ANCHOR
What will you win on, and what will you deliberately not do? The ANCHOR makes those trade-offs explicit.
Aim
The ANCHOR tool assists in clarifying what is most important to the customer and how the organization will be chosen by its customers. It also makes explicit the strategic trade-offs chosen by the leadership team. An ANCHOR, or value offering, defines an organization's marketplace positioning — targeted customers, products and services, channels, and price — and articulates the trade-offs the organization is prepared to make.
Results
- A clear definition of the value offering for the target customer, set out as Audience, Niche, Critical Hinge Points, Omits, and Results.
Pro Tips
- Testing the ANCHOR with the targeted customer group can be a means of validating it. Except for the issue of pricing, customers are the best source of confirming the utility of an ANCHOR — pricing insight is best obtained through actual behaviour and regression analysis on marketplace data.
- An organization doesn't have a strategy until it has identified what it is not going to do or be.
How to use it
After you review your Stakeholder Requirements, developing your organization's ANCHOR helps articulate the trade-offs — what you are willing and not willing to do for the customer.
When completing the ANCHOR, answer the questions from the customer's perspective. Staying focused on that is what makes the results precise rather than general.
The tool also reveals the degree of agreement between leaders about how they win in the marketplace, or what the business relies on them to do above all else.