The Customer Centricity Playbook: Implement a Winning Strategy Driven by Customer Lifetime Value

This book does a great job in providing its advice and information in a succinct and straight to the point style which is greatly appreciated. Unlike many other business books nowadays, there is not much room left for droning on about the same topics and information but in fifteen different ways. Moreover, the book does provide some tangibly useful advice in the field of customer base development but be aware that they use “customer centricity” in a very different way than business transformation professionals.

While the book is well written and is succinct, it is unfortunately misleading and misses hitting the nail on the head. The title of the book would lead one to believe that this book will focus on customer centricity in the business model and development sense, but they use a completely different approach and definition of this topic. Their core thesis is that each company has an ideal consumer with a maximized customer lifetime value and then it provides a loose roadmap to finding and engaging those particular customers. While this is definitely an important facet of marketing for businesses to invest in, it is absolutely not what customer-centric business models are built around.  They seem to define customer centricity as finding the most valuable customers for the business rather than designing the business to provide the most value for customers – feels a bit backwards.

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Featured in Forbes, NPR’s Marketplace, and a Google Talk, The Customer Centricity Playbook offers “actionable insights to drive immediate value,” according to Neil Hoyne, Head of Customer Analytics and Chief Analytics Evangelist, Google.

How did global gaming company Electronic Arts go from being named “Worst Company in America” to clearing a billion dollars in profit?

They discovered a simple truth—and acted on it: Not all customers are the same, regardless of how they appear on the surface.

In The Customer Centricity Playbook, Wharton School professor Peter Fader and Wharton Interactive’s executive director Sarah Toms help you see your customers as individuals rather than a monolith, so you can stopwasting resources by chasing down product sales to each and every consumer.

Fader and Toms offer a 360-degree analysis of all the elements that support customer centricity within an organization. In this book, you will learn how to:

• Develop a customer-centric strategy for your organization
• Understand the right way to think about customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Fine tune investments in customer acquisition, retention, and development tactics based on customer heterogeneity
• Foster a culture that sustains customer centricity, and also understand the link between CLV and market valuation
• Understand customer relationship management (CRM) systems, as they are a vital underpinning for all these areas through the valuable insights they provide

Fader’s first book, Customer Centricity, quickly became a go-to for readers interested in focusing on the right customers for strategic advantage. In this new book, Fader and Toms offer a true playbook for companies of all sizes that want to create and implement a winning strategy to acquire, develop, and retain customers for the greatest value.

For aspiring business professionals who are open minded and eager to develop their business models to incorporate new ideas, this book has a number of valuable insights to offer.  While this book will not give you a solid foundation of understanding customer-centric business models, it does have a unique perspective and take on marketing and resource allocation for acquiring new customers.