Responding to what you’ve discovered

Responding to your market is critical to being market-focused. You can generate information and communicate it internally, but unless you respond to market needs, nothing gets accomplished. Your company should be driven by:

An understanding of what your customers want
The knowledge of how to meet the customers’ needs
The delivery of the product or service customers want

Many […]

How to write a positioning statement

The purpose of writing a positioning statement is to ensure that all of your marketing activities for a customer group are consistent and clear. (And it saves you tons of time in the long run.) Initially, focus on writing a positioning statement that’s only used internally. In the future, you may end up using it […]

Spend time talking to your customers

When all else fails, ask your customers why they buy from you! Ask these questions of your 80/20 customers:

What are we doing that’s great? What is working?
What isn’t working and needs improvement?
What else would you like to see from our company? What else could we do to make your life easier?
If we ceased to exist, […]

Printing up a superior customer experience

When a weekly community newspaper analyzed its value chain, the publisher realized that several of its supporting activities detracted from the overall customer experience. For example

In the general administration area, the newspaper’s invoices only offered one method of payment, when there were actually three ways to pay. The publisher immediately revised the invoices to include […]

AOL’s advantage: Make it personal

Remember back in the early 1990’s when Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were springing up everywhere? If you bought a computer from a major manufacturer in those early days of Windows, odds were that you also got up to three separate trial ISP accounts preloaded on your computer at the factory. I got CompuServe, Prodigy, and […]

Anthropologie, a nationwide retail store

"A female about 30 to 45 years old, college or post-graduate education, married with kids or in a committed relationship, professional or ex-professional, annual household income of $150,000 to $200,000. She’s well-read and well-traveled. She’s very aware - she gets our references, whether it’s to a town in Europe or to a book or a […]

The Face of an Unhappy Company

The sad truth is that unhappy companies all look alike:

A belief that employees are dangerous and lazy. If you treat people as if they’re worthless long enough, eventually they’ll either believe you (and behave accordingly) or they’ll spend all their energy trying to build a paper case that you’re wrong. Either way, your customers (and […]

Check Your Alignment

Strategy should not be created as though it exists in a vacuum.  It is all too often that strategists create and implement seemingly brilliant strategies that fail to include the most important element, the customer!  “Customer strategy integration can drive a firm’s objectives…when we’re looking at customer strategy integration, we’re looking at “having customers on […]

Does Every Company Need a Customer Strategy?

An article titled, Does every company need a customer strategy?, co-authored by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, helps the manager understand that any one firm can not be all things to all customers.  Not every enterprise considers a customer focus part of its core competency, but that does not decree that such enterprises can not […]