Don't Just Relate - Advocate!


Book Description

Traditional "push/pull" marketing no longer works. Even highly-touted customer relationship initiatives are failing. Smart companies are pioneering an entirely new route to higher margins and sustainable competitive advantage: customer advocacy. This book reveals how it works, why it works, and how to make it work for your company. In today's environment, you must build unprecedented trust among customers who have more information, options, and sophistication than ever. You must transcend "relationship marketing" to focus on maximizing customer interests and deepening customer partnerships. It's not easy. But if you do it, you gain immense opportunities your competitors simply can't touch. Glen Urban offers a complete blueprint for getting there. You'll learn how to improve on all eight elements of customer advocacy, from transparency to partnership. Urban answers frequently asked questions about advocacy strategies, helping you identify and overcome your most significant obstacles. Then, drawing on new case studies, he shows how to align culture, metrics, incentives, and organization, driving effective advocacy throughout your entire organization.







Don't Just Relate - Adovocate!


Book Description

In today's environment companies need to go beyond relationship marketing" to be true customer advocates -- faithfully representing their customers' interests. Customer advocacy means providing customers and prospects with open, honest and complete information. It means talking with customers, not at them. In most companies, customer advocacy requires a massive transformation in both culture and process. In this book, MIT's Glen Urban covers the entire 'pyramid' of customer advocacy: the 'base' (starting with TQM and customer satisfaction initiatives); the 'middle' (relationship marketing); and the 'pinnacle': new advocacy techniques built on trust, not coercion. Companies from GM to Intel, Qwest to John Deere are beginning to recognize the urgent importance of customer advocacy. Urban reveals what they're trying, and what challenges they're up against -- and identifies crucial lessons for earning the customer trust needed to thrive in today's radically changed business environment.




Summary: Don't Just Relate - Advocate


Book Description

The must-read summary of Glen Urban's book: "Don't Just Relate - Advocate: A Blueprint for Profit in the Era of Customer Power". This complete summary of the ideas from Glen Urban's book "Don't Just Relate - Advocate" shows how the best way to grow your business today is not by improving your marketing, but by advocating for your customers. In his book, the author explains how earning and retaining your customers' trust means they will remain loyal customers in the future and will recommend you to their friends and family. This summary details exactly how you can act as an advocate by finding out your customers' needs and selling them solutions. By reading Glen Urban's advice, you will hold the key to finding customers that will stay loyal forever. Added-value of this summary: • Save time • Understand key concepts • Expand your knowledge To learn more, read "Don't Just Relate - Advocate" and find out why advocating for your customers will put you on the path to success.







Firms of Endearment


Book Description

Today’s best companies get it. From Costco® to Commerce Bank, Wegmans to Whole Foods®: they’re becoming the ultimate value creators. They’re generating every form of value that matters: emotional, experiential, social, and financial. And they’re doing it for all their stakeholders. Not because it’s “politically correct”: because it’s the only path to long-term competitive advantage. These are the Firms of Endearment. Companies people love doing business with. Love partnering with. Love working for. Love investing in. Companies for whom “loyalty” isn’t just real: it’s palpable, and driving unbeatable advantages in everything from marketing to recruitment. You need to become one of those companies. This book will show you how. You’ll find specific, practical guidance on transforming every relationship you have: with customers, associates, partners, investors, and society. If you want to be great—truly great—this is your blueprint. We’re entering an Age of Transcendence, as people increasingly search for higher meaning in their lives, not just more possessions. This is transforming the marketplace, the workplace, the very soul of capitalism. Increasingly, today’s most successful companies are bringing love, joy, authenticity, empathy, and soulfulness into their businesses: they are delivering emotional, experiential, and social value–not just profits. Firms of Endearment illuminates this, the most fundamental transformation in capitalism since Adam Smith. It’s not about “corporate social responsibility”: it’s about building companies that can sustain success in a radically new era. It’s about great companies like IDEO and IKEA®, Commerce Bank and Costco®, Wegmans and Whole Foods®: how they earn the powerful loyalty and affection that enables truly breathtaking performance. This book is about gaining “share of heart,” not just share of wallet. It’s about aligning stakeholders’ interests, not just juggling them. It’s about building companies that leave the world a better place. Most of all, it’s about why you must do all this, or risk being left in the dust... and how to get there from wherever you are now.




Employee Ambassadorship


Book Description

There have been a number of professional and academic studies, in multiple industries, linking employee attitudes and behaviors with the value customers perceive in their experiences. Through targeted research, and resultant training, communication, process, and reward and recognition programs, what we define as ambassadorship formalizes the direction in which employee engagement has been trending toward for years. Simply, the trend is optimizing employee commitment to the organization and its goals, to the company’s unique value proposition, and to the customer. This is employee ambassadorship, a state beyond satisfaction and engagement where all employees are focused on, and tasked with, delivering customer value as part of their job description, irrespective of location, function or level. There is growing general agreement that both developing employee ambassadors and customer advocates should receive high priority and emphasis if an enterprise is going to be successful. What building ambassadorship does mandate, however, is that having employees focus on the customer will definitely drive more positive experiences and stronger loyalty behavior (for both stakeholder groups). Because antecedent approaches to employee engagement (through research and application) are principally about productivity and alignment, and offer an organization only modest insight about level or degree of customer-centricity, more connection between employee behavior and customer behavior builds focus, effectiveness, and profitability. That is what the content/scope of Employee Ambassadorship will help provide.




The Second Cycle


Book Description

You're growing fast. You're profitable. Maybe they're even writing great things about you in the business press. But, just beneath the surface, are you incubating the seeds of disaster? It's happened over and over again, in one industry after another, to companies ranging from IBM to Upjohn. In this book, Lars Kolind helps you uncover the earliest signs of trouble--and reignite a powerful new growth cycle. Drawing upon his own experience as the CEO who turned around Oticon, the world's top manufacturer of hearing aids, Kolind introduces a comprehensive toolbox for revitalizing mature organizations: tools for creating consensus around change, using staff more effectively, promoting innovation, and much more. Finally, he applies his tools to a wide range of organizations in decline, including the U.S. auto industry. The result: specific, practical advice you can adapt to galvanize your organization, no matter how well you're doing today.




Consumer Information Systems and Relationship Management: Design, Implementation, and Use


Book Description

Businesses continue to design and implement a variety of information systems that facilitate the creation, aggregation, and provision of product-related information in order to increase the role that quality information is playing in consumers’ decision-making processes. Consumer Information Systems and Relationship Management: Design, Implementation, and Use highlights empirical research, theoretical frameworks, and relevant models on the understanding and implementation of consumer information systems. By covering consumer perceptions of practicality and ease of use, this book is essential for practitioners in business environments and strategic management, meeting consumer needs through the use of digital and Web-based technologies as well as recent empirical research findings and design and implementation of innovative information systems. This book is part of the Advances in Marketing, Customer Relationship Management, and E-Services series collection.




The Routledge Companion to the Future of Marketing


Book Description

The Routledge Companion to the Future of Marketing provides the reader with a comprehensive and original set of visionary insights into the future of marketing. This prestigious collection aims to challenge the mindset of academics, moving their thinking processes from current thinking into new perspectives and advances in marketing knowledge. Selected Contents: Part 1: New Paradigms and Philosophical Insights Part 2: Contributions from other Scientific Fields Part 3: Reconnecting with Consumers and Markets Part 4: New Methodological Insights in Scholarly Research in the Field