UPS: Transforming Package Delivery into a One-to-One Business summarizes the CEO’s vision for meeting customer empowerment with transformation.
Michael L. Eskew, Chairman and CEO of UPS, outlined the package delivery giant’s vision for transforming itself into a “one-to-one” business at the Executives’ Club of Chicago’s Enterprise CEO Lunch, 15 February 2007. Before a packed house at the Chicago Hilton, he demonstrated UPS’s creative “whiteboard” marketing campaign and explained its role in communicating to customers the value of the company’s transformation.
The importance of UPS’s vision extends beyond UPS stakeholders because it reflects a shift in emphasis away from industrial efficiency to knowledge-based innovation. Make no mistake, efficiency is mission-critical to every business, but fewer companies can differentiate based on efficiency. To its considerable credit, UPS sees the shift and is striving to empower customers with information as well as delivery services.
A History of Transformation
Mr. Eskew set the context by emphasizing that UPS has a history of transforming itself to meet technology and market challenges:
Founder Jim Casey began the company as bicycle messenger service in 1907, but emerging technology, […]
Word of Mouth Marketing is an exceptionally useful, insightful and surprising book. Andy Sernovitz has done a masterful job at creating a brief, lucid and tactical guide to realigning your company’s relationships with your customers, quickly and inexpensively. It is very straightforward, honest and full of practical techniques. Moreover, it is very human because it addresses customers as human beings, not demographics. I suspect that this aspect of the book might peeve those marketers that are invested in the difficulty and complexity of their craft. Think about it: when customers were (relatively) mute and invisible, marketers were the intermediary between the enterprise and the customer; in the absence of the customer’s voice, they created models and theories to simulate it. WOM, powered by Web 2.0, means that customers can talk in their own words, and companies can listen. The customer’s back!
As readers of these pages know well, I estimate that one of the most poignant changes that faces Industrial Economy enterprises is shifting their primary focus from production and operations to the customer. The Industrial Economy mechanized work and production, and by any measure it created unprecedented wealth by drastically lowering per-unit costs of any kind of product you can name, bringing more products within the means of more people. This worked extremely well while demand exceeded supply: customers were excited to have their first car/house/television, and they were happy with what producers brought to market.
What does the Knowledge Economy Portend for the Industrial Economy organization?