Abecassis-Moedas, CélinePereira, Joana Rodrigues2012-02-062012-02-0620112011http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/7770Due 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”.engmaster thesis