The Network Is Your Customer: Five Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age

With clear analysis and practical frameworks, this book provides step-by-step guidance businesses can use to prosper in the new era of digital media

"An incredibly useful and valuable guidebook to the new consumer economy. Buy it. Learn from it. Succeed with it."—Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do

"This is the stuff that every business and nonprofit needs to embrace if they're going to succeed in a changing world."—Vivian Schiller, CEO of NPR With clear analysis and practical frameworks, this book provides a strategic guide that any business or nonprofit can use to succeed in the digital age.

Marketing expert David Rogers examines how digital technologies—from smartphones to social networks—connect us in frameworks that transform our relationships to business and each other. To thrive today, organizations need new strategies—strategies designed for customer networks.

Rogers offers five strategies that any business can use to create new value:

• ACCESS—be faster, be easier, be everywhere, be always on
• ENGAGE—become a source of valued content
• CUSTOMIZE—make your offering adaptable to your customer's needs
• CONNECT—become a part of your customers' conversations
• COLLABORATE—involve your customers at every stage of your enterprise

Rogers explains these five strategies with over 100 cases from every type and size of business—from shoes to news, and software to healthcare. In The Network Is Your Customer, he shows:

• How Apple harnessed a host of collaborators to write apps for its iPhone
• How IBM designed a videogame to help sell its enterprise software
• How Ford Motors inspired an online community to build brand awareness for its new Fiesta

...and countless other cases from consumer, b2b, and nonprofit categories. 

The book outlines a process for planning and implementing a customer network strategy to match your customers, your business, and your objectives—whether you need to drive sales, to enhance innovation, to reduce costs, to gain customer insight, or to build breakthrough products and services. Because today, whatever your goals and whatever your business, the network is your customer.

David L. Rogers is executive director of BRITE and faculty director of the Digital Marketing Strategy executive program at Columbia Business School.