David is internationally recognised as an authority in Customer Value and Customer Experience thinking and practice, and is a co-author of Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition, published by Kogan Page in 2009. He founded Value Genie in 2010 to provide insights, advice and tools about value proposition development.
Value Genie’s work, enthusiastically praised by its charter clients, is the culmination of years of analysis based on hands-on experience. David started out in sales and marketing with Procter & Gamble, Hertz Rent a Car, and Forte Hotels. Exciting as this work was, David found it increasingly frustrating because, all too often, the generally accepted approach to marketing meant that customers were treated with disdain – as pawns to be manipulated. As David puts it:
“Back in 1974, Peter Drucker famously claimed ‘There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer’, but he seemed to be a lone voice. Then, in the 1980s, others started to chip in. Tom Peters wrote a treatise on ‘Creating Total Customer Responsiveness’, a passionate, rip-roaring thesis that achieved great publicity when it was published. Although it was written at a time when things were very different (the e-revolution hadn’t even happened, for heaven’s sake), it stands up extraordinarily well to this day. But little of it was implemented.
“This ‘lip-service-but-minimal-action’ response niggled away at me, but the epiphany came in 1991, in a Chinese restaurant in west London. I’d gone to meet my friend, John Frazer-Robinson (JFR for short): he was writing a book about customer power, and we debated the topic for so long that lunch ended some time in the late evening! When his book, Total Quality Marketing, appeared, it carried a disconcertingly direct customer-first proposition:
‘The object of a business is not to make money.
The object of a business is to serve its customers.
The result is to make money.’
“More support quickly followed. A couple of years later along came Messrs Hammer and Champy with their world-changing Reengineering the Corporation. This influential volume proposed a wholesale reengineering of corporations from a vertical, separate-silos focus, to a horizontal process focus where the end point of any process was…you’ve guessed it…the customer! The imperatives driving this shift were classified by Hammer and Champy as “the three Cs: Customers, Competition, and Change”. The first of that trinity, introduced under the heading ‘Customers take charge’, was explained thus:
‘Since the early 1980s, in the United States and other developed countries, the dominant force in the seller-customer relationship has shifted. Sellers no longer have the upper hand; customers do.’
“All of which would seem to suggest that a consensus about the pivotal role of the customer and the reality of customer power has existed for decades. After all, the authors just quoted weren’t being tentative or shy in their expressions. They were saying it loud and clear. So why was it not acted upon?
“Through the intervening years, I did a lot of high-level business writing for various clients, including Accenture, but this question niggled away at me. Ultimately, in the mid-2000s, it provided the impetus to write Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition because, by that time, the term ‘value proposition’ had gained enormous currency. It seemed to be on every business person’s lips, but – although the original value proposition concept was absolutely customer-focused, the term was being applied almost invariably wrongly to mean a variant of a benefits statement.
“Now, Value Genie exists to help companies – particularly B2B companies – to understand the customer-value-led logic and to implement the ideas to help assure their own continuing success. Value Genie now has a growing list of clients and a growing, enthusiastic team, all dedicated to helping companies transition to a customer value-led basis for their businesses.
“Our vision is to be a world leader in bringing about customer value-led capitalism, providing great insights, tools and resources to help every one of our clients achieve sustainable success through the creation and delivery of customer value.”
