Blending the hot topics of new technology, market spaces, competitive strategy and customer behaviour, Customer Capitalism stands conventional wisdom on its head by introducing a new business model which shows how any business can generate increasing returns and gain a massive competitive advantage. Taking examples from companies as diverse as Amazon.com and Mondex, Microsoft and Monsanto, the author explains how businesses can escape the traps of a traditional mindset and originate for the customer rather than the product. These entreprises transform classic product/service categories, moving them away from market share into new "market spaces" where they find new ways of doing for customers. Customer Capitalism does what old capitalism could never do - it gives corporations a sustainable edge. Sandra Vandermerwe shows how to relate the ten principles of customer capitalism to your business and achieve the multiple and exponential rewards of increasing returns. Customer Capitalism generates growing customer value streams from ever-deepening and expanding relationships with individuals who lock-on to an organisation. These customers become an "installed customer base" who want the organisation as their dominant or sole choice on an ongoing basis. The new enterprise becomes the standard for these new ways of doing things by gathering market momentum. A growing number of individuals see and use the new way of doing things, making the enterprise ever more prevalent, and its brand increasingly infectious to others. Central to the concept of customer capitalism are six positive feedback loops which ensure customer lock-on and accelerating growth. Once the loops go into motion as one interlinking, reiterative system then the real forces of the new market and economic dynamics of customer capitalism come into play. Customers become the competitive barrier. Advantage leads to more advantage, success to more success, accumulating increasing returns in new market spaces.
Professor Sandra Vandermerwe moved to London in 1995 to accept the post of Professor of Management at The Management School, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London. This continues her interest in customers and companies which she began in the early 1970s writing her doctorate on "The Influence of the Marketing Concept on Company Performance". She is a scholar and speaker of international repute. Apart from her teaching and research activities she works with practitioners, consulting and researching with them to help transform their organizations. After a sociology degree she worked in business. An MBA and doctorate in marketing was followed by a career as Professor of Marketing at The University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. She moved to Switzerland where she spent a decade teaching and consulting globally on the subject as Professor of International Marketing and Services at IMI and then at the newly formed IMD. She has written several books, articles and award-winning cases. Her most recent books are: From Tin Soldiers to Russian Dolls: Creating Added Value through Services, a co-authored publication with Christopher Lovelock, Competing through Services, Strategy and Implementation: Cases and Text: and Cases in European Marketing Management with John A. Quelch and Kamran Kashani.
