A funny thing happened to me last week…. my health insurance company called me on my cell phone to conduct a customer satisfaction survey with my two month old daughter. Now, first of all, they KNOW that my daughter is only 9 weeks old! After several calls to get the faulty billing and account [...]

I saw Don Peppers at a conference a few months ago. For a guy that espouses the 1:1 marketing principle, I though that it was ironic that I walked away feeling like he had given the same presentation to a dozen audiences before. Seriously though, I bought the new Peppers and Rogers book, Return [...]

Before I begin, I have to reiterate that I am not a big fan of business book metaphors; however, there is an interesting new book, The Starfish and the Spider, that attempts to explain “the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations” (I am beginning to hate taglines as well). In the spirit of full disclosure, I [...]

A bit more on product choice… First, Gourville argues that product variety may backfire if the consumer is faced with too many choices. He suggests that marketers limit the number of SKUs to avoid confusing the consumer. One important distinction that he makes is differentiating different types of product choice. “Aligned” [...]

Last month, Inc had an article on Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) system that was implemented in a $25 million business. I know a lot of people who wouldn’t consider this business small, but the article got me to thinking about how small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) evaluate and implement new management concepts.
It seems [...]

I was in a meeting a few weeks ago when I made an offhand comment about the emergence of customer-centric business models. One of my colleagues challenged whether or not is is actually a new phenomenon — isn’t all of this customer centric talk just “new wine in old bottles” he demanded? Over [...]

I read an interesting article over at Knowledge@wharton today on blogging. In all, the article was fairly well balanced with both supporters and detractors. However, the detractor’s comments were the most interesting (in that elbow-patched academic sort of way). One detractor basically said he didn’t really read blogs because there is no way to [...]

How does a company like MySpace or YouTube go from nothing to a billion dollar enterprise in just a few years? In both cases, it can be argued that they have created a new market space (a Blue Ocean perhaps?). Putting aside the arguments about valuations and long-term sustainability for a minute, I [...]

“Quality” is such a loaded word. Often when customers complain about poor quality, I believe that they are really saying that the price/quality ratio does not meet their expectations. What they bought was not actually defective, but rather that they expected more for the amount that they paid. This problem ties directly into PPM1 — [...]

Anyone remember the early 90’s movie Crazy People?… “Zony, No Baloney”. Anyway, let me tell you why I hate one of the leading consumer electronics companies. For the purposes of this post, let’s just call them “Zony”. A couple of years ago, I bought my wife a laptop from said company. She was doing her [...]