Customers not CEOs determine a company’s success. Yet being customer-led remains elusive for many.
It’s why Tesco went from market trader to the third largest retailer in the world then had by a very public collapse, AO went from nothing to leadership of a hugely competitive sector and a £1 billion valuation in 15 years, and Sky made and won a series of make-or-break bets based on a belief that customers would pay for better TV.
Packed with compelling case studies and based on decades of research and practice, The Customer Copernicus by Charlie Dawson and Seán Meehan reveals how to transform an ordinary business into a customer-led success.
It explores how some companies are great for customers – like Amazon, EasyJet and Sky. They make things easier and improve what really matters – obvious, surely? They have also enjoyed huge business success.
But, if it’s obvious and attractive, why is it so rare? And why, having mastered it, would you ever stop? Tesco, O2 and Wells Fargo were like this once. Because all three stopped, and two ended up in court.
For more customer-led successful stories, read here
The tough but worthwhile journey from an ‘inside-out’ to an ‘outside-in’ belief system
The book explores why the shared beliefs of people in an organisation are central to this conundrum and how changing from an ‘inside-out’ to ‘outside-in’ belief system is crucial but also extremely hard. Most companies are self-interested. They start with what matters to their business and push it out into the world. An ‘outside-in’ mentality is unnatural – starting with the customer, understanding what they value, the problems they’re really trying to solve, and finding new and better ways of solving them, not just selling more. The book shows how to navigate this journey, escaping the dominant shareholder-first principle and growing belief in a customer-first approach. It shows why ultimately this is also better for business including shareholders, not just for customers.
‘Burningness’ then creating ‘Moments of Belief’
Dawson and Meehan argue the only way to create an ‘outside-in’ mentality is through bold, risky, costly, customer-led initiatives, hard to justify because they all look the same – the benefit to the customer is clear but in advance, the benefit to the business isn’t. The book reveals what conditions are needed to start taking these kinds of steps – a sense of being on fire – and then how beliefs in the business change when people see customer-led initiatives benefitting the business. These are called Moments of Belief and one leads to more, belief growing across the company that every time the business does something good for customers, it works for the business too. Eventually being customer-led becomes ‘the way we do things around here’.
How to become a pioneering customer-led business
Using real-world examples, the book guides readers though what it takes to become, AND to remain, a customer-led organisation, revealing:
- How being customer-led leads to market leadership and growth well beyond a sector
- Why establishing customer-led shared beliefs about what success is and how it’s achieved is critical, and how to go about it
- What the journey from conventional self-interest to extraordinary customer-led success looks like, stage by stage, with multiple examples
- The inevitability of, eventually, losing customer-led beliefs and how to protect them so they last for as long as possible
