HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing Quotes

“Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer-creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny of the organization. It has to do this continuously and with the kind of flair that excites and stimulates the people in it.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“They determine that effective marketing calls for people skilled in segmentation, targeting, and positioning. Once companies hire marketers with those skills, Marketing becomes an independent player. It also starts to compete with Sales for funding.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“We needed a greater sense of urgency.” So the management team decided that field managers would not be eligible for promotion unless their branch or group of branches matched or exceeded the company’s average scores. That’s a pretty radical idea when you think about it: giving customers, in effect, veto power over managerial pay raises and promotions. The rigorous implementation of this simple customer feedback system had a clear impact on business. As the survey scores rose, so did Enterprise’s growth relative to its competition. Taylor cites the linking of customer feedback to employee rewards as one of the most important reasons that Enterprise has continued to grow,”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“The measurement system cost more than $4 million per year, but the company made such significant progress in building customer loyalty that the company’s management considers it one of the company’s best investments.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“Compare net-promoter scores from specific regions, branches, service or sales reps, and customer segments. This often reveals root causes of differences as well as best practices that can be shared. What really counts, of course, is how your company compares with direct competitors. Have your market researchers survey your competitors’ customers using the same method. You can then determine how your company stacks up within your industry and whether your current net-promoter number is a competitive asset or a liability. Improve”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“In short, a customer feedback program should be viewed not as “market research” but as an operating management tool.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“One company that manufactured resins used in exterior paints discovered this firsthand. By researching the needs of commercial painting contractors—a key customer segment—the company learned that labor constituted the lion’s share of contractors’ costs, while paint made up just 15% of costs. Armed with this insight, the resin maker emphasized that its product dried so fast that contractors could apply two coats in one day—substantially lowering labor costs. Customers snapped up the product—and happily shelled out a 40% price premium for it. Three”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“What is worse, many companies have decided that building new brands is so expensive they will no longer do so. Brand building by advertising is indeed prohibitively expensive. But that’s because it’s the wrong way to build a brand. Marketing”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“Job-defined markets are generally much larger than product category-defined markets. Marketers who are stuck in the mental trap that equates market size with product categories don’t understand whom they are competing against from the customer’s point of view. Notice”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension. If marketers understand each of these dimensions, then they can design a product that’s precisely targeted to the job.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“Thirty thousand new consumer products hit store shelves each year. Ninety percent of them fail. Why? We’re using misguided market-segmentation practices. For instance, we slice markets based on customer type and define the needs of representative customers in those segments. But actual human beings don’t behave like statistically average customers. The”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“can only express a likelihood of purchase in probabilistic terms. Thus”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“THIRTY THOUSAND NEW CONSUMER products are launched each year. But over 90% of them fail—and that’s after marketing professionals have spent massive amounts of money trying to understand what their customers want.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“The profit lure of mass production obviously has a place in the plans and strategy of business management, but it must always follow hard thinking about the customer.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“Is that not what consumer research is for—to find out before the fact what is going to happen? The answer is that Detroit never really researched customers’ wants. It only researched their preferences between the kinds of things it had already decided to offer them. For Detroit is mainly product oriented, not customer oriented.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“If thinking is an intellectual response to a problem, then the absence of a problem leads to the absence of thinking.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“The history of every dead and dying “growth” industry shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“What the railroads lack is not opportunity but some of the managerial imaginativeness and audacity that made them great.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“a deep investigation of the decision journey often reveals the need for a plan that will make the customer’s experience coherent—and”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“Ultimately, the CCO is accountable for increasing the profitability of the firm’s customers, as measured by metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer equity as well as by intermediate indicators, such as word of mouth (or mouse). Customer”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“To be effective, the CCO role as we conceive it must be a powerful operational position, reporting to the CEO. This executive is responsible for designing and executing the firm’s customer relationship strategy and overseeing all customer-facing functions. A”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“The most dramatic change will be the marketing department’s reinvention as a “customer department.” The first order of business is to replace the traditional CMO with a new type of leader—a chief customer officer. The”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“Directors and management need to spearhead the strategy shift from transactions to relationships and create the culture, structure, and incentives necessary to execute the strategy. What”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“Tesco uses its data-collecting loyalty card (the Clubcard) to track which stores customers visit, what they buy, and how they pay. This information has helped Tesco tailor merchandise to local tastes and customize offerings at the individual level across a variety of store formats—from”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“To compete in an aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“The key distinction between a traditional and a customer-cultivating company is that one is organized to push products and brands whereas the other is designed to serve customers and customer segments.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

“no amount of technology can really improve the situation as long as companies are set up to market products rather than cultivate customers. To compete in this aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value.”
― Harvard Business School Press, HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing