Gurus On Marketing

Benchmarking
According to Philip Kotler 36 :
‘Companies normally learn about their competitors’ strengths and
weaknesses through secondary data, personal experience, and
hearsay. They can augment their knowledge by conducting primary
marketing research with customers, suppliers and dealers. A
growing number of companies are turning to benchmarking as the
best guide to improving their competitive standing.’
What is benchmarking?
Benchmarking is a method of improving business performance by
learning from other organisations how to do things better in order
to be the ‘best in the class’. The aim of a benchmarking is to improve
upon the best practices of other organisations.
Benchmarking originated in the USA in the late 1970s. Now 95 per
cent of US companies say they are practising it. As far as Europe is
concerned benchmarking seems to be well established. Coopers &
Lybrand undertook a survey in 1994 covering The Times 1000 companies
or their equivalent across five European countries: the United
Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain and France. The survey
defined benchmarking as ‘the process of comparing business practices
and performance levels between companies (or divisions
within companies) in order to gain new insights and to identify opportunities
for making improvements.
The survey showed that over two-thirds of companies in the United
Kingdom, the Netherlands and Switzerland, over half of French companies
and a third of Spanish companies are using benchmarking
techniques. Benchmarking is used across all of the principal business
functions.
TEN GURUS AND STRATEGIC ANALYTICAL TOOLS 149