This book brings together, for the first time, two very powerful concepts: customer value and competitive planning. Together they create a powerful tool that will generate breakthrough strategies for market dominance. The previously fashionable metrics of customer satisfaction have proven to be poor predictors of business performance, whereas the linkages between customer value and performance measures such as market share and profitability have been identified and documented. Value has been shown to be one of the best predictors of market share and customer loyalty available. Developing a system to harness value as a competitive weapon is an essential next step.Competing with Customers presents a competitive planning template that enables organizations to actually harness their value creation and delivery systems to enhance their market performance. It is a planning system that focuses at the level where the organization makes money: selling products or services to people in specific markets or market segments. Readers will discover a clear blueprint for crafting breakthrough, value-added strategies. For many readers, it will challenge the way they look at their competition, their markets, and their industries. Competition will never look the same.!

Typically, when companies want to improve their products, they go to their customers. But why not reach further and explore the entire market? In this eye-opening book, Eric Reidenbach goes beyond the "voice of the customer" that so many consultants talk about to introduce you to a groundbreaking concept: the Voice of the Market. Like most business

Six Sigma Marketing challenges the way both the Six Sigma community and the marketing area think about business and the way they currently do business. It does so by providing a detailed and structured approach—one that is entirely data driven—to unleash the power of Six Sigma on the crucial need for revenue growth. Six Sigma Marketing (SSM) is a fact-based, data-driven disciplined approach to growing market share by providing targeted product/markets with superior value. It is organized around the following elements: Customer value is the driving strategic metric. It replaces the emphasis on customer satisfaction embraced by both Six Sigma and marketing, and provides a much stronger link to market-share gains and revenue increases. SSM has a unique set of powerful tools designed around the idea of customer value to concentrate the organization’s efforts on both acquisition of new customers and retention of current customers. It uses a modified DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) model that is not only very familiar to the Six Sigma community but also friendly to and easily understood by marketers. It strives to make marketing a more effective and efficient factor within the organization. Its goal is defect reduction. A defect is defined as failure to provide satisfactory customer events. Customers interact with an organization in many ways: sales, billing inquiries, service, repairs, parts, and so forth. Each event, or interaction, has the ability to increase or decrease their loyalty and hence the organization’s market share. SSM expands the traditional view of marketing to include emphases not only on pricing, product, promotion, and distribution, but also on processes. SSM takes elements from both Six Sigma and marketing and forges them into a powerful and focused discipline designed to increase the enterprise’s market share and top-line revenues. It is a structured approach that addresses the need for more effective and efficient marketing activities in order to achieve value proposition goals at lower costs. It represents what many have called the next generation in Six Sigma—one not focused solely on reducing costs or defects, but actually on increasing revenues and market share. COMMENTS FROM OTHER CUSTOMERS Average Customer Rating (5 of 5 based on 1 review) “Dr. Reidenbach has hit a transformational home run with this new book. My former company deployed Six Sigma Marketing to great success. Dr. Reidenbach was urged by some of our Black Belts to come up with a way to turn our investment in Six Sigma towards the objectives of growing revenues and increasing share. This he did and the process is well documented in his new book. Our market share took off and value became part of our culture. I find the discussion of the difference and use of customer satisfaction versus customer value to be of great utility. Companies that have already invested in Six Sigma will find Six Sigma Marketing as a great blueprint for extending their focus from cutting costs to growing market share. The format is highly user-friendly and one that is very familiar to Six Sigma practitioners. If you read only one business book this year, make it Six Sigma Marketing by Dr. Reidenbach.” A reader in Perth, Australia

This book demonstrates in a simple and straightforward way the process of discovering the attributes that are important to your customers, measuring their satisfaction with an unbiased survey instrument, analyzing that data, and then doing a statistical analysis to determine the best approach to improving the low-rated attribute(s) and implementing change that has a higher probability of improving customer loyalty. Satisfaction is a feeling; loyalty is a behavior with satisfaction as its foundation, coupled with a willingness to repurchase and a willingness to recommend. It is that interest in reliving a positive customer experience that creates loyal behavior. This book gives insights into the process that companies can use to create that satisfaction in their customers and promote loyal behavior in customers’ buying patterns. Each chapter is constructed as a self-contained entity. The method described in this book will help you collect data from your customers, understand the information through analysis of the metrics and comments, find root causes of problems, motivate people to contribute to improving satisfaction, and then sustain the gains by audit. There is no appendix to reference for additional materials. The basic process needed to analyze and implement a robust quality system for improving customer satisfaction is described in full, including presenting the data of “customer satisfaction values” in a way that makes it easy to understand.

