Simply Better

Simply Better – Patrick Barwise and Sean Meehan, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2004

Given all of the brand practitioners who are advocating that we dissect the customer experience in minute detail, there’s definitely something to be said for keeping it simple.

The authors provide us with a well-reasoned approach to managing customers that is based on the following points:

• customers want better, not more differentiated products and services
• companies should place more executional focus on meeting customer’s basic needs
• “product categories matter more than individual brands” (p.13)

They further point out “that customers rarely buy a brand because it offers a unique feature or benefit. Rather, they usually buy the brand that they perceive as offering the best overall combination of category benefits.” (pgs. 23-24)

At the heart of the customer experience is the ability for executives, managers and relevant employees to understand more deeply how customers think and respond not just to our brand promises, but to the delivery of those promises on a consistent and meaningful basis. It’s refreshing to know that customer expectations are actually not that complicated. Unfortunately, we have a tendency and desire to make things a lot more complex than they need to be.

Simply Better belongs in every marketer’s and brand builder’s library if only to remind us that, when it comes to customers, it is better to keep things simple.

Add comment December 19th, 2006

Managing Customers as Investments

Managing Customers as Investments – Sunil Gupta and Donald R. Lehmann, Wharton School Publishing, 2005

What can we say about two distinguished scholars who have the ability to immerse themselves in complex research investigations and at the same time, share their findings in ways that are relevant to everyday marketing and branding practitioners?

Gupta and Lehmann are respected academics who also happen to have deep ties to the Marketing Sciences Institute, an organization that we highly respect.

Managing Customers as Investments advances one of the best arguments on the subject to date by bridging the all-to-often ignored gap that exists between marketing and finance. While we have for some time accepted the notion that customers should be seen as assets, we have not yet commonly adopted the belief that programs designed to attract and retain customers should be treated as investments. We have also not embraced the real link between customer and shareholder value because we have been too transaction versus relationship-oriented in our thinking.

The authors provide us with a number of very informative and data-rich chapters that outline the steps to understanding the investment value of customers.

We especially like Chapters 5 and 6, which speak directly to the ways an organization can retool to become more customer-based. There’s a lot of practical, actionable advice that marketers will find useful here.

Add comment December 18th, 2006