All I wanted to do was change my Wall Street Journal digital Monday to Friday subscription back to a daily print subscription. Why? Because I found I was not reading enough of the business news as I had when the paper was physically delivered. I also wanted to retain my Saturday delivery subscription. Sounds easy to accomplish, yes? Four or five (can’t remember which) conversations later, I have effected the change. Why so many? Because the WSJ customer service functions are designed from the inside out to serve internal needs rather than from the outside in to serve customer needs. To make the change I needed to deal with three customer service groups: Saturday only Digital Daily print As I look at this list, I can envision the WSJ’s organizational structure and financial reports. Because of this business structure, I would have needed…
Demographics, GOP and business model strategy
Demographics don’t lie. They are one of the few external trends shaping organizational outcomes around which there is little if any controversy. The baby boom is aging. The voting electorate is getting more diverse. A critical question facing business models therefore is “What will be the impact of demographic trends on our future success?” The answer depends upon context. Lima, a small city in the eastern part of Pennsylvania, has a median age of 79. It suffered a 15% decline in population from 2000 to 2010. City officials and local businesses clearly have an issue! On the other hand, a large city with one of the oldest populations (Scottsdale, Arizona) experienced a 7.2% growth in population over the same period. Here, demographics work to city government and local business advantage, as Scottsdale attracts new residents by positioning itself as a retirement hub. It…
As CMOs become immersed in technology, beware of the CIO myopic thinking trap
If you thought that the move from the Industrial Era to the Digital Era was the last major economic transition that your business would have to deal with, think again. We are in the middle of yet another transformation of comparable magnitude. The slow but steady shift of power away from companies and to customers as we moved into the Digital Era will reach its zenith in the years ahead. Today’s customers, clients, and consumers are instrumented, interconnected, intelligent, engaged, informed and empowered. They want companies they buy from to know them, interact with them on their terms, and personalize marketing offers and customer support. They even want personalized products and services. IBM (my employer) calls this the Connected Consumer Era and it will lead into a digitization of the front office comparable to the back office digitization of the past two decades….