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Introducing “return on relationship” with your most valued customersThe traditional model of growing your business—by relying on employees in sales, marketing, and product development—is dying. Today’s most successful companies are taking a different approach: getting customers to market, sell, and create products for them.In assessing client value, most companies look at the money paid for their goods and services. But in this book, Customer Strategy Group CEO Bill Lee offers a compelling new vision for growth by maximizing your “return on relationship” with select customers—those that offer rich sources of hidden wealth. A different type of ROI, this strategy of making the most of your firm’s existing relationships is a modern approach to customer relations—one that yields a distinct business advantage.Illustrated by numerous case studies—Salesforce.com, SAS Institute, 3M, Microsoft, and others—The Hidden Wealth of Customers shows the value some customers can have by helping to market your offerings, penetrate foreign markets, leverage the demand-generating power of social media, build customer communities, improve innovation, and more. Lee explains how to effectively engage this crucial audience, which has the power to keep your strategy focused on important customer issues and increase profitability.When done right, your best customers will prospect for you while also speeding product adoption and improving customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.Consider this book a blueprint for finally making the most out of your most valuable customer relationships.

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Caveat venditor—let the seller bewareWhile marketers look for more ways to get personal with customers, including new tricks with “big data,” customers are about to get personal in their own ways, with their own tools. Soon consumers will be able to:• Control the flow and use of personal data• Build their own loyalty programs• Dictate their own terms of service• Tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much it should costAnd they will do all of this outside of any one vendor’s silo. This new landscape we’re entering is what Doc Searls calls The Intention Economy—one in which demand will drive supply far more directly, efficiently, and compellingly than ever before. In this book he describes an economy driven by consumer intent, where vendors must respond to the actual intentions of customers instead of vying for the attention of many.New customer tools will provide the engine, with VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) providing the consumer counterpart to vendors’ CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. For example, imagine being able to change your address once for every company you deal with, or combining services from multiple companies in real time, in your own ways—all while keeping an auditable accounting of every one of your interactions in the marketplace. These tantalizing possibilities and many others are introduced in this book.As customers become more independent and powerful, and the Intention Economy emerges, only vendors and organizations that are ready for the change will survive, and thrive. Where do you stand?

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Trying to get your message heard? Build an iconic brand?Welcome to the battlefield.The story wars are all around us. They are the struggle to be heard in a world of media noise and clamor. Today, most brand messages and mass appeals for causes are drowned out before they even reach us. But a few consistently break through the din, using the only tool that has ever moved minds and changed behavior—great stories.With insights from mythology, advertising history, evolutionary biology, and psychology, viral storyteller and advertising expert Jonah Sachs takes readers into a fascinating world of seemingly insurmountable challenges and enormous opportunity. You’ll discover how:• Social media tools are driving a return to the oral tradition, in which stories that matter rise above the fray• Marketers have become today’s mythmakers, providing society with explanation, meaning, and ritual• Memorable stories based on timeless themes build legions of eager evangelists• Marketers and audiences can work together to create deeper meaning and stronger partnerships in building a better world• Brands like Old Spice, The Story of Stuff, Nike, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street created and sustained massive viral buzzWinning the Story Wars is a call to arms for business communicators to cast aside broken traditions and join a revolution to build the iconic brands of the future. It puts marketers in the role of heroes with a chance to transform not just their craft but the enterprises they represent. After all, success in the story wars doesn’t come just from telling great stories, but from learning to live them.

