What does it mean when an industry enjoys record growth but continually falls behind investors’ expectations? It means that doing more of the same thing probably isn’t an option—a message that truck manufacturers around the world must confront. Truck sales rose by 41 percent in the United States and by 74 percent in Europe from 1995 to 1999, the industry’s strongest market upturn ever. Yet truck manufacturers, growing by slightly more than one-third the rate of the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) World Index (Exhibit 1), underperformed most other business sectors in its total returns to shareholders. Given the current economic slowdown, which is hitting the truck market hard, even those inadequate returns are now little more than a fond memory.

To capture more value, truck makers, like companies in many industries before them, must sell solutions.¹ But to do so, these truck makers will have to think of their customers and products in new ways. Traditional small fleets in the United States have been losing ground to consolidated pan-continental companies, and the industry in Europe is expected to follow suit. In both of these markets, four customer segments are dominant: large long haul (such as the US...