Customer strategy

Any company that strives to be innovative must allow for failure. Making mistakes means you're taking risks, which is critical to innovation.

As B2B offerings become more commoditized, the subjective, sometimes quite personal considerations of business customers are increasingly important in...

When consumers buy online, they spend more.

A genuine and human approach to transactions is rare, but it can transform a business.

Three strategies that will help you save your accounts.

An organization's culture powerfully shapes how people behave and how they do their work. Culture can therefore be more important than strategy for sharpening...

“There is no excuse. Creativity has to be at the forefront.”

To understand your customers' expectations, look beyond your industry.

A clear, compelling vision is at the heart of everything an organization does, and can inspire employees to deliver their best performance on the job.

Many executives assume that customer data can give you an unbeatable competitive edge. The more customers you have, the more data you can gather, and...

Marketers often worry that performance marketing and its focus on short-term sales is crowding out brand-building activities aimed at enhancing customer...

Learn to detect subtle discrimination in your customer service.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, banking can be both fair and profitable--in fact, fairness can be a source of competitive advantage. The evidence for...

The Economist opened 2021 with a cover story headlined "Why Retailers Everywhere Should Look to China." It's not hard to see why. China is both a large...

Marketing is everyone's job. No matter what department you work in, you need to understand who your customers are and what they need.

For decades, the business world has been fixated on achieving sustainable competitive advantage, a position within an industry that allows a company to...

For decades, businesses have sought competitive advantage in "upstream" activities related to making new products--building bigger factories, finding...

Leaders recognize that they should manage their businesses to maximize the value of the customer base. But too often, earnings pressures result in cost-cutting...

They need to revise the marketing innovations that gave them early momentum.

Back when the author was the CEO of Virgin Mobile, he accepted a challenge to live like a homeless person for 24 hours in New York City--with no money...