Companies Have Powerful Technologies for Understanding and Interacting with Customers

Companies have powerful technologies

for understanding and interacting with

customers, yet most still depend on mass

media marketing to drive impersonal

transactions.

To compete, companies must shift from

pushing individual products to building

long-term customer relationships.

The marketing department must be

reinvented as a “customer department”

that replaces the CMO with a chief

customer officer, makes product and

brand managers subservient to customer

managers, and oversees customer-focused

functions including R&D, customer service,

market research, and CRM.

These changes shift the firm’s focus

from product profitability to customer

profitability, as measured by metrics such

as customer lifetime value and customer

equity. This organizational transformation

will uproot entrenched interests and so

must be driven from the top.Companies have powerful technologies

for understanding and interacting with

customers, yet most still depend on mass

media marketing to drive impersonal

transactions.

To compete, companies must shift from

pushing individual products to building

long-term customer relationships.

The marketing department must be

reinvented as a “customer department”

that replaces the CMO with a chief

customer officer, makes product and

brand managers subservient to customer

managers, and oversees customer-focused

functions including R&D, customer service,

market research, and CRM.

These changes shift the firm’s focus

from product profitability to customer

profitability,