The Value Discipline Model : is Customer Intimacy the best suited strategy for Cell Matters S.A. ?

Abstract

Cell Matters is a Belgian business-to-business service company integrating critical cryopreservation services in the complex supply chain of Cell Therapies. The company is new in the Cell Therapy market and must therefore gain market shares and ultimately a leadership position within its market. To do so, the company has chosen to pursue a Customer Intimacy strategy. This master thesis discusses the pertinence of Cell Matters’ choice to follow this strategy in its specific context of the Cell Therapy. The Value Disciplines Model assumes that each leading company is offering superior value compared to its competitors by offering customer value, i.e., Operational Excellence, Product Leadership, and Customer Intimacy. An operating model of each Value Discipline has been proposed in literature, encompassing the core processes, the management systems, the organization structure, and the information technologies the company should adopt to develop a specific Value Discipline. It has been showed that the targeted customers are an important parameter of the Value Disciplines Model as the value perceived can vary drastically between customers. Moreover, a literature review shows that different performance metrics have been proposed for each Value Discipline to monitor the execution and effectiveness of the strategy, including cost and time parameters for Operational Excellence, parameters related to upstream and downstream commercialization steps for Product Leadership and customer behavior parameters for Customer Intimacy value. Therefore, a revised operating model canvas including the originally proposed parameters, in addition to the targeted customers, the performance metrics and competitive advantage parameters are proposed in this work for each Value Discipline. This master thesis presents a multiple-case study of four leading companies in the Cell Therapy market, namely the biotechnology company Novartis, the Contract Research Organization Iqvia Inc., the product and service providers Biolife Solutions Inc. and Barkey GmbH. Each company’s strategy is analyzed through the revisited operating model canvas. The results show that although Product Leadership and Customer Intimacy values only account for approximately a third of the academic works published to date, these strategies have successfully been implemented in the Cell Therapy industry: a Product Leadership strategy is adopted by Novartis and Barkey, while Iqvia and Biolife Solutions are successfully pursuing a Customer Intimacy strategy. Hence, while this study is performed on a restricted number of cases, it highlights the potential reliability of a Customer Intimacy strategy to achieve market leadership in the Cell Therapy industry for Cell Matters. Moreover, based on the data collected, some guidelines to implement a Customer Intimacy strategy are proposed, encompassing a clear definition the targeted segments, the creation of customer- and solution-oriented teams and company culture, the development of extensive customer knowledge to ensure development of total solutions and long-term relationship with customers, the investment on customers offering high lifetime value to obtain substantial wallet shares of these customers, and to regularly monitor the strategy effectiveness via shares of wallet, customer retention and customer attrition metrics.