya, Dassault Systemes, and GE Medical
Systems we could learn ways in which information assets can develop new
value and new growth. We can consider/identify some ideas that can be applied
to every company, for example: compile and use customer information from
different sources, create targeted customer offerings (such like
recommendation, promotion, sales), optimize product mix and balance by store
by analyzing customer data, systems to analyze and file customer letters,
suggestions, emails, and call centre responses, which will enable you to spot
trends, improve customer service and develop new products, services and
systems.etc.; Now all those ideas are important components in the demand
process, they alone wont generate growth for our company. To achieve this, we
have to know apart from traditional assets what else our company own that can
be used to create new value.
And this is the key importance of information: they can help manage risk,
streamline workflows, improve decision making, and anticipate problems. Also,
these assets include an advantaged market window into the activity of a
particular industry, proprietary technical know-how, and internally developed
software and systems that may have external value. Tsutaya, for example,
made use of by-product information to offer customers an unusual service. But
more importantly, it allows a business to make informed decisions by presenting
data in a way that can be interpreted by management. In this context, customer
information would be useful in providing metrics surrounding client/customer
engagement for determining better ways to engage or work with your clients.
However, it must be stated that the value of information lies not only in the
information itself but the actions that arise from the information. For example, if
the information alerts you to poor customer satisfaction, it is only useful if this
creates a change in the way the business deals with customers. Hence, the
information process should form part of a wider review process within the
business to gain the best outcomes.