Assessing Philips Consumer Lifestyle's Consumer-Centricity
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Eindhoven University of Technology MASTER Assessing Philips Consumer Lifestyle's consumer-centricity Kaufmann, T.F. Award date: 2011 Link to publication Disclaimer This document contains a student thesis (bachelor's or master's), as authored by a student at Eindhoven University of Technology. Student theses are made available in the TU/e repository upon obtaining the required degree. The grade received is not published on the document as presented in the repository. The required complexity or quality of research of student theses may vary by program, and the required minimum study period may vary in duration. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain Eindhoven, January 2011 Assessing Philips Consumer Lifestyle’s Consumer- Centricity by Togbor Ferdinand Kaufmann BSc Industrial Engineering and Management Science — Eindhoven University of Technology 2009 Student identity number: 0559828 in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Innovation Management Supervisors: dr.ir. J. P. M. Wouters, TU/e S. Papamichalis, Philips Consumer Lifestyle dr. J. J. L. Schepers, TU/e R. Veugen, Philips Consumer Lifestyle TUE. School of Industrial Engineering. Series Master Theses Innovation Management Subject headings: customer satisfaction, organization development, customer relationship marketing, marketing: case studies, consumer goods 2 Abstract I. ABSTRACT This master graduation thesis examines the consumer-centricity in the case of Philips Consumer Lifestyle. On a strategic level, Philips Consumer Lifestyle is aiming to become more consumer-centric and expects that this will lead to a more valuable consumer experience. This study validates this approach by assessing both the development of Philips Consumer Lifestyle’s consumer-centricity and its consumer experience. For consumer- centricity, the domains: culture, structure, processes, and financial metrics are examined. For consumer experience, the official Philips Consumer Lifestyle metric: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used. Finally, a link between consumer-centricity and consumer experience is made. While results suggest that Philips Consumer Lifestyle is becoming more consumer-centric, a clear indication that this development is paying off in a more valuable consumer experience could not be proven. 3 Management Summery II. MANAGEMENT SUMMERY This chapter presents a self-contained summery of the complete report. It is intended to highlight the main topics of the report and provide a short overview over the conducted study. The study took place in the context of organizations shifting their focus from products to providing services. The organizations that make this shift are now trying to provide valuable services to their consumers instead of selling the “best” product. An approach to increase this perceived value is to provide personalized offerings. Providing offering on the individual consumer basis is called consumer orientation or consumer-centricity. To apply the consumer-centric approach, companies need detailed knowledge on their consumers. This enables them to identify consumer needs and to maximize the individual consumer’s perceived value. Given the advances in information technology, it has become possible for companies to collect a vast amount of information on consumers (Kumar A. , 2007). It is now also possible to collect this information and build up detailed knowledge for companies targeting a large number of consumers (Shah, Rust, Parasuraman, Staelin, & Day, 2006). The shift from product-centricity, where the aim is to sell products, to consumer-centricity, where the aim is to deliver value to the consumer, is associated with organizational transformations (Sheth, Sisodia, & Sharma, 2000). According to Shah et al. (2006) the transformation is hampered by four organizational barriers: culture, structure, processes and financial metrics. The model by Shah et al. (2006) is the basis of this thesis. Philips Consumer Lifestyle has made the strategic decision to become more consumer- centric. The problem of Philips CL is that there is currently no measure for consumer- centricity. It is therefore difficult to manage the transition. It has, in an addition, not been researched whether more consumer-centricity will lead to an improved perceived consumer experience. To solve these problems, two research questions were formulated. The main research question was phrased as: How to measure the consumer-centricity of Philips CL? The second problem was addressed as: How to link consumer-centricity to consumer-experience? To answer these questions a retrospective study was designed that measured the dimensions of consumer centricity for 2007 and 2009. For consumer experience, the scores of the at Philips Consumer Lifestyle used Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric were used. The intention was to develop a practical measure for dimensions of consumer-centricity, use the results to calculate an overall consumer-centricity score and relate this score to the consumer experience of Philips Consumer Lifestyle. 4 Management Summery Using the model of Shah et al. (2006), four dimensions of consumer-centricity (culture, structure, processes and financial metrics) were defined. To measure the organizational culture at Philips Consumer Lifestyle, the Competing Values Framework (CVF) by Cameron and Freeman (1991) was used as the theoretical background. This enabled the categorization of Philips Consumer Lifestyles organizational culture of as being internally or externally oriented. Using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) (Cameron & Quinn, 1999) was used. The degree of externally orientedness was taken as the degree of consumer-centricity. The organizational structure was assessed using a model by Day (2006) that evaluates the structural alignment with the market in four steps. The model focuses on the consumer facing units of organizations. The focuses of the assessment of this dimension were therefore the Philips Consumer Lifestyle units: Direct Sales, Marketing Communication, Marketing Intelligence, Consumer Care and Sales Organization. The assessment was done using semi-structured interviews during which the interviewees commented on the situation in 2007 and 2009. For the process domain, the value creation process, the multichannel integration process, and the information management process were assessed. No theoretical model was found that could be used to measure the consumer-centricity of Philips Consume Lifestyles processes. A 3-point scale that assesses each process on two dimensions was therefore developed. The scales measured whether Philips Consumer Lifestyle had: not partly or fully implemented a solution to a central issue of the processes consumer-centricity. The assessment was done the same way as that of the structure dimension. The assessment of the financial metrics domain was based on two measures. According to Johnson and Schultz (2004), Philips Consumer Lifestyle should employ two consumer-centric key performance metrics (KPIs). The degree to which consumer-centric KPIs were used was the first measure. Second, a technique called “Disclosure Index” was used to assess the annual reports of Philips Consumer Lifestyle of 2007 and 2009. This language analysis led to a score that could be used as a second measure for the consumer–centricity of the financial dimension. After standardizing the score, the following results were attained: Consumer-centricity of the dimensions Dimension 2007 2009 Culture 0.49 0.51 Structure 0.00 0.33 Process 0.33 0.42 Financial Metric 0.21 0.56 Due to the absence of a clear theoretical foundation of the calculation of a consumer- centricity score, score for consumer-centricity were calculated using five alternative models: 5 Management Summery an additive, a multiplicative, an exponential, a logarithmic, and a logistic model. This lead to the following results: Consumer-centricity scores using alternative models Consumer-Centricity Model 2007 2009 Additive 0.26 0.45 Multiplicative 0.00 0.04 Exponential 2.81 6.17 Logarithmic 0.71 1.04 Logistic 0.74 0.86 Due to data limitation, no clearly superior models could be derived. Considering the rule of parsimony, the additive model is preferable since it less complicated than others and the consumer-centricity score does not become zero if one dimension is assessed as zero, like with the multiplicative model. A clear link between the calculated score for consumer-centricity and consumer experience could not be found. While regardless of the applied model, the consumer-centricity of Philips Consumer Lifestyle increases, the NPS scores decreased. It was expected that an increased consumer-centricity would lead to higher NPS scores. A possible explanation for this is the reorganization of Philips Consumer Lifestyle that took place in 2008. This reorganization might have lead to the found dip in NPS score from 2007 to 2008. From 2008 to 2009, the score increases. The main managerial implication of this study is that especially advances in the information management process could facilitate