Bringing Customer Focus to the Marketing Organization
Customer intimacy is a means to an end. It is a strategy for sustaining competitive advantage in the market by developing learning relationships with customers. These learning relationships enable the company to deliver appropriately customized products and services to customer segments with different sets of needs. We begin this session with a brief overview of customer intimacy and a discussion of the circumstances under which it makes sense to pursue a strategy of customer intimacy. We then examine the case of Harrah's Entertainment to identify the key principles underlying their successful customer relationship management program.

Understanding and Crafting the Customer Journey
To better understand your customers and their purchasing decisions, you must first understand how humans fundamentally make decisions. A substantial proportion of these decisions is shaped by basic instinctual systems and processes that are not only automatic but also non-conscious. Throughout the course of the two sessions these basic neural systems will be unraveled, with an emphasis placed on the liking and the wanting systems. In the process we will highlight the critical role that emotion plays in the customer decision-making process and ways by which one can shape emotion to foster greater loyalty toward and willingness to pay for an offering, and most importantly enhanced experience utility from the offering. We will also discuss the downside of focusing on price rather than the brand to create a superior customer value proposition and, based on our understanding of the instinctual brain systems, the effective incentive systems that can be set for your customers.

The Art of Storytelling
"Tell me the facts and I'll learn. Tell me the truth and I'll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever." How do you tell a story? This question becomes important for leaders of companies, who often only need to act as an editor, shaping the stories told by employees and customers to align with a shared vision. It becomes important as you craft a marketing campaign. But a good story is not enough, it must be well told.

In this session, we will break down the basic elements of storytelling, and apply them to your company and give you the opportunity to practice telling a story about your organization, your product, or you.

Creating Better Strategies
"Business Strategy" is perhaps the most overused and least understood concept in our business vocabularies. What, exactly, is a business strategy? How do we develop better business strategies?

These two sessions will examine the fundamental building blocks of business strategy, including the all-important elements of marketing strategy, and develop a process for Creating Better Strategies.

But before we can understand Business Strategy, we must explore the even more fundamental question, "What is a business?" Then we can tackle other key questions, such as, "How do we predict the future?", "How do we tell if we have a good strategy or a bad one?" ,"How do we develop alternative business strategies?", "How do we select a business strategy?".

Other Selected Sessions

• Strategies for Market Growth
• Building Innovative Brands
• Understanding Customer Preferences
• Understanding Customer Profitability
• Pricing
• Linking the Customer Value Proposition to Organizational Culture
• Building a Sales Organization
• Leading Change to a Market-Focused Organization