Benchmarking outside the box
With competition growing fiercer inside most industries and customer attention waning, it is critical to differentiate your company from the pack, says Hamish Taylor ’84MBA, CEO of the technology and business design company Vision UK. Taylor led a Goizueta-sponsored breakfast discussion in December at the St. James’s Club in London, England, on “The new view of benchmarking: Can your organization learn more outside its industry than within?”
Spurred on by his attendance at a previous Berlin banking conference on trading competitive advantage, Taylor joked that industry insiders offer little insight on their secrets to success. To get that competitive advantage, he advised attendees to look beyond one’s competitors and instead consider “what is powerful or world-class in ‘other’ organizations.” He honed this strategy while serving as CEO of the U.K.-based Sainsbury’s Bank, as managing director of the railways company Eurostar, and in a variety of brand management posts for British Airways and Procter & Gamble.
Bringing in examples from his professional life, Taylor noted how he and his staff at British Airways were charged with the task of trying to appease customers stuck in long airport lines. Instead of going to other airline carriers for advice, he consulted Walt Disney World management, as experts in the field of managing queues. In another example, Taylor illustrated how building on supermarket retail principles, as opposed to banking, helped him spearhead the growth of Sainsbury’s Bank, a financial institution built upon the brand name of the U.K. supermarket chain.
“A traditional bank gets clients in expensive ways, through advertising, checking accounts, and direct mail for other products,” Taylor explains. “Instead, we treated the bank offerings like any other supermarket product. A range of very simple products were promoted in main aisles and in the checkouts, with color-coded banking ads and retail-style special offers. We cut the cost of customer acquisition and grew profit by behaving like a retailer rather than a bank.”
While this line of thinking might sound simple conceptually, Taylor contends that when applied to organizations the shift is not as easy. He says, “What we ask people to do is counterintuitive, especially when they have previously been asked to try to be unique, rather than like someone else.” He recommends breaking down the business task into very basic terms and moving away from industry specific language to allow for the free flow of ideas. He also notes that managers “need to be out there talking to other organizations and recruiting people from other industries, or thinking of ways to be part of a joint partnership with them.”
Taylor’s career achievements will be acknowledged in April when he receives The Sheth Distinguished International Alumni Award. Recipients of the award must be highly acclaimed in their business, profession, or life’s work, either internationally or nationally, and must be individuals who, in deed or in action, reflect the impact
of their education at Emory University.—Myra A. Thomas