Browsing by Author "Pereira, Joana Rodrigues"
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- Best practices benchmarking of smart services : the Lectra casePublication . Pereira, Joana Rodrigues; Abecassis-Moedas, CélineDue to the global economic crisis, companies have been facing not only a more fierce competition, but also a decrease in demand. For many companies, in the business-tobusiness market, the only way to keep growing is to look for after-sales opportunities, called Smart Services. Best-in-class companies are aware of this business opportunity and have been developing different strategies to pursue it by selling high value solutions that, in some cases, can bring a competitive advantage to consumers. The goal of this dissertation was to understand how best-in-class companies are marketing their Smart Services, sharing the results with Lectra, in order to help it to achieve a business partner positioning. In that way, a Best Practices Benchmarking based on secondary research was conducted on STP and Marketing Mix strategies across 28 companies, from different industries. The benchmarking analysis showed that besides the fact that literature states 4 main business-model strategies to conduct Smart Service business, in what concerns with marketing strategies companies follow one of two: “Service Innovator” or “Smart Partner”. The first one uses a product-centric approach, selling a pack of services with no strategic value for consumers, while the second follows a consumer-centric approach, selling whole solutions and achieving in that way a business partner positioning. The theoretical guidelines of these two strategies were defined with the goal to show, not only to Lectra, but also to other Smart Services providers, the directions to be successful in this “Smart Services era”.
- External design for reputation, perspective and exposurePublication . Abecassis-Moedas, Céline; Pereira, Joana RodriguesThis paper analyses why and how design-centred industrial firms with internal design teams contract external designers. This research is based on an exploratory multiple case study methodology, with a sample of five highly reputable design-centred industrial firms, operating in hypercompetitive industries. While some results challenge the mainstream literature on design management, others expand the existing literature, highlighting that not all firms extract the same benefits from external designers; neither do all external designers bring the same benefits to firms. The paper shows that firms with internal design teams contract external design for (1) reputation (external designers sign products and bring their reputation to the product and to the firm), (2) perspective (external designers bring a different perspective, especially when they come from a different industry from the firm), and (3) exposure (external designers bring exposure that enriches internal design teams).