MIT Sloan Management Review

To become a customer-focused organization requires senior executives to open up communication with people throughout the organization so they can hear what is actually going on — as opposed to a sanitized version. Few companies make this leap, even though not doing it can hurt long-term performance. However, managers can come to terms with their company’s weaknesses in the realm of customer focus by posing a set of five questions specifically designed to uncover their vulnerabilities.

Information-visualization guru and famed PowerPoint debunker Edward Tufte explains how businesses would think better, make better decisions and present themselves more powerfully if only they would learn to talk — both internally and externally — in facts.

Companies now have unprecedented access to data and sophisticated technology that can inform decisions as never before. How successful are they at helping forecast what customers want to watch, listen to and buy?

Assessment tools for better-informing decisions have proliferated. Here’s an insider’s guide to prediction and recommendation techniques and technologies.

Recent research suggests that consumers’ state of mind affects their openness to new products affiliated with existing brands.

Relationships with academic institution scan play an important role in continuing to generate new value for shareholders if you know how to approach those relationships.

Foreign competition has become a fact of life in industrialized countries. But the nature of that competition is changing, as new entrants increasingly arrive from countries with dramatically lower costs.

Conventional wisdom holds that consumers faced with a large product assortment, like PCs with varying processor speeds, would rather choose a product that is middling than one at the extremes.

As people increasingly tune out the most common forms of advertising, savvy marketers are turning to four surprisingly affordable strategies.

Common sense would dictate that a competitor’s breakthrough is bad news for a company. But the company’s investors might think otherwise. Anita M. McGahan, Everett W. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar and professor at Boston University’s School of Management, and Brian S. Silverman, J.R.S.

Last September, executives from Arla Foods amba, the Danish dairy giant, probably paid scant attention to a series of caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten. Six months later, they learned a hard lesson about religion and commerce.

When one company acquires another, executives have 10 distinct options for the corporate rebranding. Selecting the right strategy can set forth a compelling vision for the combined entity and send important signals to employees and the outside world.

Customers frequently play key roles in the delivery of services. But if customers fail in those roles, their experiences may be unsatisfactory for them — and for the companies with which they do business.

Many companies make incremental improvements to their service offerings, but few succeed in creating service innovations that generate new markets or reshape existing ones. To move in that direction, executives must understand the different types of market-creating service innovations as well as the nine factors that enable these innovations.

The textbook approach to satisfying customers is simply to give the people what they want — and a little bit more. The trick, then, is to know what it is that customers want.

The growing popularity of cell phones and other hand-held mobile devices has opened up new marketing possibilities.

Vanishing mass markets, the proliferation of products and services and new technologies are requiring many companies to redefine their beloved core business doctrine: “Give customers what they want.â

The information revolution is making consumer disaggregation vastly more efficient and profitable than aggregation, the traditional source of brand power. This raises a fundamental question:

As customer power grows, innovative companies are moving beyond traditional push marketing and customer relationship management to become full proponents of the customer agenda.

The past decade has seen a virtual explosion of information about customers and their preferences. Many companies have the ability to gauge customers’ willingness to pay for their products and can determine with some accuracy the effect of price changes on sales volumes.