Customer CEO(TM) Overview (C) 2012 Chuck Wall

TM

Profit from the Power of Your Customers.

The customer is the new power at the epicenter of the enterprise.

Overview The greatest asset companies possess is not their building, brand, reputation or heritage. It’s not even their valuable employees. It’s their customers. Today this is truer than ever before in the social business marketplace. Customers now share or control the conversation with brands, the distribution of their marketing and, ultimately, their sales. To some, this is a threat. To the smartest, it’s an opportunity. Customer power has unlocked the potential of co-creation marketing, innovation and distribution. It has transformed every employee into a valuable listening post. It provides leaders with myriad channels through which to humanize their brand. The success stories of the future will be those companies that partner with their customers, that lead with listening, inspire their employees through purpose, and bring their core values to life in ways that are meaningful to customers and employees alike.

Imagine what the economy could be if every company truly tapped into the unrealized value of engaging their customers.

The New Book Customer CEO > How to Profit From The New Power of Your Customers, launches at SXSW in April 2013. The book provides the roadmap for such success by relieving client frustration, exposing the futility of fad strategies and empowering companies to leverage timeless business fundamentals for success in today’s marketplace - brand integrity, employee participation and customer engagement. Traditional brands, as we have come to know them, are breaking down and their underlying value is disappearing into thin air. Tried and true business models are decaying because leadership has either remained entrenched in the old ways or simply waited too long to change. Some are stuck in their comfort zones while others believe it’s just a matter of time until the return of the good old days. But there’s no going back. We’ve entered the age of the Customer CEO.

It’s time to turn the business world upside down with the customer on top. Every organization should create their own “upside down” org chart and start to live a business life of “service first”.

Chuck Wall, Customer CEO

The Author Customer CEO author Chuck Wall is a business futurist and entrepreneur with over three decades of diverse business and leadership experience across a variety of industries. As the founder and CEO of six companies, he believes that the only lasting solution for business growth in today’s world of short term business thinking is for enterprises to start building cultures built on deeper customer insight. He has advised companies ranging from Fortune 500’s to start-ups. Chuck is an expert in customer research, having interviewed over 100,000 B2C and B2B consumers. This insight had led to the creation of billions of dollars in incremental revenue for his clients through innovations in goods, services and experiences.

The Market Has Changed The innovation marketplace is replete with fad strategies. They come with high-priced consultants and sure-fire systems that companies invest in only to find the same cultural problems persist while the results they seek elude them. What expensive consultants overlook in their rush to justify their fees is the fundamentals of corporate culture – brand integrity, employee optimization, and customer engagement. At the same time the market has changed. Social media has given companies the tools to listen to customers at scale in real time, to rally employees around a shared vision, and to share a corporate purpose that will make the brand more meaningful and trustworthy to their media-savvy customers. The key to effective innovation, employee optimization, and customer engagement today is simple and disruptive. Social media has turned employee and customer engagement on its head. As such it has totally redefined business leadership and innovation. Instead of hierarchical corporate structures, product verticals, and media silos, the social business marketplace is flat. It requires seamless, real-time engagement with employees and customers using new social listening and communication tools. Most of all, it requires adaptation to a reverse in the polarity of the conversation, from a top down approach to one where leadership and their employee follow the customers’ lead. This effectively inverts the power, control and direction of decision-making and content distribution. Locked in dialogue with vocal consumers, companies must adopt a co-creation approach and listen in real time to his or her wants, needs and demands.

Social media is transforming the rules of every personal and business relationship so quickly that even the experts can’t keep up. It is the most powerful torrent unleashed in our lifetimes.


Meet The Customer CEO This begs the question of who, ultimately, is in charge. No doubt, the C-suite still steers each company, but the drivers of innovation, sales and profits have shifted to the consumer. So how do we communicate such a fundamental shift in power and all its implications? We reframe our thinking around the Customer CEO. Tomorrow’s business practices will be almost unrecognizable from today’s solutions. Companies will have turned their marketing strategies inside out, flattened their hierarchical structures, and embraced leadership through listening. Social media is the most powerful disrupter to emerge in terms of business innovation and transformation. The ability to smartly manage this multichannel new customer world will differentiate the winners from the losers. Driving this shift will be a new breed of thought leaders that offer the rare combination of real world experience, proprietary insights, and technological savvy. Customer CEO will be at the forefront, adapting timeless fundamentals that include brand integrity, employee participation and customer engagement, for a social, connected and mobile consumer world.

Businesses that don’t understand that the customer is in charge are willfully blind and deserve their inevitable demise.


Anyone who has a customer or plans to have one is a prime prospect for Customer CEO. The book is about the power of understanding the customer so it applies to every kind and size of business. No matter their size, companies need clarity and solutions around this subject. Several recent business research studies prove this point. •  In their annual CEO study, Price-Waterhouse-Coopers found that company leaders

overwhelmingly said the #1 issue for growth is to better understand their existing and future customers.

•  In a new corporate study, Frost & Sullivan discovered that executives said their two biggest

issues are “identifying breakthrough ideas” and “matching innovation projects to unmet customer needs.”

•  In a comprehensive study about innovation, Harris Interactive reports that over 50% said they

“have no innovation process or team in place to talk to the customer.” •  In a new Boston Consulting Group study of which companies did well during the 2008 –

2009 recession, the winners were the ones that continued to innovate. Those firms leapfrogged their competitors who pulled back.

In today’s business world, time is the most precious resource for over worked executives and business owners. But, they realize they need current and relevant information to stay abreast of the latest trends and best practices.

The Customer CEO Audience

Stories are the universal way we’ve always learned from each other. business schools teach through case studies. Yet, in the practice of business, we tend to rely on our own experience and opinions as the final word while ignoring the stories that really count; our customers.


What if every company demolished the barriers between their customers and employees? Working together solves problems and defuses differences.


Enterprises that give their customers a meaningful seat at the head of the table will be respected, recommended and richly rewarded.


TM

customerceoconsulting.com

Launching August 1, 2012