Customer segmentation has driven a decade of marketing ROI gains — and it's still campaign-lead thinking. Customer-lead marketing inverts the logic: start with the customer's needs and design campaigns to serve them, not the other way around. Here's the side-by-side comparison, and why most marketing departments are stuck in campaign-lead mode without realising it.
Australian NPS benchmarks consistently look worse than European ones in the same industry. Either Aussie service is genuinely worse, or something else is going on — here's a look at the Satmetrix data and the two explanations worth taking seriously.
Most new product development is done by guessing what customers want, then surveying them at the end to confirm. Customer co-creation flips that. After 18 months working with a financial services client that ran an online conversational community alongside focus groups, here are four ways to involve customers in NPD that lower risk and lift relevance.
Publicly committing to great service feels like a confidence move. In practice it inflates expectations faster than delivery can catch up, and satisfaction quietly drops. Here's the case for letting customers discover your service standards rather than advertising them.
Most internal reporting is a one-way street: data goes out, nothing comes back. That's how reports keep getting produced for years that no-one acts on. Closed loop reporting flips it — the audience reports back on what they did with the information. Here's why that small process change drives outsized improvements, with a diagram and a worked example.
Other marketing programs prove causality with control groups — set aside a chunk of customers, expose them to everything except the campaign, measure the gap. With loyalty programs, that's awkward to impossible: how do you exclude your high-value customers from the loyalty program? Here's the case for measuring loyalty program effectiveness despite the control-group problem, and the approaches that work.