Managing Creative and Lifestyle Businesses (Term - IV)

Creative and lifestyle consumer businesses are distinct from any other as they engage the emotions and desire of the consumers well before they rationalise their choices. Businesses in sectors such as Fashion, Jewellery, Accessories, F&B, Hospitality, Travel, Luxury goods, Art, Entertainment etc mandate nuanced brand building as well as management of talent and value chain.
The course introduces the students to the unique value drivers of creative and lifestyle businesses and studies how these can be managed. It also aims to equip students with a mindset to venture into creative and lifestyle consumer businesses

Customer Based Business Strategy (Term - VI)

Delivering profitable, sustainable, revenue growth is a key strategic objective of most businesses because of the weightage it has in creating business value (and in driving business valuations). This holds true for most businesses, whether young or mature, new economy or old economy, services or manufacturing, B2B or B2C. This requires a good business strategy (defining the best path to deliver this) to drive the business and a good business model to operationalize it . Even in the case of early stage startups , investors invest in the business strategy and business logic of the entrepreneur and his or her ability to deliver the same.
Interestingly, while delivering profitable sustainable revenue growth is not possible without the customer’s cooperation, most businesses develop their strategies based on supply-side thinking and with little or no customer understanding and analysis – of the kind that is needed for developing business strategy. Even the idea of ‘market disruption” to achieve breakaway rates of growth are strategized from the supply side when, in fact, disruption actually means providing discontinuous value to customers as compared to competition, usually with a breakthrough benefit and / or price. Every company and entrepreneur dreams of a blue ocean strategy, but blue ocean strategies are not just about supply side creativity, they require a very sharp understanding of how customers value. Well known strategist Kenichi Ohmae has said in 1988, talking of how Japanese companies had won, that the heart of strategy is not about beating the competitor but about adding value to the customer and avoiding the competitive battle altogether. Today this is something we see frequently in the strategies of new economy companies.
Boundaries of industry and business lines are also blurring as diverse companies are targeting consumer needs and finding very different ways to fulfil them. Uber and Maruti are competitors, Fin techs and Banks are competitors, Swiggy, Nestle and cloud kitchens using local couriers are competitors, Jio and Airtel may not actually be competitors if their strategies diverge and so on.
This course is designed to equip participants with the orientation, tools and frameworks to understand and develop business strategies which can deliver disruptive , profitable, sustainable growth, through bifocal vision – superior
customer understanding and superior business design to create wealth for the company through creating value for customers.
This course builds on participants’ prior understanding of business strategy and of customer understanding as it straddles both the disciplines of marketing and strategy