Blog by S.Swaminathan

Futher following-up on the trend of  'Customer Made' by Springwise, Scott Karp has this nice post on the role of intermediaries if this trend gains traction:

If marketers can get their own consumers to create marketing messages for them, and then get those same consumers to propagate those messa...

Springwise has some great examples of co-creation case studies in their May 2006  trendwatching briefing called CUSTOMER MADE.

What's Customer Made?

“The phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services and experiences in close cooperation with experienced and creative consumers, tapping into...

Read this thought provoking post by Scott Karp on how media companies should plan to monetize in the future, as their business model is changing rapidly:

"In media 1.0, brands paid for the attention that media companies gathered by offering people news and entertainment (e.g. TV) in exchange for...

IBM has released a report (Download IBMCustomerfocusstudy.pdf ) which has some interesting findings for companies to take note of how well they manage their customers.

• Seventy-nine percent of companies surveyed by IBM reported marketing and promoting products without clearly understanding of customer...

Brian Caroll has an interesting post on why CEOs must be involved in lead generation.

CEOs can make a huge difference by focusing on interdepartmental collaboration - especially between sales and marketing - to gain consensus on the following three things:

1. Ideal Customer Profile (company wide – for ea...

I had a chance to witness an interesting episode today at one of branches of a leading private Indian bank in Mumbai, India.

There was a bank customer at the bank's help desk who requested for additional cheque books. The bank officer on the other side said that she could request for one thro' the A...

Here's a great interview with Walt Disney conducted by NBC in 1966. It has some lovely anecdotes, quotes and thoughts.

• "As long as there is imagination left in the world, Disneyland will never be complete."
• From the very start it was a problem of getting the money to open Disneyland. About ...

I came across a lovely speech my Bob Lutz of General Motors which he delivered at the Swiss American Chamber of Commerce. It's extremely candid, optimistic and he makes his point quite well to all the people who spell doom for GM and their products.

Here are some excerpts:

Well, we don’t care what th...

H Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges, one of the best-known department stores in UK, first penned the well-known slogan, "the customer is always right."

However, Selfridge died both insane and penniless.

There is a lesson there. Remember, not all customers are created equal. Some ar...