Over the past decade, the concept and effective execution of off-line and online social (and business-related) informal peer-to-peer communication has become extremely important to marketers as business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) customers have increasingly shown distrust, disinterest, and disdain for most supplier messages conveyed through traditional media. The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur offers a comprehensive overview and sets of actionable insights into this new world of customer-led communication and behavioral influence: How we got here How objective, original, credible, authentic and effective brand, product, or service word-of-mouth programs can be initiated and scaled How contemporary and actionable measures can be applied to assess strategic and tactical customer experience and relationship effectiveness Why advocacy is the ultimate customer loyalty behavior goal How to identify drivers of, and minimize, customer sabotage How employee behavior links to customer advocacy behavior How social word-of-mouth is addressed differently around the world How the core concept of advocacy can be expected to morph going forward through more proactive marketing and leveraging of customer behavior Praise for The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur "Michael Lowenstein offers excellent insights and methods any business can apply to achieve high customer advocacy from its customer base." - Professor Philip Kotler, Northwestern University "Proactive endorsements of customers and employees are earned by making deliberate decisions about how you run your business. Michael Lowenstein's book gives readers dedicated to company growth through customer advocacy the specifics and tools to 'earn the right' to those endorsements." - Jeanne Bliss, noted customer experience expert and author (www.customerbliss.com); co-founder, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) "The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur is fantastic! Michael eloquently presents customer service theories and research techniques that reinforce what we all already know but now intimately understand so we can confidently expand our best practices. I have gone back to the material several times since initially reading this masterpiece to clarify and tweak current programs as well as justifying the implementation of new customer relationship building initiatives. Since our nation now relies on the service sector to support the economy, this book and Michael Lowenstein are a block in the foundation of our economic recovery. Read this book; your customers, your employees, and the nation will benefit.” - Chris Zane, Founder/Pres, Zane’s Cycle; author of Reinventing the Wheel; the Science of Creating Lifetime Customers “Social Customers can have an enormous impact on brand value. Michael Lowenstein's The Customer Advocate and the Customer Saboteur synthesizes solid research and compelling examples to show how to capitalize on advocacy behavior while minimizing the potential for damage from ‘badvocacy.’ Essential reading for customer-centric business leaders!” - Bob Thompson, Founder/CEO, CustomerThink Corp.

Business growth depends on more than asking a single question. Challenging the widely touted Net Promoter Score (NPS) claims, author Bob E. Hayes provides compelling evidence that, to grow their business, companies need to look beyond this simple question to efforts on improving the entire customer feedback program (CFP). First, customer loyalty consists of three components, advocacy, purchasing, and retention, each providing unique and useful information regarding future business growth. By measuring these three components of customer loyalty, companies will be better able to manage their customer relationships to maximize growth through new and existing customers. Second, because of the diverse business practices companies can employ with respect to their CFPs, there are hundreds of different ways a company can structure its particular program. Some companies have top executive support for their programs while others do not. Some companies integrate their customer feedback data into their daily business processes while others keep them separate. Some companies use customer feedback results as part of their employee incentive programs while other companies rely on more traditional incentive programs. Still some companies conduct in-depth customer research using their feedback data while others rely on basic reporting of their customer feedback data for their customer insight. But are there critical elements of a customer feedback program that are absolutely necessary for its success? Can a company exclude some elements from its program without adversely impacting its effectiveness? How important are certain components in increasing customer loyalty? This book answers these questions. It is a direct result of the author’s scientific research and professional experience in the field of customer satisfaction and loyalty. This book represents the first scientific study that has tried to identify the best practices of customer feedback programs. Hayes formally collected information from many CFP professionals regarding how they structure their CFPs, and identified specific CFP practices that lead to higher levels of customer loyalty. Additionally, he worked first-hand with employees from Microsoft, Oracle, Harris Stratex Networks, Akamai, and American Express Business Travel in gathering insights and case studies to illustrate how to build a world class CFP. Learn why companies should look beyond the NPS as the ultimate question and learn how to design an effective CFP that will help improve the customer experience, increase customer loyalty, and, ultimately, drive business growth. For those unfamiliar with CFPs, the appendices provide detail on methods used in the main body of the book: a discussion on methods of determining customer requirements (those elements of your business that are important to your customers), a complete discussion on how to write survey questions, and brief discussions on particular statistical analysis methods that can help you understand how customer feedback data are analyzed.