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Customers—Programs & Actions
Growth & Market Strategy Team
Our Growth & Market Strategy Team exists to lead Alcoa in taking broader, cross-business unit views of existing, emerging, and potential customer needs; next generation market opportunities; and emerging geographies and megatrends—all in a highly disciplined fashion. This mission includes joining with our businesses to share best marketing and customer practices, institutionalizing and spreading our ability to generate growth, and defining clear metrics and scorecards to enable and evaluate our performance.
The group focuses its efforts in four primary commercial areas:
- Market sector/market development teams;
- Growth practice;
- Commercial homeroom (a space for sales and marketing professionals to tap into top marketing resources and share best practices) and communications; and
- The Strategic Marketing Analysis and Reporting Tool (SMART).
Market Sector/Market Development Teams (MSTs and MDTs)
Our four market sector/market development teams—Aerospace, Ground Transportation, Defense, and Sustainable (Green) Infrastructure (the former Oil and Gas MST is now a business unit)—bring together our global marketing and application engineering capabilities to focus on particular sectors where our value propositions are compelling or soon will be.
Market sector teams operate across business units where Alcoa has a historic and significant presence. Market development teams primarily coordinate entry of multiple business units into newly identified white space.
To accomplish their tasks, these teams:
- Create, interpret, maintain, and distribute best-available market sector intelligence;
- Identify growth opportunities and drive development of new offerings that provide clearly differentiated value propositions to our customers;
- Develop market sector strategies; and
- Initiate growth opportunities that bridge multiple business units and surface those that are not captured by the current business structure.
In short, these teams join capabilities from across our businesses in new ways so our customers can better leverage the breadth of capabilities within Alcoa. They help our businesses uncover and sell more advanced solutions that are profitable for the company, creating highly-focused, systems-oriented solutions. They work at the forefront of the Alcoa Advantage—the notion that the combination of businesses and assets within Alcoa is greater than the sum of its parts—every day.
MST/MDT Successes
As societal concern about carbon footprints, carbon dioxide (CO2) reductions, and overall energy consumption intensifies, it is prudent for us to evaluate our businesses and provide appropriate product portfolios to help customers meet emerging, environmentally astute needs. Therefore, we are purposefully leveraging our competencies, technologies, products, services, and intellectual capital to benefit our customers.
We believe world markets increasingly should, and will, demand authentically green products as defined by cradle-to-cradle design philosophy. More and more products may be made from alloys high in recycled content, while others may be smart building systems that facilitate Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Others will enable new in-field applications that alter the way oil and gas are economically extracted from previously unreachable deposits, while newly designed aluminum-intensive city buses and trucks will use less fuel and emit fewer pollutants. We also believe that we are well-positioned to do the right thing for the environment and our shareholders.
Responding to fluid demand for both detailed, credible information on sustainable material and for authentically green products, we refocused the mission of the Sustainable (Green) Infrastructure Market Development Team in 2008.
The day-to-day commercial pursuit of green building solutions like energy-efficient facades, integrated photovoltaic systems, and daylighting systems was shifted to our Building and Construction Systems group, owner of the strong Kawneer brand.
Our Sustainable Infrastructure MDT has evolved into a center of excellence at Alcoa, with its main pursuit being to develop and maintain global competency in sustainable product design and market growth. The group will help Alcoa businesses calculate CO2 footprints of key product lines; obtain cradle-to-cradle design product certifications; maximize recycled content of key product lines; and explore and define new business models that create carbon credits in our downstream and midstream businesses. It also will assist our business units in determining how they can help their customers’ sustainability goals.
Alcoa’s two-pronged approach to green market development was on display at the influential and growing 2008 Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Boston. The show drew 30,000 attendees from 80 countries as far away as India and Australia, with another 50,000 participating in cyberspace. Our mission at the show was to educate city planners, developers, architects, and building component and material suppliers about the green opportunities inherent in aluminum and to promote green building solutions and products available from our Kawneer business.
In late 2008, Kawneer North America was awarded Cradle to CradleSM (C2C) environmental product certification at the silver level for its 1600 Wall System®1, 1600 Wall System®2, InLighten® Light Shelf, and 1600 SunShade®. C2C is an independent, U.S. environmental certification process for materials and products, assessing the total impact of a product on human health and the environment. These are the first C2C certifications awarded to Kawneer and reflect Kawneer’s and Alcoa’s ongoing commitment to sustainability. Alcoa’s aluminum bottle stock achieved silver-level Cradle to CradleSM environmental product certification in early 2009.
An Alcoa technology show at Swedish truck maker Scania that was orchestrated by the European Ground Transportation MST featured five Alcoa business and resource units. These units detailed how Alcoa engineered solutions across a number of applications could help reduce fleet emissions, improve fuel economy, and contribute to a better climate.
