Managing Customers Through Economic Cycles »

JOHN MCKEAN is the Executive Director of the Center for Information Based Competition, which provides thought-leadership and practitioner-level guidance to help businesses advance to a mastery level of customer information, interactions, and communities ranging from human-to-human to social media/mobile conversations – both as rational consumers and high-order intuitive people. He is frequently called on by the world’s leading businesses to inspire new levels of customer awareness and effectiveness through fact-based insights and a passion for customer excellence. John McKean’s real world customer work is balanced with the academic rigors of guest lecturing at MIT Sloan Graduate School and postgraduate work at Harvard University.

This book focuses on the unique knowledge, skills, and underlying disciplines to enable any business to optimally address the distinct customer opportunities, challenges, and risks created as customers’ transition through economic cycles and provides the strategies and detail tactics applied by the world’s most well-known Fortune 500 organizations and innovative small businesses including how they:

• Tuned their marketing campaigns to economy-specific consumer/business sensitivities.

• Created the 2 types of customer loyalty that best weathered economic turmoil.

• Adopted their sales strategy to how consumers/businesses changed their perception of value in each economic condition.

• Optimized their consumer value proposition or commercial business case for each type of economy.

• Leveraged the behavioral mechanics of how economic conditions changed consumer and business buying behavior.

• Applied consumer and operational information best-practices for each economic transition.

• Unleashed the unique power of Online and Offline communities to get and keep their customers through economic cycles.

• Maximized their employee’s effectiveness through economic cycles and transitions

The book is based on real-world "lessons learned": what worked and what didn't with consumers and businesses across each economic cycle and transition. 

Acknowledgements vii

1 Introduction 1

2 Predicting/Preparing for Economic Transitions 7

3 Science of How Consumers' Buying Changes over Cycles 41

4 Consumer Loyalty Strengths/Vulnerabilities in Cycles 67

5 B2C Approaches for Dynamic Consumer Needs/Value Tradeoff 91

6 B2B Approaches for Different Economic Cycles 125

7 Mastering Information across Economic Cycles 151

8 Managing the Employee Factor through Cycles 173

9 Leveraging the Power of the Community (Physical and Online) 203

10 Summary 247

Index 249