Niraj Dawar is a Professor at the Ivey Business School and with a wealth of corporate experience as an expert marketing strategist. Niraj has wrote one of the most important books I have read as a customer centric marketer this year. Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy From Products to Customers.

Key strategic questions that I earmarked in reading Tilt  by Niraj Dawar are as follows:

1. Why do your customers choose you? Make sure it is not table stakes.

2. What business are you in? What business do your customers think you are in? How have they defined you? The answer you give to this question is predictive of how you see your business strategy

3. How is profitability measured? By customer or by volume?

4. Where do you spend most of your effort and energy? – on the service or product you sell or on understanding your customers and consistently delivering value to them by asking one fundamental question: What else do our customers need?

“Today manufactures can replicate the looks and feel of an innovative product and print it to market for a fraction of the price, in a fraction of the time it use to take. Even Nike and HP manufacture their products in Asia.” Tilt pg 178

5. How can we take what we know about our customers and provide value in different ways.

Niraj gives a indepth interview with me around the reason he wrote Tilt, the difference between upstream and downstream strategies and what it was like to present the book to the Canadian president!

More information:

strategytilt.com

Blog

My article on Tilt

Doug Leather is passionate about customer centricity as a system. In fact he has built a business over the past 11 years around it. I had the pleasure of interviewing Doug about his new book The Customer Centric Blueprint: Building and Leading the 21st Century Organisation.

Doug talks of how to create a sustainable competitive advantage, enlighted leadership and cultural orientation around the customer using examples including:

How to create a customer centric organisation using the REAP Customer Centric Organisational Blueprint

Contact details:

www.reapconsulting.com

Bernadette is a great story teller and discoverer. She works with businesses to uncover brand stories. We buy 

how brands make us feel, brands that resonate with our beliefs and stand for something. Bernadette in her new book, The Fortune Cookie Principle: The 20 Keys to Great brand stories and why your business needs one,helps us learn about purpose, people, personal and perception are important aspects in shaping brand perception. Today more than ever before, with more choice we are looking for those brands that have a purpose and align with our values.

Bernadette references some companies doing it right:

Method

Chobani yoghurt

Warmer Parker Glassware

Resources and ideas:

Visit Bernadette's site The Story of Telling for more great tips on how to create your brand story.

Bernadette's Blog

Melis is an inspiring human centric strategist specialising service design. As the MD of wearehuddle.com, Melis is in the innovative space of working with CEOs of bluechip companies, in helping them discover ways to do meaningful work.

Companies are seeking new frameworks to create a way to navigate decision making and challenges that they are facing. One of these problem is the customer value they provide.Using an understanding of the customers and the organisational world, wearehuddle help create a path where this can be more in sync.

Using the framework of design, Melis leads her team in working with companies address strategic questions that challenges the way they create value. In my interview with Melis, we talk about the fliperoo a communication tool that her team use and the enabling role that wearehuddle play in delivering a human experience.

Resources:

wearehuddle

Blog

Bruce Kasanoff is a speaker, author and business strategist who helps companies profit from disruptive forces, rather than fall victim to them and the co-writer of Smart Customers, Stupid Companies.

Bruce helps companies understand what comes next, and how they can leapfrog their competitors. His entire career has focused on helping companies leverage emerging technologies to better grow revenues and serve their customers. Bruce with co-author  Michael Hinshaw have asserted that our tolerance to mistakes by companies we engage in is reducing. We now have more information before we engage with them. Companies are still slow to recognise this and so rather than leverage the same disruptive forces like:

Companies are not keeping pace with our need to have a better experience with them. Well most anyway.

A Bain & Company research study showed that while 80% of managers thought their firm was providing a superior customer experience, only 8% of those firms' customers agreed.Now that seems stupid.

Bruce and I have a very interesting chat about the new landscape with customers and technology calling the shots.

Resources:

Bruce's website Now Possible

SmartCustomers website

Tristan White is the manager of The Physio Co. He has become a big advocate, thoughtleader and key note speaker on creating a great corporate culture. Tristan shares why he created a vision, values and the purpose of his business and how it changed how he grew his business.

The Physio Co was ranked by BRW at No. 5 on it’s annual list of Australia’s 50 Best Places to Work. Learn from Tristan some best practices of how to create that vision for everyone to rally around and how to embed those values into your business to create a culture.

Resources
Tristan's White Blog 

The Physio Co

What's it like to work at The Physio Co

Bryony Thomas is an experienced strategic marketer that really gets it. I absolutely love her new book Watertight Marketing. It is a practical approach to getting the fundermentals right when creating a strategic approach to marketing.

Bryony's book is all around getting the fundermentals right so that as an small business owner you can build a strategy approach to their marketing so that works and continues to work over time. By reading this book you can ensure that you are not throwing your precious marketing dollars down the drain.

By auditing your existing business model, you can ensure that you can keep the customers you have!

Watertight Marketing talks of:

As Bryony discusses there is no point turning on a tap if the bucket you are using is leaky, you need to have a watertight bucket to start with.

Resources:

Download your free chapter here

Buy the book here (I highly recommend it)

Bryony Website

Bryony on Facebook

I came across Cath's Sutherland's book Creating Brand Energy while I was researching branding online. Cath's approach really resonated with me. I even re-did my Brand Energy Blueprint. What makes you choose one company over another is becoming harder. Online we can all look the same. To differentiate our brand we need to stand for something. We need to have a greater cause and back it up with a value-set.

Conscious Business, Cath's business works with businesses that want their brand to be more than a logo. Those who are interested in creating a physical and energic entity. It is a conscious and deliberate decision making platform that shapes how you make choices and this builds your brand reputation.

More Resources:

The book

Website

5 Steps to building your brand energy

Jagan Nemani is an innovation-focused executive who believes in developing innovative solutions to deliver a best-in-class customer experience. He has more than 14 years of experience encompassing product, process and business model innovations. His experience encompasses the software, telecom, semiconductor, insurance, cleantech and government procurement industries. 

 Jagan Nemani has written a great book called The Shift: Innovation That Disrupts Markets, Topples Giants, and Makes You #1 that focuses on a nine variables companies can use to manage the customer experience and innovate. This framework provides some great insights into the landscape we need to manage to ensure that our product or service has a compelling value proposition.

Join with me as I talk with Jagan about the research, the framework and learnings.

Mark Joyner is an author and software developer who has run and sold several business start ups. His software  Simpleology is designed to make us more productive. What I love about Mark, is his philosophy. He takes a holistic approach to business and his software Simpleology has this baked into it. When we all have to "get stuff done", it is so nice to do it with fun at the centre. The software talks of Habit Bombs to change your behaviour, HIME's (High Impact Minimal Effort) as an approach and has great videos of how to use the tools effectively. Simpleology is free with modules in development that will assist business manage financials and business growth and a help us take a better approach to keeping high energy with diet and health practices.

Resources:

Simpleology

The Irresistible Offer

The Great Formula

The worst case scenario - The business survival guide

Integration Marketing