Our thinking is appearing in publications around the world

A framework by which a company can identify, analyze and correct inconsistencies across its customer touchpoints.

Banks are generally held to have entrenched attitudes about customers and marketing. But, in conversation with chief marketing officers of several leading banks in Europe, Prophet found evidence of a willingness to embrace the new customer realities.

In this book, learn how to turn your brand from the logo on your letterhead into the driving force behind your company's growth, operational success, and long-term profitability.

The days of brand building defined simply by awareness and driven by marketing alone are over. Prophet believes that brand is the essential underpinning to a holistic business strategy, requiring that the brand be managed at the highest levels within the organization.

In this article, Scott Davis answers questions about customer control: Does the customer really want to be your co-pilot? Does the customer want to do the marketer’s work in building the brand? Make your ads? Design your products? Distribute your message? Maybe not, he argues.

In this book, learn how to map out a strategy that can help an entire organization manage and live (not just think about) its brand.

The anti-brand backlash can be contained, Kevin argues, by teaching those who think a brand is just a name slapped on a package that the true concept of Brand is the 360-degree experience a consumer has with it.

Consumer brands have invested billions to create experiences built upon distinctive combinations of products, services and people. Companies on the business-to-business (B2B) side, however, are typically less focused on creating customer experiences as a way to achieve competitive advantage. And that might seem to make sense. Yet a closer look shows that the attributes describing B2B winners – reliability, accuracy, quality, ease – are often the hallmarks of a great customer experience. 

When it comes to assessing marketing's effectiveness in creating the type of customer relationships that fuel business growth, consider this: Maybe marketers should stop thinking so much like traditional marketers.

Color today’s marketers dazed and confused. It’s an understandable reaction to an environment that has become almost impossibly complex, making it difficult for them to figure out where to start (or much less how to go about) meeting management’s escalating demands for demonstrable returns.

Jay Milliken and Andres Nicholls discuss how strategy-led design and understanding customer behavior are the key elements for the success of Emart.

Roland Bernhard talks about the importance of the new networked era based on social media and how marketers should be communicating more transparently about their brand.

For a few years now, the shiniest new toy in the digital marketplace has been the mobile app.

The proliferation has been amazing: The 1-millionth app went live as 2011 came to a close, and the pace has continued through 2012. The trend, Mobilewalla told theNew York Times, has been 15,000 mobile app releases per week.

Everyone wants to get a piece of this pie. And why not? The thing is that for all the really cool, highly successful apps there are hundreds, (thousands?) of others that are dumb, useless, or a joke.

In this interview published in M&K, the leading Swiss marketing communications journal, Roland Bernhard addresses some of the most challenging topics marketers face today. Roland talks about customer experience, innovation and marketing accountability and explains how commanding these topics help marketers gain a competitive advantage, even in difficult times. *Please note, this article is in German.

This article outlines how to manage your brand touchpoints to build strong customer relationships.

A perspective on the importance of aligning your brand's touchpoints across all interactions with your customers. The article also provides some consumer products related examples.

When thousands of people lost their jobs during the Great Depression, many of them started riding the rails across the country in search of work and food. Hobos, as they were called, had been hopping trains since the 1870s, working as migrant laborers wherever they could find a job. They often traveled by themselves, leading to the inevitable problem of knowing what to expect when arriving in an unfamiliar place. Some cities might be welcoming while others might be less hospitable. A farmer might feed those who worked his fields while others might turn you into the police. A secret language of signs was developed that informed hobos about what awaited them. To the casual observer, the signs were gibberish or graffiti; but to the hobo, they could mean the difference between a hot meal and a night in jail. And therein lies a key question for today’s companies to ask themselves:

Individual brands, or even whole categories, that were once important for a particular consumer segment, become irrelevant as society evolves and tastes change. Should you completely lose your current brand equity association so you can become relevant to new consumers?

A critique of Britain's customer service within the context of how it may impact brands on a global scale.*

Andy uses the example of the Milwaukee's Mitchell Airport to show three ways to "recombobulate" to better deal with the known uncertainties of today's business times and re-spark your creative edge.