Customer Strategy News
Valuegenie talks to Matt Watkinson about The Grid
The Grid Valuegenie’s David Pinder talks to award-winning business author Matt Watkinson about his new book The Grid. Matt is an internationally-renowned author, speaker and consultant on customer experience and business strategy. His first book, The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences has been described as the definitive book on the subject, winning the CMI Management Book of the Year Award in 2014. Since its release, Matt has become a sought-after keynote presenter, addressing thousands of industry leaders worldwide. His second book, The Grid was released by Random House in 2017, after four years of research and development. “The Grid provides you with a simple way to look at the complex system which is your business. With the possible exception of Warren ...
Content Strategy: Content vs. Discontent
Content Strategy A recent survey on “The role of content strategy” conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit in association with Peppercomm indicates that all is not well in the world of content strategy. The survey found that two-thirds (67%) of global decision makers judge the success of content on its distinctiveness while 71% of the content-supplying marketers judge success purely on sales. The reasons for this mis-match, this dis-content, are understandable enough … but it doesn’t alter the fact that things need to change. It’s not as if there haven’t already been several alerts to this problem. Back in 2006, in their book “Customer Message Management”, Tim Reisterer and Diane Emo made the point that “Up to 90 percent of the marketing messages and materials created for sales suppor...
The 4Ps of Marketing. RIP.
The 4Ps of Marketing There’s a lot of stuff out there about the 4Ps of Marketing. Fact is, the best thing to do with the 4Ps model is bury it. To borrow from the Monty Python team, “It is a late model. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life it rests in peace”. Let’s take a step back. The 4Ps of Marketing model – Product, Place, Price, Promotion – was created by Jerome McCarthy, a marketing professor at Michigan State University, in 1960. That’s a long time ago: the year that John F. Kennedy became President of the United States; a new band called The Beatles played their first gig, in Hamburg; and the Pentel Corporation demonstrated the fiber-tip pen. The business mindset back then was all about Products. In the September 2014 McKinsey Quarterly, in an article titled Redefining Capitalism, authors E...
What’s a Customer Worth? (A lot more than you think!)
Most businesses evaluate Customers exclusively in terms of their actual and potential spend on products and services. But many Customers are worth more. Some are worth much more. So it is important to understand which of your Customers fulfil the basic ‘money for product’ role with no desire for any involvement beyond that. And even more important to understand which of your Customers are willing to participate further. Customer as a Customer The basic Customer contract with which we are all familiar is where a supplier makes or sources a product or service and puts a price ticket on it. Prospective Customers then make the ‘product versus price ticket’ evaluation (often nudged along by some marketing activity) and either buy or don’t buy. In today’s parlance we can label this the Customer ...
(Customer) Satisfaction
Customer Satisfaction Back in 1965 The Rolling Stones unleashed (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, a protest against conformity, including the conformity demanded by the powerful mass marketing forces of the time: “When I’m watchin’ my TV And a man comes on to tell me How white my shirts can be But he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke The same cigarettes as me”[i] In the same year a business growth model was published that expressed and promoted that very conformity. Igor Ansoff’s famous Matrix synthesized everything down to just Products and Markets, resulting in four possible business growth strategies[ii]: Market Penetration = Existing Product in Existing Market Market Development = Existing Product in New Market Product Development = New Product in Existi...
