Blog by S.Swaminathan

Harvard Business School - Working  Knowledge has a nice interview with  Prof. Luc Wathieu on customer empowerment.

Here are some of the salient points about the concept:

The idea involves letting consumers take control of variables that are conventionally pre-determined by marketers: produc...

Peter Davidson writes:

These days marketing is all about the story. It's the story of the idea that lead to the creation of your business, the history of your company, the creative uses of your product, the experience of your service, the transformation that results from your experience. Whatever it ...

Whenever I have seen brand scores, I alway see a lot of importance being given to  awareness, TOM, brand preference scores etc. But, never does the customer-centric measures get adequate attention in brand metrics. It's time we did it. Here's a nice blog post I read on this subject.

Nick Wreden ...

Christopher Carfi writes:

Laurence Haughton's well-organized It's Not What You Say...It's What You Do communicates a series of tactics of how to actually get.things.done at an organizational level. Four broad building blocks are given which, in concert, Haughton contends will result in what he calls ...

Jennifer Kirby writes:

The most important measure in corporate performance management is the value customers put on your company - their connection score. For this measure increases or decreases company profitability. Today's profits are the direct result of customer valuations - the sum total of all...

John Hagel writes:

Organizational success depends upon effective mobilization of resources.

Push models treat people as passive consumers (even when they are producers like workers on an assembly line) whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision-makers.  Pull models treat pe...

I just picked-up a thread on ignorance premium by Hugh Macleod where he wrote:

"With the Ignorance Premium, you're paying extra for not knowing. Instead of MICRO knowledge, your basing your choice on the cooler, hipper MACRO Brand Metaphor. Branding is all about about being cool and hip, because...

Trendwatching writes:

MINIPRENEURSaremillions of consumers making some money on the side, satisfying their enterprising urges instead of relentless consumption. Can you in turn satisfy them?

Increasingly, consumers are participants instead of passive audience members, and this mega-trend manifests it...

Adrants writes:

The survey, "Americans' Relationship with Custom Publications and the Companies that Provide Them," found that 85% say that if they are going to get information from a company, they'd prefer to get it in an interesting collection of articles, rather than an ad.

Fifty-eight pe...

Leigh Duncan writes:

"Not my job" is the enemy of good customer experience.

A "not my job" response forces customers to make an unfortunate choice: seek an alternative source for satisfaction – or walk away, entirely. Customers must also re-process their brand association against t...