Informal Learning Flow is a content hub started by Jay Cross that collects and organizes the best information on the web around informal learning. We hope this will help you find good stuff, learn and stay current.

905 Articles match "customers","partners"

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When Profit and Social Impact Unite
These hybrid value chains present myriad challenges for businesses, including figuring out how to serve consumers they traditionally haven't served and redefining value for existing customers. (Think Think of Starbucks and its work with coffee growers and how that has changed both its supply chain and its relationship with customers.) Two citizen-sector organizations — RASA, Until the late 1980s, you could clearly see the difference between the business and public sectors. Business was fast-moving, productive, and focused exclusively on profits.
HarvardBusiness.org - Thursday, March 18, 2010
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The Best Business Model in the World
In our previous lives running businesses, my partners and I have seen and experienced one business model that we love the best, based on fundamental cash flow and the ability to grow that cash flow as the business scales. During my years of working with my partner Dick Harrington at The Thomson Corporation (now Thomson-Reuters), we focused on finding and building "must-have" information services that held the potential for highly repeatable revenue. One of the "golden rules" of investing we have at our firm, Cue Ball, is that we value the business model over the financial plan.
HarvardBusiness.org - Thursday, March 18, 2010
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Guard Your Living Rooms: Google and Its A-Team Are Coming to TV
They'll be making a set-top box for Google, assumed to be similar to the Apple TV crossed with a cable box, but they'll also be packaging the custom Android OS into their Bravia TVs and Blu-ray decks. It's not clear if they're the exclusive hardware partner, but they're the only company named so far--this could be Sony's chance to rock the multimedia world yet again. The Team: Google : The mastermind. Of the three major connected screens users have (TV, mobile, and computer), Google has made firm stands in only the latter two--and now they're coming for TV.
Fast Company - Wednesday, March 17, 2010
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  • Want to Understand Your Customers? Go Pyscho.
    Customer research tends to be demographically-biased in its design. But it is time for us to go a little psycho on customers — psychographic, that is. So why is it that we so often look at detailed website usage or customer data along impersonal demographic dimensions like age and gender? To choose your partner, you When it comes to purchasing behavior, it is obvious that personalities matter. While useful, those characteristics don't describe attitudinal trends which may be more important — and need to be a critical complement to other data.
    HarvardBusiness.org - Thursday, May 28, 2009
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  • Four Customer Experience Lessons from Target's ClearRx
    Among my favorite examples of great customer experience is Target's ClearRx pharmacy system . After graduating, she shopped her idea around until she found a willing partner in Target. I've seen numerous attempts at customer experience improvement fail because of a company's unwillingness to dig in and really do what it takes to deliver. Introduced 4 years ago, it provided a radical departure from the standard design of pill bottles, setting Target apart from their competition. ClearRx sports an excellent design, with clear typography, smart color coding, and
    HarvardBusiness.org - Monday, June 1, 2009
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  • The Three-Minute Rule
    At our venture capital firm, Cue Ball , we are pretty maniacal about understanding customers. We encourage our portfolio company CEOs to dive deep — very deep — and learn about their customers along every possible dimension. My Partner, Dick Harrington, and developed a customer-driven approach and capability set that we put in place at Thomson which ultimately was a key driver of the company's transformation into a global media and information powerhouse. We wrote about this in a 2008 HBR article, Transforming Strategy One Customer at a Time .
    HarvardBusiness.org - Friday, January 22, 2010
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  • When Customer Loyalty Is a Bad Thing
    The economic crisis has jolted companies into the need to redouble efforts to foster customer loyalty. Numerous articles now tout the increased importance of giving customers premium service in troubled times to ensure customer retention . The underlying reasoning is simple — loyal customers help a company to weather the storm through their continued patronage. Without question, there is some truth to this logic. No firm can survive for long without loyal customers.
    HarvardBusiness.org - Thursday, May 7, 2009
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  • How Google and P&G Approach New Customers, New Markets
    It seems obvious: our assumptions become less valuable the farther our experiences are from our decisions and customers. Local hiring is just the beginning- we have to make sure we are solving the right problems for customers. Leading companies such as Procter & Gamble and Google have realized that the more clearly you understand your customer or partner, and their context(s), the more likely you will be able to offer the right solutions, build When I worked with entrepreneurs and leaders in Europe, I often heard complaints like: "American companies have a habit of coming into Europe full of ambition, searching for big markets, but without fully understanding what it takes to sell a product, build a brand, or forge partnerships in each country."
    HarvardBusiness.org - Monday, March 2, 2009
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  • How to Align Customer Value With Green Value
    In most discussions I have with people about sustainable brands and product or service offerings, someone inevitably asks, "But will customers pay a premium for green products?" With the downturn in the economy, this question has been arising earlier in the conversation and is framed more as a statement: "But customers won't pay a premium for green products, especially now, will they?" In Focusing on whether or not customers will pay a premium for green products brings with it a number of constraining assumptions: 1) that green products do not have any tangible benefits for customers other than making them feel good about helping the planet, and 2) that green products are more expensive to produce than non-green products.
    HarvardBusiness.org - Friday, April 3, 2009
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  • Causata Launches Customer Interaction Platform With $4.5M From Accel Partners
    Accel Partners has poured $4.5 million into Causata , a San Francisco-based software startup that provides tools companies can use to optimize customer experience and business results. Causata markets a multichannel customer interaction platform that intends to enable companies to optimize customer experience and business results simultaneously, at any touch point, in real-time. The Series A round actually closed back in April this year, but the name of the investor has only now been made public through a regulatory filing, reports peHUB . Judging by messages
    TechCrunch - Monday, October 5, 2009
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  • Selling Simplicity — Not Just Marketing It
    What is interesting about this phenomenon is that it is in sharp contrast with the thinking of the past few years — which was that consumers wanted unlimited choice so that they could customize their products and services to fit their own unique needs and lifestyles. As such, technology companies pushed for more and more bells and whistles, while other firms drove towards mass customization. Have you noticed that more and more companies are marketing "simplicity" as a reason to buy their products or services? For example, Philips Electronics advertises " Sense and simplicity
    HarvardBusiness.org - Thursday, October 29, 2009
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  • Your Employees Have No Clue What Your Company Does
    Ask five to 20 of your employees to explain what your company's customer value proposition is. But, in the many years with which we have advised on and written about customer-driven strategies , there has been a common pattern: massive inconsistency in people's ability to clearly articulate their company's value proposition. These questions form the core of describing your value to a customer. Here's a test. How many different answers do you guess you'll get?
    HarvardBusiness.org - Thursday, September 3, 2009
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  • How to Use Market Research in a Recession
    In a recession, it's essential to get a clear read on existing core customers, including those who are most loyal to the brand and those who are most profitable, rather than fritter away research resources on potential or peripheral consumers. When times are good, there is budget available for increased research on secondary products or customers. Recession-challenged consumers are buying less, looking for deals, or switching to different brands, product categories, or stores. Some are even changing long-held attitudes toward consumption.
    HarvardBusiness.org - Monday, May 18, 2009
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