Being the best isn't easy. It requires dedication, hard work, and a passion and plan to sell more than anybody else. It also requires treating your customer as your best friend. For more than half a century, Rick Case has steered Rick Case Automotive Group to become one of the most successful car dealership chains in America by following this simple rule. & ;& ;Rick, along with his wife, Rita, have learned what it takes to become the best and how to stay on top whether it's selling cars or motorcycles, building iconic brands, marketing sporting events, or developing new philanthropic events that benefit local charities.& ;& ;In Our Customers, Our Friends, Rick explains how to look through the eyes of your customers and transform any organization into an industry leader. & ;& ;From creating the 10-year, 100,000-mile warranty that literally changed the face of Hyundai to promoting daredevil Evel Knievel's daring stunts, Rick Case has applied creativity and innovation as well as a dab of marketing genius to every endeavor he undertakes. & ;& ;But before he grew into any of the titles people assign him car dealer, promoter, entrepreneur, pioneer, philanthropist, or marketing guru Rick was just a car salesman from Akron, Ohio, with a big dream. Here's how he did it, and how you can take the lessons he learned and apply them to your own life.

Who do you want your customers to become? According to MIT innovation expert and thought leader Michael Schrage, if you aren’t asking this question, your strategic marketing and innovation efforts will fail. In this latest HBR Single, Schrage provides a powerful new lens for getting more value out of innovation investment. He argues that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far enough—serious marketers and innovators must ask them to become something different instead. Even more, you must invest in their capabilities and competencies to help them become better customers. Schrage’s primary insight is that innovation is an investment in your client, not just a transaction with them. To truly innovate today, designing new products or features or services won’t get you there. Only by designing new customers—thinking of their future state, being the conduit to their evolution—will you transform your business. Schrage explains how the above question (what he calls “The Ask”) will incite you and your team to imagine and design ideal customer outcomes as the way to drive your business’s future. The Single is organized around six key insights and includes practical exercises to help you apply the question to your current situation. Schrage also includes examples from well-known companies—Google, Facebook, Disney, Starbucks, Apple, IKEA, Dyson, Ryanair, and others—to illustrate just what is possible when you apply “The Ask.” Marketing executives, brand managers, strategic innovators, and entrepreneurs alike should understand how successful innovation rebrands the client and not the product. A requisite question for its time, Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become will liberate you and your team from ‘innovation myopia’—and turn your innovation efforts on their head. HBR Singles provide brief yet potent business ideas, in digital form, for today's thinking professional.

Offers an organizational design model for service organizations, covering such topics as funding mechanisms, employee management systems, and customer management systems.

With emerging technology transforming customer expectations, it's important to keep a laser focus on the experience companies provide their customers. Tomorrow's customers need to be targeted today! Customer experience futurist Blake Morgan outlines ten easy-to-follow customer experience guidelines that integrate emerging technologies with effective strategies to combat disconnected processes, silo mentalities, and a lack of buyer perspective. The Customer of the Future explains how today's customers are already demanding frictionless, personalized, on-demand experiences from their products and services, and companies that don't adapt to these new expectations won't last. This book prepares your organization for these increas­ing demands by helping you do the following: Learn the ten defining strategies for a customer experience-focused company. Implement new techniques to shift the entire company from being product-focused to being customer-focused. Gain insights through case studies and examples on how the world's most innovative companies are offering new and compelling customer experiences. Tomorrow's customers will insist on experiences that make their lives significantly easier and better. Craft a leadership development and culture plan to create lasting change at your organization!

Not all customers are created equal. Despite what the tired old adage says, the customer is not always right. Not all customers deserve your best efforts: in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers...and then there is pretty much everybody else. Upending some of our most fundamental beliefs, renowned behavioral data expert Peter Fader, Co-Director of The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, helps businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. He provides insights to help you revamp your performance metrics, product development, customer relationship management and organization in order to make sure you focus directly on the needs of your most valuable customers and increase profits for the long term.

Imagine a management philosophy based not upon serving a company's customers, but on serving the company's employees. Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies in India, has put such a philosophy into practice with remarkable results. His "employee first, customer second" mantra has been recognized globally as an example of organizational innovation, and was deemed a "new and radical management philosophy" ripe for the picking in the Western world by Business Week. In this book, Nayar himself describes his blunt refusal to treat the flesh and blood of HCL--its people--as "human resource" or as "intellectual capital" or even as an asset like all its other assets-and how his unique perspective led to an holistic transformation of his organization. By putting employees on top of the organizational pyramid, he argues, your company can fully realize the value created in the interface between customers and employees. This book leads managers and executives through the five core aspects of Nayar's approach, demonstrating how to create a sense of urgency, overhaul incentives and reporting structures, foster transparency in communications and feedback, provide platforms for achievement and personal growth, and finally recognize the potential of every individual in the organization. The "Employee First" philosophy should be the fulcrum of the transformation journey of any organization.