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Welcome to Culturematic: How Reality TV, John Cheever, a Pie Lab, Julia Child, Fantasy Football, Burning Man, the Ford Fiesta Movement, Rube Goldberg, NFL Films, Wordle, Two and a Half Men, a 10,000-Year Symphony, and ROFLCom Memes Will Help You Create and Execute Breakthrough IdeasA Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine.Once wound up and released, the Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemporary culture, to test the atmosphere, to see what life it can sustain, to see who responds and how. Culturematics start small but can scale up ferociously, bootstrapping themselves as they go.Because they are so inexpensive, we can afford to fire off a multitude of Culturematics simultaneously. This is evolutionary strategy, iterative innovation, and rapid prototyping all at once. Culturematics are fast, cheap, and out of control. Perhaps as important, they fail early and often. They are the perfect antidote to a world where we cannot guess what’s coming next.In Culturematic, anthropologist Grant McCracken describes these little machines and helps the reader master them. Examples are drawn from NFL Films, Twitter, the Apple Genius Bar, Starbucks, Ford, SNL Digital Shorts, Restoration Hardware, UNICEF, J. Crew, Pie Lab, USA Network, and the GEICO gecko.For the traditional producers of culture—the creators of movies, design, advertising, publishing, magazines, newspapers, and corporate R&D—this book will inspire new innovation and creativity.For the emerging producers of culture—the digital players—this book will serve as a practical handbook. Culturematic: our app for creating the world anew.

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We live in an age of persuasion. Leaders and institutions of every kind–public and private, large and small–must compete in the marketplace of images and messages. This has been true since the advent of mass media, from broad circulation magazines and radio through the age of television and the internet. Yet there have been very few true geniuses at the art of mass persuasion in the last century. In public relations, Edward Bernays comes to mind. In advertising, most Hall-of-Famers–J. Walter Thomson, David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Bruce Barton, Ray Rubicam, and others–point to one individual as the «father» of modern advertising: Albert D. Lasker. And yet Lasker–unlike Bernays, Thomson, Ogilvy, and the others–remains an enigma. Now, Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz, having uncovered a treasure trove of Lasker's papers, have written a fascinating and revealing biography of one of the 20th century's most powerful, intriguing, and instructive figures. It is no exaggeration to say that Lasker created modern advertising. He was the first influential proponent of «reason why» advertising, a consumer-centered approach that skillfully melded form and content and a precursor to the «unique selling proposition» approach that today dominates the industry. More than that, he was a prominent political figure, champion of civil rights, man of extreme wealth and hobnobber with kings and maharajahs, as well as with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. He was also a deeply troubled man, who suffered mental collapses throughout his adult life, though was able fight through and continue his amazing creative and productive activities into later life.This is the story of a man who shaped an industry, and in many ways, shaped a century.

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Coca-Cola. Harley-Davidson. Nike. Budweiser. Valued by customers more for what they symbolize than for what they do, products like these are more than brands–they are cultural icons. How do managers create brands that resonate so powerfully with consumers? Based on extensive historical analyses of some of America's most successful iconic brands, including ESPN, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Harley-Davidson, this book presents the first systematic model to explain how brands become icons. Douglas B. Holt shows how iconic brands create «identity myths» that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change. Holt warns that icons can't be built through conventional branding strategies, which focus on benefits, brand personalities, and emotional relationships. Instead, he calls for a deeper cultural perspective on traditional marketing themes like targeting, positioning, brand equity, and brand loyalty–and outlines a distinctive set of «cultural branding» principles that will radically alter how companies approach everything from marketing strategy to market research to hiring and training managers. Until now, Holt shows, even the most successful iconic brands have emerged more by intuition and serendipity than by design. With How Brands Become Icons, managers can leverage the principles behind some of the most successful brands of the last half-century to build their own iconic brands. Douglas B. Holt is associate professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School.

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In their first book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators, the authors provided a better model for executing disruptive innovation. They laid out a three-part plan for launching high-risk/high-reward innovation efforts: (1) borrow assets from the existing firms, (2) unlearn and unload certain processes and systems that do not serve the new entity, and (3) learn and build all new capabilities and skills.In their study of the Ten Rules in action, Govindarajan and Trimble observed many other kinds of innovation that were less risky but still critical to the company's ongoing success. In case after case, senior executives expected leaders of innovation initiatives to grapple with forces of resistence, namely incentives to keep doing what the company has always done–rather than develop new competence and knowledge. But where to begin?In this book, the authors argue that the most successful everyday innovators break down the process into six manageable steps:1. Divide the labor2. Assemble the dedicated team3. Manage the partnership4. Formalize the experiment5. Break down the hypothesis6. Seek the truth.The Other Side of Innovation codifies this staged approach in a variety of contexts. It delivers a proven step-by-step guide to executing (launching, managing, and measuring) more modest but necessary innovations within large firms without disrupting their bread-and-butter business.

