The Customer World

by Peter Fisk

From Antalya to Umpqua, brands are finally discovering their customers’ worlds.

It’s amazing how different things look from the outside in.

Whether it’s the way you define your business, the style in which you serve your customers, or where you look for new ideas and inspiration, the chances are that you are still on the inside looking out, rather than the outside looking in.

We are all human – we all have dreams and aspirations. Yet when we go to work, we put our blinkers on – we restrict our thinking to our defined sectors and functional roles, we limit our ambitions to the scope of our responsibilities and rewards. We stop being real people.

We commend ourselves to be customer focused, or even customer centred. We seek to deliver great service, or rather service experiences. And we hope to gain the loyalty of customers, by persuading them to have relationships with us. The problem is, we do all of this from the inside out. Our starting point is still, invariably, our business - our brands, products, and targets. We do it on our terms. This doesn’t work anymore.

Peter Fisk, best-selling author of Customer Genius, helps you explore your customer's world with case studies of customer inspired brands like Current TV, Hillside Beach Club, Li & Fung and Net a Porter.

17 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 26, 2011

About the author

Peter Fisk is a brand, innovation and marketing expert - making sense of fast-changing markets, learning from a new generation of business, digital and physical, large and small, west and east … inspiring and enabling you to innovate and win in the exciting new world of business.
 
He is a bestselling author and inspirational speaker, combining the most inspiring ideas and practical action, and an in-demand expert advisor to business leaders around the world.
 
Peter leads GeniusWorks, a strategic innovation business based in London, Istanbul and Dubai, that works with senior management to “see things differently” – to develop and implement more inspired strategies for brands, innovation and marketing.

His next book is Gamechangers …about the next generation of businesses - from Alibaba to Zipcars, Aberchrombie to Zynga - who are transforming markets with bolder brands, smarter innovation and clever marketing.
 
His previous books included Creative Genius brings together entrepreneurs and artists, rockstars and rockets scientists, in "the essential guide to innovation for leaders, visionaries, and border crossers". Marketing Genius explores the left and right-brain approaches to competitive success (translated into 35 languages), Customer Genius describes how to build a customer-centric business, Business Genius is about inspired leadership and strategy, whilst People Planet Profit explains how to grow, and be good.

He was also the transforming CEO of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the world’s largest marketing organisation. He was recently described by Business Strategy Review as “one of the best new business thinkers” and is in demand around the world as an expert advisor and energising speaker.

Find out more, read his blog, download videos, extracts and new articles at his website www.theGeniusWorks.com

See work in progress of his next book "Gamechangers" at the co-creation website www.NextGenerationBrands.com