5.1 Introduction: The Value of “Sorting”

Kraft Foods’ Tang—the orange-flavored drink that Americans closely associate with astronauts and the space program—experienced 30% growth in 2009 in developing markets, including Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.“Tang Gets a Second Rocket Ride” (2010). It is instructive to note how the firm has leveraged different kinds of value in achieving these results. In competing in any market, there is some basic value a brand must provide, including adequate distribution and certain levels of market awareness and understanding of the product. Other dimensions of value differentiate the product; in Tang’s case, it is a unique flavor and established brand equity. The company has new flavors, including mango variations in the Philippines and maracuja (passion fruit) in Brazil. As the brand reach was expanded, the company remained open to research and insight about unmet needs, and potentially yet-to-be-determined attributes. In China, they discovered both a strong belief that children’s hydration was important and required drinking a lot of water (up to 6 glasses a day) and that kids found water boring! Most significantly, though, they found a strong preference for single servings, leading to the development of single-serve powder sticks to address this unmet need. This new form of packaging was adopted in place of pitcher packs, which Chinese moms found to provide nonvalue (in being wasteful and expensive).

At this point in the book, we have established the challenges of growing in the competitive marketplace today, introduced the 3-Circle model, and explored the basic concepts behind it. As reflected in the Tang example, we have also reinforced throughout that in any customer market, there are different dimensions of customer value that can play different strategic roles for the firm. Different strategy and customer value frameworks over the past 30 years have identified categories of value in disparate areas of the literature. Cutting across those frameworksKano (1995); Kuo (2004). See also Gale (1994) and the previously cited works of Kim and Mauborgne (1997, 2005) and Levitt (1980). and adding unique insight around nonvalue, we can summarize these categories as follows:

There are three kinds of nonvalued attributes. Surprisingly, very important growth implications emerge from considering different attributes that are currently not valued by customers.

In short, experience has shown that there is significant insight in recognizing these different categories of value in developing growth strategy. But what is needed is a way to simultaneously represent all of these categories of value in a manner that can be easily taught within the organization in order to get team members most quickly focused on the important dimensions of growth strategy.

We will describe a case study in order to illustrate how the 3-Circle framework provides the basis for integrating all of these value concepts in an actionable way.