Providing A New Strategic Perspective For Lufthansa Technik

CASE STUDY

Andrew Muirhead, Director of Innovation, Lufthansa Technik AG, on his work with ReD:

“I approached ReD as we were putting our strategy together to get some help in looking at where our real strengths are and where we should focus our energy in the future rather than trying to do everything, which is very tempting when your core focus is on being innovative. That’s where ReD was really useful; they helped us build the strategy coming from the customer side. They brought a much stronger focus on the end users, but also on the people who are buying from us. What drives them to make the decision to buy and how do we best focus on their needs? Up until now, we’ve very much been developing products based on what we thought they needed. Our market analysis was centered on the competitors and the potential numbers; we weren’t really taking it all the way to the end user. And that’s why some of the things have been really successful and some of them have been not as successful. But working with ReD, it was about getting an understanding of how do you find out what your customers need and match that to what you’re doing.

For me it was just an absolute eye-opener. It was a revelation on how to go about conducting a strategy process and I actually felt that we had been doing it with insufficient customer insight for many years.

Every year, we present a strategy to the company, and this year was, with the help from ReD, the clearest, most understandable and focused strategy document we have produced to date. That showed me that the work that we put into it led to a solid, easy-to-explain strategy that was also easy to explain to our staff. They found it very plausible. It was a lot more streamlined than anything we’d had in the past and a lot more focused.”

[Banner image by Varun Gaba, via Unsplash]