629 Posts Found

A lot of our energy and drive as a company, as a culture, comes from trying to build these customer-focused strategies. And actually I do think they work better in fast-changing environments, for two reasons. First, customer needs change more slowly—assuming you pick the right ones—than a lot of other things. Second, close following doesn’t work as well in a fast-changing environment. The strategic value … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Bezos | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Strategy | Company: Amazon.com Inc.

How Coach learned to know, not guess, what customers want.

Content: Case Study | Author: Adrian J. Slywotzky | Source: Oliver Wyman | Subjects: Customer Related, Management, Marketing / Sales | Company: Coach

Scoring Points is one of the seminal marketing books of the last decade. It tells the story of how British supermarket chain Tesco conceived, launched, and developed its hugely successful Clubcard program. Clive Humbly and Terry Hunt, two major influences behind Tesco’s spectacular transformation, and Tim Phillips, a leading business writer and broadcaster, bring us a compelling behind-the-scenes account of Clubcard — the successes, the … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Clive Humby, Terry Hunt | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Companies start loyalty programs to encourage additional purchases, but a new book by the brains behind one of the world’s most successful loyalty programs believe that that premise is the first step toward failure.

What companies really need to do, say Clive Humby and Terry Hunt, is establish loyalty programs that thank customers for previous purchases rather than encourage them to buy more.

Content: Related Content | Author: Nick Wreden | Source: MarketingProfs | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

To stimulate growth in today’s marketing environment, companies must identify and prioritize opportunities at points where proliferating segments, channels, and product categories intersect.

Content: Article | Authors: John E. Forsyth, Nicolo’ Galante, Todd Guild | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Open a new window! That’s just what the author orders as a way to address the most important issues you’ll face – those dealing with how customers interact with your business.

Content: Article | Author: Patricia Seybold | Source: Optimize Magazine | Subject: Customer Related

In the past 20 years, American companies have perhaps learned too well a lesson they had long been inclined to ignore: Businesses should be customer oriented rather than product oriented.

…At last, however, the dangers of too much reliance on this philosophy are becoming apparent.

…The argument that no new product ought to be introduced without managers undertaking a market analysis is common sense. But the argument … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Sources: Harvard Business Review, Managing Our Way to Economic Decline | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Too often, industrial companies measure only the core product-related elements of their customers’ experience rather than the full range of interactions. So they lose customers without understanding why and also miss out on powerful opportunities to create value and cement customers’ loyalty. This article outlines a disciplined, impartial approach that can transform a company’s understanding of its customers’ experience from a set of general, possibly … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: David Rickard | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Crowdsourcing is a technique that sophisticated companies use to translate the enthusiasm of their most highly-engaged customers into valuable marketing, branding, or product-development insight. You can do it, too. Use these techniques to harness the intelligence of customers that love your business, talk about your business, and better yet, will do free work for your business in today’s increasingly democratic, user-generated, social-networked, marketplace.

Content: Article | Author: Jennifer Alsever | Source: BNET | Subjects: Customer Related, Management

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

“Roy Williams qualified shoppers as operating in either one of two modes: transactional or relational, a few years ago. At that time some of us loafed around virtually, exchanging emails with friends, trying to complete a list of reasons that motivate people to buy things. (Thank you, Tom G. & Brett F.) More recently, we returned to compiling the list with the rest of my … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Bryan Eisenberg | Source: GrokDotCom | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

With the same grace and generosity displayed in his dining rooms, Meyer’s instructive how-we-did-it account shares lessons learned on his way to becoming CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group. Meyer opened Union Square Cafe in 1985 when he was 27 years old. It hit its stride three years later when he hired chef Michael Romano, and Meyer charts its evolution from a neighborhood to international … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Danny Meyer | Subjects: Customer Related, Management

“In expanding the question about relational-transactional purchasing by asking the question of WHAT makes people buy, a fellow deep thinker from the Wizard Academy shared that we should also add in the essential “reporter” questions…”

Content: Article | Author: Bryan Eisenberg | Source: GrokDotCom | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Popular metrics such as customer satisfaction, acquisition, and retention have turned out to be very poor indicators of customers’ true perceptions or the success of marketing activities. Often, they’re downright misleading. High overall customer satisfaction scores, for example, often mask narrow but important pain points-areas of major dissatisfaction-such as unhappiness with poor customer service or long wait times. They can also mask backsliding against competitors; … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Differentiating and measuring degrees of loyalty is an evolving craft. Companies first tried to measure and manage their customers’ satisfaction in the early 1970s, on the theory that increasing it would help them prosper. In the 1980s, they began to measure their customers’ rates of defection and to investigate its root causes. By measuring the value of the customers themselves, some companies also identified high-value … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Customer Related

Understanding the needs and wants of customers in an ever-more competitive economic environment is critical. But Professor Itamar Simonson warns that information gleaned from some widely used types of customer surveys can be misleading and even counterproductive.

Content: Article | Authors: Chezy Ofir, Itamar Simonson | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

This white paper argues that winning salespeople are made, not born. It teases out the ONE common trait that sales gurus such as Ken Stine, Jeff Gitomer, and Jack & Suzy Welch have identified as being critical to sales success: The ability of product reps to adjust their behavior to meet their customers’ needs.

Content: Article | Source: TRACOM Group | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

The FLIRT model views the Crowdsourcing / Collective Customer Collaboration phenomenon from the perspective of a company considering intensive collaboration with customer collectives and aims to identify the different actors on the field as well as their roles in the collective creation process. Furthermore, it suggests a set of elements (the FLIRT ring) that have to be considered and established in order to achieve desired … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Sami Viitamäki | Source: Debute | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Mello draws on years of experience in product development, hardware engineering, software development, and marketing, in creating this text for executives and new-product professionals. She presents a market-driven product definition (MDPD) strategy for identifying, understanding, and meeting customer- value-based demand. The text features a wealth of techniques and approaches used at a number of top companies, and includes charts, figures and a complete case study … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Sheila Mello | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

…Customers-people and companies-have “jobs” that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can “hire” to get the job done. This is how customers experience life. Their thought processes originate with an awareness of needing to get something done, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales