Customer experience

The best stay attuned to their customers’ signals in the social graph.

Career-oriented women are increasingly flexing their spending muscle. Here’s how companies can reach these “Golden Misses.”

The Internet promises to give marketing the same boost in productivity that new operational strategies have given to manufacturing.

While management skills can improve service systems, a manager is better off if he or she first has a clear understanding of the operating characteristics that set one service system apart from another. This author offers one view of services, which, if followed, results in a “rational approach to the rationalization” of services. His view, […]

You can learn a lot about consumer marketing in the developing world by looking at how retailers engage with shoppers.

Brands are not just names slapped on products by the marketing department; they embody the value those products have for your customers. That may be more true for high-tech products than it is for soap.

Is your company unintentionally keeping your most senior people from getting the feedback they most need? It can easily happen as an unintended consequence of success. Consider these situations: Senior executives at car companies drive only the newest models: For decades, the top executives at America’s leading automobile manufacturers always drove models fresh from the […]

Marketers must claim the broader growth agenda, connecting the dots across data, digital, and the full customer journey.

New technologies can be dazzling. But do they represent the future of retailing? Have the fundamentals really changed?

Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors,...

The best insights often come from seeing the world through someone else's eyes.

As technology becomes more powerful and affordable, your company is only limited by its imagination.

I thought I’d do something different and write a blog post about the iPad. Why add to the noise? Because my beloved publishing industry, my source of professional identity and income, is on the verge of blowing it. Let me run it down for you. Sometime around 2002, in boardrooms of publishing companies throughout the […]

Peachtree Healthcare has major IT infrastructure problems, and CEO Max Berndt is struggling to find the right fix. He can go with a single set of systems...

Start paying less attention to your own innovation speed limits and more attention to your customers'.

Your strategy should be driven by relationship-building — not shiny new tech.

That sound you hear is the cry of outrage over the decision by Spirit Airlines to charge customers as much as $45 to stow carry-on baggage. It’s a horrible idea, but not for the easy, airline-bashing reasons cited by most critics. In fact, this decision is a pretty interesting case study in the wrong ways […]

Last week, I got to spend nearly an hour interviewing Jack Welch, the legendary former chairman and CEO of General Electric, in front of an audience of several thousand bankers from around the world. It was a fun and stimulating conversation that ranged from the toughest leadership challenge facing financial institutions (his answer: energizing rank-and-file […]

On Tuesday, January 8, the giants of the presidential battle knocked heads in the always important New Hampshire primary, and far beneath the froth of issues and image is a fascinating difference between how two of the Democratic presidential candidates compete online: Hillary Clinton treats her supporters as “customers’ and Barack Obama, as “members.” When […]

Companies have gotten very good at getting customers to do free work—pumping their own gas, conducting their own checkouts, filling out online forms. In each case, the mutual benefit is clear, and customers tacitly agree to an exchange of value: “I’ll pump my gas if you give me a price break.” But some organizations are […]