Sometimes interviewees find it hard to differentiate themselves by simply using common frameworks. The problem with common frameworks is that they are too board to allow you to give an insightful synthesis. And as more and more candidates start to use them frequently, it is harder to impress the interviewers. Hence, I would like to give you two secret models to help you delight your interviewers. If common frameworks are powerful machine guns, these tools are silver bullets.
Silver Bullet #1: Marketing Tool: Segmenting – Targeting – Positioning
In short, this tool is call STP. STP is a powerful structure to construct insightful marketing strategies. It consists of 5 steps.
- Define the total market
- Segment the market
- Assess segment attractiveness
- Identify target segments
- Determine your value proposition
In this post, I will give you a very quick example to explain how powerful this tool can be (if you are interested, you can read more details about STP here).
Kogan.com, an online retailer in Australia, has enjoyed exponential sales growth in the past 2 years and its stock price has more than doubled. Kogan.com is playing for the retail market in Australia (step 1). This market can be segmented in many ways, including by age of customers and product categories (step 2). Customers of Kogan.com are mainly 16-35 years old, mostly digital natives, and have strong buying power. Kogan.com has the capability to delivery digital products at attractive prices and with excellent service. The fit between segment attractiveness and Kogan’s ability to compete make Kogan target this segment (steps 3 and 4). In Australia, there are many sellers of digital products including JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, and K-Mart. Kogan realized that doing business online while offering supreme customer service was a strong value proposition with less competitors. You can see this by looking at the value position map below.
Chart 1: Value Position Map
Now, if you can walk your interviewer through those steps of analysis (after maybe using the Market Study Framework and drilling down to identify the drivers of business decline as being marketing position), your ability to solve business problems will definitely stand out.
Silver Bullet #2: Strategy Tool: Play to Win
Strategy related cases are not very usual during interviews. But they can be very challenging if you happen to encounter them. However, besides the Market Study Framework, there are not many handy well known frameworks that you can draw on.
So, I would like to introduce the Play-to-Win Framework.
The framework comes from “A Playbook for Winning Strategy” developed by A.G Lafley (CEO of Procter & Gamble) and Roger Martin (Dean of the Rotman School of Management) in 2013. The framework provides a step-wise approach of questions that consultants can ask a client (or the client can ask itself):
- What is your winning aspiration?
- Where will you play?
- How will you win?
- What capabilities need to be in place?
- What management systems are required?
By answering those 5 essential questions, you can examine whether a strategy is well defined, or help an organization develop a valuable strategy from scratch.
Let’s use Kogan.com again here as an example. What is the strategy that Kogan.com should choose?
- Kogan’s winning aspiration is to bring consumer goods to retail customers with lower prices and better service
- Kogan.com plays in Australia and in the online retail market
- Kogan.com wins by product differentiation and better customer service like product delivery and warranty. (You can even do an STP here)
- Key capabilities that Kogan.com needs include a user friendly online shopping experience, fast inventory and logistics turn-around, customer service, cost leadership, exclusive channel partners, and big data analytics.
- Major management systems that need to be in place are CRM, package tracking, Service Desk, Data Centre, UX/UI, etc.
As a matter of fact, the Play to Win Framework is quite general, however, the value of the framework is the thinking process it forces you to adopt.
Below you can see a chart from the original article to better understand how this framework works. The solid arrows in the chart show the sequence you should follow when crafting strategy while the dotted arrows show the route to examine the congruence between steps of an existing strategy.
*Chart is adapted from “A Play Book for Winning”, Harvard business review, strategy, April 2013
This is my concluding post on case interview frameworks. I hope that you have learned something from these posts and sincerely wish you enjoy your case interview experience.
My final word of advice regarding frameworks is: don’t stop at learning from other people’s frameworks, create your own ones! That is the best way to master them and distinguish yourself in the interview!
Image: Pexels
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