Denyse Drummond-Dunn
How to Improve Customer Centricity in Hospitality
The title of this week’s post might surprise you. After all, the hospitality industry should be highly customer centric, as it relies on satisfying its guests. However, it can learn a lot from consumer packaged goods (FMCG/CPG), as I shared with industry experts at a...
Why Technology Won’t Help You Understand Your Customers
Were you surprised to read the title of this post? Do you believe that using technology to understand customers is the only way today? Then let me explain why I believe it's not quite that simple. In today's data-rich environment I'm not really suggesting that...
7 Reasons for Failure When Adopting a Customer First Strategy
By now, every CEO knows that a stronger customer focus is the answer to many of their business challenges. Why therefore do so many companies still struggle to adopt a customer-first strategy and culture? Read on for my own thoughts and perspectives on what should...
7 Ways to Deliver Awesome Customer Service
How can some companies get customer service so wrong?!This week I have a longer post than usual, but one that will make you smile, if not laugh out loud.It describes one recent personal example of disinterested client support, from which I have drawn seven learnings…
Are You Still Using The Marketing 5Ps? Move To The Improved 7Qs.
Marketing is a great profession and the marketing 5Ps is the code by which we live. I’ve worked in or with marketing teams for almost my whole career and I am passionate about brand building.From the outside, others see marketers as those who come to work…
Getting to Yes: A 7-step Roadmap to Successful Project Management
I’ve been involved in hundreds of successful project management initiatives over my career. I’ve been the leader, sponsor or team member, which means that each time I had different responsibilities. What they all had in common was the desire to get the project approved quickly…
The Future of Brand Building is Customer Centricity
Marketing is an old profession. It’s been around for hundreds of years in one form or another. But with the advent of digital in the early 80’s, companies began taking a serious look at their marketing strategies. Many organisations realised that it was time for…
How the Best Marketers are getting More Actionable Insights
Are you as busy as I am, as we plan on how we’re going to deliver on all our objectives before year-end? The last quarter of any year is a stressful time indeed, but this post on actionable insights is a must-read if you want…
Today’s Toughest Marketing Challenge is Not Customer Satisfaction!
We all know how extremely demanding consumers have become in recent years. The offers of constant innovation and novelty have made us all more impatient and critical. Today we want things better, faster and sometimes cheaper as well. And customer satisfaction is becoming insufficient to…
How to Measure Customer Centricity the Right Way
As a customer first strategist (hopefully just like you), I spend a lot of my time searching how to better measure customer centricity for my clients. I also do a lot of analyses on what customers really want today. I’m always trying to understand exactly…
The 6 Best Ways to Show you Respect your Customers
More than one year after the introduction of GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California, I wondered what has changed. And more importantly, I got to thinking about customer privacy and how to build a mutually beneficial relationship whilst also respecting it. Customers don’t…
The Best Ways To Improve Innovation With Better Ideation & Insights
One of the most frequent questions I get asked by my clients is how they can improve their innovation. Whether they are large or small, global or local, they all want to their new products and services to be more successful. And the answer I…
What you need to know about Brand Image, Personality & Archetypes
Your brand is not what you think it is! It is what your customers think it is; its brand image, personality and its value to them. I was lecturing at Miami University a while back on brand image and personality. These are two vital elements…
Is Packaging Part of Product or Promotion? Should it be Both?
Which did you answer subconsciously when you read the title? Do you consider your packaging to be a part of the product, protecting its contents and framing its on-shelf life? Or do you consider it to be an integral part of your connection with your…
Five Rules of Customer Observation for Greater Success
One of the best ways to a deeper understanding of your customers is to watch and listen to them whenever you can. Customer observation is a powerful, but unfortunately too often an under-utilised tool of marketers. It is, therefore, understandable that so many companies run to…
7 Secrets to Business Growth from Leading Global Brands
Consultants get contacted for all sorts of – admittedly sometimes strange – requests for support from their clients. However, when I get several people asking for help in the same area, I know something important is happening in the marketplace. This is exactly what happened…
Fundamentals of a Customer First Strategy For Every Industry
Every industry strives to improve their customers’ experience with their products and services. Adopting a customer first strategy is therefore in many company objectives. Unfortunately it rarely goes beyond the theory in many organisations, so I decided to help out with these six suggestions. Hospitality…
How To Write A Winning Marketing Plan: 8 Questions Every Marketer Should Be Prepared...
How hard is it to write a marketing plan? After all, every marketer writes one every year, so how difficult can it be, right? Well, writing a marketing plan isn’t hard at all, but writing a winning plan is very difficult. And time consuming. And getting it…
Even the Police Can Get it Right! Adopting a Customer First Strategy
In most countries, the Police have a love / hate relationship with their population. You can imagine my surprise, therefore, to find myself writing about how they appear to be adopting a customer first strategy in Switzerland! Let me explain. They have recently introduced many…
AI and ML are Taking Digital Marketing to the Next Level
I presented last week at an exciting, forward-looking conference in Fort Lauderdale, USA. It was ITEXPO, a successful conference celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year! The huge turnout of thousands clearly shows the value that both attendees and exhibitors get from it. This year the…