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With roots planted firmly in the industrial age, the corporate ladder has been the metaphor used to describe the prevailing one-size-fits-all model for success. At its heart, the ladder is derived from inflexible, hierarchical, organization models in which prestige, individual rewards, information flow, power and influence are tied to the rung each employee occupies. Yet the workplace as we know it is in transition – evolving away from the linear, one-size-fits-all model of the corporate ladder toward a multidimensional approach that Cathy Benko calls the corporate lattice.This book will serve to widen an organization's strategic lens, representing a fundamentally new way to work and run a company. It offers a framework to help senior leaders and HR directors harness the talent in their company in a way that provides a strategic advantage, not only for recruiting but also for achieving and maintain better individual performance.In the bestselling book Mass Career Customization (Harvard Business Press/2007), Cathy Benko and Deloitte provided the breakthrough MCC dashboard for understanding the important variables of individual employees' career-life profiles, but she also coined a new metaphor – the corporate lattice – as a way to think about the changed career landscape. This book delves much deeper into the power of the lattice for organizations, fully exploring its contours and applying it to real-life practice throughout a company.It explores how the corporate lattice model creates value by:1. Ensuring a flow of talent into and through the organization. 2. Increasing the efficiency of and return on organizational investments. 3. Improving financial and operating results through greater employee engagement.The three-part framework of the book presents specific ways managers and organizations can use The Corporate Lattice to manage talent, measure results, collaborate across teams, engage employees, and reor"

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Your stomach's churning; you're hyperventilating – you're in a badly deteriorating conversation at work. Such exchanges, which run the gamut from firing subordinates to parrying verbal attacks from colleagues, are so loaded with anger, confusion, and fear that most people handle them poorly: they avoid them, clamp down, or give in.But dodging issues, appeasing difficult people, and mishandling tough encounters all carry a high price for managers and companies – in the form of damaged relationships, ruined careers, and intensified problems.In Failure to Communicate, Holly Weeks shows how to master the combat mentality, emotional maelstrom, and confusion that poison difficult conversations. Drawing on her many years as a consultant and coach to leaders and executives, the author explains:· Why we turn to ineffective tactics when the heat is on· How to avoid the worst pitfalls of difficult conversations, and how to pull yourself out if you fall in· Ways to regain your balance and inject respect into stressful conversations, even when you've been confronted, infuriated, or wronged· Strategies for mitigating aggression and defensiveness, and for clearing the fog of misconceptions· How to get through the hardest conversations with your reputation and relationships intactUsing proven techniques paired with detailed real-life examples, Weeks equips you with the strategies and practices you need to transform even the toughest conversations.

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Powerful product, country, and functional silos are jeopardizing companies' marketing efforts. Because of silos, firms misallocate resources, send inconsistent messages to the marketplace, and fail to leverage scale economies and successes–all of which can threaten a company's survival.As David Aaker shows in Spanning Silos, the unfettered decentralization that produces silos is no longer feasible in today's marketplace. It's up to chief marketing officers to break down silo walls to foster cooperation and synergy.This isn't easy: silo teams guard their autonomy vigorously. As proof of their power, consider the fact that the average CMO tenure is just twenty-three months. How to proceed? Drawing on interviews with CMOs, Aaker explains how to:Strength your credibility with silo teams and your CEOUse cross-functional teams and other strategic linking devicesFoster communication across silosSelect the right CMO role– from facilitator to strategic captainDevelop common planning processesAdapt your brand strategy to silo unitsAllocate marketing dollars strategically across silosDevelop silo-spanning marketing programsIn this age of dynamic markets, new media, and globalization, getting the different parts of your organization to collaborate is more critical–and more difficult–than ever. This book gives you the road map you need to accomplish that feat.

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