Do Business Well

Nothing is more important to streamliners than being able to depend on their business relationships. Far from lazy, this group just doesn’t want to spend time rethinking its decisions. They want to know exactly what they will be getting, time after time. Beware the company that strays from the predictable, as Coca-Cola found out when it introduced New Coke some years ago, unleashing uncounted protests from customers who liked Coke just the way it was. Coca-Cola hastily, and with some embarrassment, reintroduced its old Coke, renaming it Classic Coke.

Streamliners don’t like surprises, and particularly not the disruptive kind. They value market leaders they can rely on, who, when needed, will guide them through changes with a steady hand.

Charles Schwab, the financial services firm, clearly understands this. Throughout its more than twenty-five-year history, the company built its business on the assumption that culture and people are its greatest asset. Reassuring customers is its mission, or as co-CEO David Pottruck is fond of saying, at Schwab “we want to be the custodian of our customers‘ financial dreams.” Linnet Deily, vice chairman, echoes Pottruck’s sentiments: “This is a very customer-driven organization from top to bottom [and] I’ve sat in many meetings here where the question is, over and over again, ‘What’s the right thing for the customer?”

With the Internet rapidly transforming the investment management field, Charles Schwab’s challenge was to steer its streamline- minded customers through some pretty dramatic changes. Starting in 1993, it introduced them to on-line trading, over time lowering customers‘ average cost per trade some fivefold, to $29.95, and putting $250 million of annual net profits at risk. “Fortunately,” says Pottruck, “the gamble paid off—we strengthened our existing customer relations and gained a large number of new customers.”

Of course, when a company is dealing primarily with streamliners, change must be introduced with care and subtlety. Deily recalls a presentation to a group of investor customers in which she used a chart that described fifteen current Schwab programs. Only when the chart was projected on a screen did Deily realize that “we were only doing one of them two years earlier. But the changes had built over the last couple of years, bits and pieces every month, until suddenly, when I looked back over a two-year time frame, we had changed things fairly dramatically. But it never felt like a dramatic change.”

For market leaders appealing to streamliners, brand building is another priority “We have put a lot of advertising weight behind [our] brand and we would say that has helped us differentiate ourselves from a lot of the competition,” says Deily. As is to be expected, the company’s ads stress peace of mind and empathy with the customer. After all, that’s what is important to its customers.

Another industry where dependability counts is fast food, or as it is more formally known, the QSR (quick-service restaurant) business. To hold on to streamline-minded customers, some of the better known fast food brands invested billions of dollars in a market that even ten years ago was already deemed mature.

The conventional wisdom that was frequently reported in the press was that there was a massive fast food oversupply, and analysts predicted the industry was headed for trouble.

If you were competing in the QSR marketplace, your initial step in confronting the problem would likely have been to analyze customers‘ needs. First, who uses these restaurants and what do they want? As it turns out, the majority are streamliners. As far back as 1959, Fred Turner, one of McDonald’s founding fathers, recognized the company’s appeal to streamliners, though he didn’t use the term, when he challenged the fledgling company and its franchisees to “achieve standardization without regimentation.” As Claire Babrowski, executive vice president, worldwide restaurant systems, puts it, “He was looking for some level of standardization and consistency in what the customer got so that we could have a clearly identified brand that people could recognize and be comfortable with.”

In time, as we know, people became very comfortable, indeed, with McDonald’s golden arches and its various imitators. In fact, roughly 35 percent of the U.S. population visits a quick-service restaurant on an average of ten times a month, and some people—the frequent users—eat in them five or six times a week. In all, the 35 percent of the population that seems devoted to fast food restaurants accounts for 80 percent of all visits to QSR facilities.

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