The Connected Company

Customers trust each other more than they trust companies, who have a vested interest in making themselves look good.

Good profits come from creating value for customers. Bad profits come at the expense of happy customers and long-term sustainable growth. Bad profits come from customers who are locked in, who feel trapped or abused. Bad profits come from nuisance fees, like airlines charging extra for checked baggage, car rental companies charging $10 per day for

What the market requires is not incremental improvement, but order-of-magnitude increases in performance. Are you ready to respond to these rising expectations?

Products aren’t just things. They are servants.

Companies tend to lose touch with customers as they grow, for a variety of reasons. Companies must find ways to create, maintain, and develop deep connections as they grow.

In product-dominant logic, production is the core of the value-creation process, while customer service is a cost to be minimized. But in service-dominant logic, products are the cost centers, and services become the core value-creation processes.

An initial event strikes a chord: it’s interesting, funny, sad, disgusting, or enraging. As a result, it is shared, commented on, analyzed, and argued about. And as it moves through the network, it is amplified, sometimes to an exponential degree.

The purpose of a company is what it does for customers.

Walmart dominates retail by relentlessly focusing on price-sensitive customers. Everything in Walmart’s culture is focused on squeezing one more penny of cost out of their operations, and sharing those cost savings with customers. Much smaller retailer Nordstrom has only 2% of Walmart’s revenue, but generates higher profits by focusing on customers

In today’s world, where ideas are increasingly displacing the physical in the production of economic value, competition for reputation becomes a significant driving force, propelling our economy forward.