Wharton Executive Education Customer Centricity Essentials: What It Is, What It Isn't, and Why It Matters (Wharton Executive Education Essentials) [Paperback]

Peter Fader (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 11, 2011 | Series: Wharton Executive Education Essentials

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 a roadmap for revamping your organization, performance metrics, and product development in order to make sure you meet the needs of your most valuable customers.

In Wharton Executive Education Customer Centricity Essentials, you will learn how the strategies underlying customer centricity can help your company gain a competitive advantage in today’s challenging business environment; how to calculate what customers are really worth, individually and collectively; how you can use customer-centric perspectives to make smarter, more strategic decisions for your company; how the well-intended idea of customer relationship management lost its way and what your company can do to put it back on track and use it productively; and why Walmart, Costco, Starbucks, Apple, Nordstrom, and other companies may be leaving money on the table—and how you can avoid that pitfall.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Knowing what your customers are worth is the secret to focusing your time and money where it makes the most difference. You can't be all things to all people, so you need to learn to find out who really matters to your success. Fader makes it clear with great ideas and a readable style.”
—Andy Sernovitz, author, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking

About the Author

Peter Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the Co-Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, an academic research center focused on fostering productive collaborations between data-driven firms and top academic researchers around the world. Fader has been quoted or featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Washington Post, and on NPR, among other media. He has also won many awards for his teaching and research accomplishments. In 2009, Fader was named a “Professor to Watch” by the Financial Times, which discussed his interest in “the swathes of hard data consumers generate through their spending habits.”

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Wharton Digital Press (October 11, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1613630077
• ISBN-13: 978-1613630075
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.4 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,104,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An Important Read on CLV in a World Where Competition is Changing November 4, 2011

By Michael Scully

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Back in business school, I remember a marketing professor driving home the importance of customer segmentation by pointing out that the average American has one breast and one testicle. This pretty direct example showed that simple averages do not always produce meaningful information for business planning. Customers are not carbon copies, so why treat them all the same?

This concept of customer heterogeneity and the value of targeted segments is the topic of Professor Peter Fader's new book, Customer Centricity. Dr. Fader points out that customer centricity is so important now, because technological and geographic barriers are disappearing. Consumers are more connected than they have ever been, providing new options and empowerment. Competition is changing.

Customer centricity is a long-term strategy that puts relationships ahead of revenue in order to build customer equity for a business. Getting it right, can be a real differentiator, but so many companies with the best of intentions still get it wrong. This is reflective of the fact that there is no standard template for customer relationship management (CRM). Loyalty programs and CRM systems are just tools and not magic bullets. It takes a deep understanding of the business and behaviors to identify the right data, collect it, analyze it, draw the right conclusions, and take the appropriate actions. It takes an organization-wide commitment.

(Note: Customer centricity does not necessarily mean a focus on customer service.)

Dr. Fader paints some very successful businesses, such as Nordstrom and Apple, as very much NOT customer centric. It's true. They are brand and product centric, respectively. These businesses do not tailor their offering depending on the customer.... Instead, they put forth a one-size-fits-all approach to managing customers. It has worked for them. While some businesses thrive today without a focus on customer centricity, today's consumers have quickly evolving expectations. Understanding the fundamentals of customer centricity and employing the proper data collection and analytical methods creates new strategic options.

Proper customer lifetime value (CLV) methodologies do not get the attention they deserve in today's business world, so this book is an important read. Customers represent assets with value to a business, much like stocks in a portfolio. You cannot optimize your portfolio to deliver maximum returns without understanding the fundamentals of proper valuation. This book provides a good overview of the implications of customer centricity and the importance of this type of thinking. Get a good grasp of it before your competitors do.

My only criticism is that this book reads like an extended introduction to a much bigger story that I want to dig into. It raises practical questions and points of debate around the valuation for trade-offs necessary to fully commit or transition to customer centricity. Just as I was ready to dig into the nitty gritty, I was at the end. I love data and stats, and I am a segmentation junkie, so I'd love to see a follow-up on this surprisingly often overlooked topic. Read more ›

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What CRM Should Have Been November 2, 2011

By James B. Sterne

Format:Paperback

I have always felt that Customer Centricity as a strategy for improving profits is so obvious that it goes without saying. Apparently, it has gone without saying for too long. The solution? This book.

Peter Fader clarifies the strategy of Customer Centricity as a means to increase profits from your best customers, find more like them and avoid over-investing in the rest. Knowing who is worth pleasing and who is simply worth maintaining is not easy. Collecting the necessary depth of knowledge about customers is not a trivial task. But it is demonstrably valuable.

Had a bad experience with Customer Relationship Management? Then this book is for you. It describes what went wrong with CRM and how to fix it, and illuminates whether your firm should spend to grow customer equity or brand equity. Clear advice on calculating Customer Lifetime Value and plenty of examples make for a useful book, written in Peter's decidedly accessible voice. Read this book and learn how to treat your best customers well and reap the rewards.

An absolute necessity for companies differentiating themselves on service in this social media world.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must-Read for Marketing Professionals October 11, 2011

By Dr. Steven P. Lerner

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

If you accept the premise that all customers are not created equal and you'd like a rigorous, objective methodology for segmenting them based on their historical purchasing behaviours, then this book is for you. This excellent introductory book and the other readily-available works of Drs. Fader and Hardie, will illuminate the path for those marketing professionals who want improve the efficacy of their marketing expenditures and the operational efficiency of their sales and marketing teams. Gain an advantage on your competition today! Buy the book, read it, and reap the benefits of a change in philosophy!

5.0 out of 5 stars Good intro into P Fader's work July 2, 2012

By deepinthegame

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a good start into the concept of customer centricity. Hopefully he produces more work that shows how to understand customers through the use of marketing math and different techniques. One of the best professors out there covering this subject.

3.0 out of 5 stars Information marginal for what I needed May 29, 2012

By Bb

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Book was OK but not what I needed - customer centricity has multiple definitions and the book description was midleading.

3.0 out of 5 stars Detailed but not in the way I expected March 4, 2012

By Curtis A. Cecil

Format:Paperback

I recently received a book entitled Customer Centricity by Peter Fader.
AS someone working in retail management this book really hit home.

The concept is looking at the typical Customer retention model, or "The Customer is Always Right" moniker and finding the errors in that thinking. I can fully relate to that. It seems that when you always return items for the guests they expect it the next time and the next... thus never truly making them happy.

Yet when the expectations are defined ahead of time, and the customers who are your larger spenders (Or in some terms the largest Margin Producers) are the ones you work to keep. Not that we fully ignore the others but we do not market or `converse' with them as often due to their lower Customer Lifetime Value.

This was a pretty detailed look at the CLV as well as other aspects of the Centricity model. Yet as with anything there must be a balance. If we don't keep the middle group happy then we lose our base that allows us the flexibility to connect more with the high CLV guests. As well the key point I didn't fully grasp from this book was `HOW' do we move our middle tier customers into the higher CLV group.