Summary
As industrial firms scale, services bolt onto products and strategy drifts. What was clear fragments, and it becomes harder to evidence. Brand strategy, framed as a service‑led narrative, restores a single value logic by defining outcomes, evidence and choices. From there, teams align faster, pricing sharpens, and investment confidence builds.
Our Perspective
What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.
Define The Value Logic
A service-led model isn’t a wrapper on products; it’s the value logic that decides which problems you own end to end and how you’ll be paid for solving them. That logic should travel intact from strategy to pricing to delivery. If it doesn’t, you get a well-meaning list of services that pull in different directions. In our experience with industrial leadership teams, the breakthrough comes when the service narrative names the client outcome you’ll stand behind and the evidence you’ll use to prove it.
McKinsey & Company notes that industrial players leading on digital delivered 47% total shareholder returns in 2020 versus 27% for peers, indicating that outcome-centred, data-enabled services are strongly correlated with value creation.
Choose, Then Concentrate
If everything is on the menu, nothing signals intent. Concentration builds credibility and makes the economics work. Use a deliberate filter to decide where you’ll compete and where you won’t.
- Prioritise service domains where you have distinctive know-how, data advantage, and a clear route to profit.
- Draw firm boundaries on data rights, asset responsibilities, and liability so value and risk are symmetrical.
- Tie pricing to outcomes and risk-sharing, not hours or inputs; simplicity here speeds decisions.
- Retire legacy offers that blur your direction, even if they still generate some demand.
One Narrative, Many Decisions
The same story should guide business development, marketing, engineering, finance, and operations. When each function improvises its own pitch—cost here, efficiency there, digital somewhere else—clients hear noise, not intent. Your narrative is the shared contract inside the organisation.
- Anchor every proposal in the outcome you improve, the mechanism you use, and the proof you’ll supply.
- Standardise language for performance measures and responsibilities so sales and delivery reinforce each other.
- Build a small set of proof points—benchmarks, references, and data—that show up consistently in bids and contracts.
Make Outcomes Evident
Without evidence, claims fall flat. Design measurement into the offer: install the data pipeline, define the baseline, and agree the improvement curve upfront. Then report in plain terms across efficiency, reliability, and environmental, social and governance (ESG) impact—because stakeholders now expect a broader ledger of results.
EY reports that 45% of manufacturing “thrivers” are planning to change their business model versus 32% of “survivors,” underlining that leaders are moving decisively towards service- and outcome-led plays.
As this discipline matures, the narrative becomes a dependable operating system for choices, and choices compound—quietly building alignment, credibility, and the room to invest in the next horizon.
Sources: