More than 80% of respondents in a BCG survey of 5,000 global consumers say they want and expect personalized experiences. But two-thirds have experienced personalization that is inappropriate, inaccurate, or invasive. That’s because most companies lack a clear guidepost for what great personalization should look like. Authors Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman remedy that in this article, which is adapted from Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI (Harvard Business Review Press, 2...| Harvard Business Review
Many executives assume that customer data can give you an unbeatable edge. The more customers you have, the more data you can gather, and that data, when analyzed, allows you to offer a better product that attracts more customers. You can then collect even more data, repeating the cycle until you eventually marginalize your competitors. But this thinking is usually wrong. Though the virtuous cycles of data-enabled learning may look similar to those of network effects—wherein an offering inc...| Harvard Business Review
For years, brand managers have groused that consumers say they intend to buy sustainable products but don’t actually buy them. Companies have used this conventional wisdom as justification for not making their products more sustainable. A new study, looking at the sales from 2013 to 2018 of products marketed as sustainable, finds the conventional wisdom isn’t true. In more than 90% of consumer packaged goods categories, sustainability-marketed products grew faster than their conventional ...| Harvard Business Review
As B2B offerings become more commoditized, the subjective, sometimes quite personal considerations of business customers are increasingly important in purchases. To discover what matters most to B2B buyers, the consulting firm Bain analyzed scores of quantitative and qualitative customer studies. All told, it identified 40 discrete “elements of value,” which fall into five categories: table stakes, functional, ease of doing business, individual, and inspirational. The elements range from ...| Harvard Business Review
Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create offerings that people truly want to buy, firms instead need to home in on the job the customer is trying to get done. Some jobs are little (pass the time); some are big (find a more fulfilling career). When we buy a product, we essent...| Harvard Business Review
This blog explores strategies for companies to improve communication, offer flexible delivery options, and provide real-time shipment tracking for a superior customer experience in logistics.| ZhenHub
Campaign planning helps organizations create marketing efficiency and impact – reducing marketing fragmentation and building cross-functional alignment.| Clarke & Esposito
At some point in its development, every industry can be considered a growth industry, based on the apparent superiority of its product. But in case after case, industries have fallen under the shadow of mismanagement. What usually gets emphasized is selling, not marketing. This is a mistake, since selling focuses on the needs of the seller, while marketing concentrates on the needs of the buyer. In this widely quoted and anthologized article, first published in 1980, Theodore Levitt argues th...| Harvard Business Review
Customer satisfaction is at its lowest point in the past two decades. Companies must focus on 10 areas of the customer experience to improve satisfaction without sacrificing revenue. The authors base their findings on research at the ACSI — analyzing millions of customer data points — and research that we conducted for The Reign of the Customer : Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction. For three decades, the ACSI has been a leading satisfaction index (cause-and-eff...| Harvard Business Review
A refresher on customer churn rate.| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R1007L The notion that companies must go above and beyond in their customer service activities is so entrenched that managers rarely examine it. But a study of more than 75,000 people interacting with contact-center representatives or using self-service channels found that over-the-top efforts make little difference: All customers really want is a simple, quick solution to their problem. The Corporate Executive Board’s Dixon and colleagues describe five loyalty-building tactics tha...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0312C Companies spend lots of time and money on complex tools to assess customer satisfaction. But they’re measuring the wrong thing. The best predictor of top-line growth can usually be captured in a single survey question: Would you recommend this company to a friend? This finding is based on two years of research in which a variety of survey questions were tested by linking the responses with actual customer behavior—purchasing patterns and referrals—and ultimately with com...| Harvard Business Review