For years, managers and marketers have been told that the surest route to
winning and keeping customers was to give them something no one else
could. They were told to innovate, revolutionize, think outside the box,
break the rules, and above all,differentiate or die! But while companies were
busy working on better “bells and whistles,” customers were still waiting
on hold, receiving bad customer service, and dealing with products that
don’t work.  In a world in which customers have more choices than ever,
they are still as dissatisfied as ever. What are companies doing wrong?

Authors Patrick Barwise and Seán Meehan argue that customers have much
lower expectations than we think and that companies have gone so far trying
to differentiate themselves that they’ve often neglected the basics. 

In SIMPLY BETTER: Winning and Keeping Customers by Delivering What
Matters Most, Barwise and Meehan advocate a radical “back-to-basics”
approach that replaces the relentless quest for differentiation with a relentless
focus on basic customer needs. While things like on-time delivery, quality,
and good customer service might seem blindingly obvious, the authors’
research shows that most companies have been ignoring these basics for too
long and that customers care much less about “unique” and “different” than
they do about fundamental needs.

At the heart of the “simply better” approach is a new and controversial view
of why customers buy what they do. Barwise and Meehan argue that
customers rarely choose a product or service because it offers something
unique.  Instead,customers usually choose the brand which they think will
most reliably deliver the basics – the generic category benefits which all the
reputable brands provide but which some provide better or more reliably than
others.  

Using examples such as Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Tesco, Medtronic, Hilti,
and Shell, the book shows how companies can successfully differentiate
themselves by providing the basics "simply better" than the competition.

SIMPLY BETTER
Winning and Keeping Customers by Delivering What Matters Most
Patrick Barwise and Sean Meehan
Harvard Business School Press
August 2004
$24.95 / £14.99 / €21.90