Other recent MST/MDT successes include:
- Continuing participation in the Joint Strike Fighter and new tactical vehicle programs (aluminum makes this equipment lighter, stronger, and faster); and
- The successful launch of a lightweight, aluminum-intensive, energy-efficient, next-generation city bus in China. The bus reduced CO2 emissions and enabled greater fuel economy.
Growth Practice
The Growth Practice continues to aggressively infuse the proven Alcoa Growth Process (AGP) discipline and supporting tools into our business units and MSTs/MDTs to develop market-validated value propositions, create customer plans, and help the enterprise move more quickly and intelligently to capture profitable growth.
A key deliverable of the AGP—the value proposition—is a clear, concise description of how we create unique, relevant, and credible value for customers. That all-important proposition is supported by statistically valid voice-of-the-customer data, and it crowns a framework that provides guidance for all future activities and initiatives related to how we identify and capture market success.
A sound, integrated business strategy prioritizes resources and investments by streamlining objectives, goals, strategies, and metrics that tie back to the value proposition. Customer planning provides a systematic roadmap to ensure we are targeting the right customers, growing with them, and doing so in a way that smartly aligns with their priorities.
The Growth Practice has helped our businesses identify and validate more than US$6 billion in profitable revenue. In 2008 alone, the practice was used to identify more than US$1 billion in growth potential in consumer electronics, Russian ground transportation, medium-duty wheels, surface engineering, and carbon monetization (the potential revenue from sales of carbon reduction technologies, reduced carbon products, and/or any resultant carbon credits). Overall Growth Practice efforts in 2008 that touched sustainability-related issues and opportunities accounted for about 25% of total growth identified, and we will focus on increasing this amount in 2009.
Commercial Homeroom and Communications
In addition to promoting the vision, strategy, teams, and tools required to grow, we are more fully developing the commercial capability within our sales and marketing employees by deploying standardized processes and tools that enable our businesses to hire, train, and develop these professionals more effectively.
The foundation of these initiatives is based on a set of competencies that define the core capabilities of our commercial professionals. Anchoring our selection, development, and succession processes in these competencies helps us build the stronger capabilities needed to achieve our business goals. These competencies articulate not only what is needed today, but what is needed for us to grow sustainably in the future.
We regularly assemble key new Alcoa sales and marketing professionals around the world for concentrated on-boarding sessions that reveal the history of Alcoa’s pioneering role in product and market development and strategies to extend that leadership role. These sessions build camaraderie, promote networking and best-practice transfer among the participants, and offer an opportunity to instill the corporate expectation of an enterprise-wide growth mentality.
Perhaps the most time-tested and surest way to perpetuate and sustain a business culture that drives market growth is to tell and retell pointed, interesting, and educational stories about Alcoa employees and businesses that are doing just that. Our growth community portal site employs brief video features, print stories, podcasts, interactive graphics, and discussion boards to highlight the best growth activities found in Alcoa worldwide. Content is refreshed weekly and archived for ongoing reference.
Our communications focus on successes as well as lessons learned, enabling the broader commercial organization to learn from itself and stay current and vibrant, which leads to a more sustainable organization.
Strategic Marketing Analysis and Reporting Tool (SMART)
SMART provides key customer and profitability data to support commercial decisions, customer planning, reporting, and profitability analysis. This tool offers our commercial and financial managers the ability to extract, analyze, and report on data by specific customer, product, and market designations.
Company-wide deployment of SMART began in 2006 and continued in 2008, expanding into all four Alcoa geographic regions for the first time. With the completed rollout of SMART Lite in January 2009, we can more fully analyze and evaluate the impact of customers and markets for more than 90% of our current business.
eBusiness
We offer eBusiness processes and tools that create competitive advantage through reduced transactional costs and improved customer service. Primary platforms are AlcoaDirect, Alcoa.com, and direct customer systems integration.
Connecting with our customers electronically is a key element of our growth strategy. These digital linkages provide customers faster, 24/7 access to the information and services they need to conduct business. Sustainably speaking, they also eliminate administrative paperwork, lower travel and other costs, and improve productivity. Among our customers, 60% characterize our eBusiness as “vital” to their companies, and 78% of all AlcoaDirect users indicate the tool saves them time.
Like our customers, we also reap benefits and competitive advantages. These include:
- Cost savings and productivity gains, since customer service employees spend less time on routine administrative tasks;
- Growth through existing and new customers who prefer the ease and convenience of transacting business online;
- Greater customer retention;
- Increased customer value by bundling knowledge and services unique to Alcoa; and
- New technology for customer connections that are leveraged to all business units at little or no cost.
In 2008, productivity savings from driving work to this self-service environment increased 8% over 2007. Nearly every one of our business units posted record increases in online customer activity.
Case Studies
Alcoa CSI Colombia Earns Highest Social Responsibility Rating from Coca-Cola
Alcoa Growth Process Serves as Primary Growth Generator
Understanding, Delivering on Customer Needs
From Cash Draining to Profit Generating
Uncovering Market Growth, Customer Needs
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