Customer Capitalism

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.