Thriving in the era of the “connected customer”

Purpose How can strategists and their companies learn to survive and thrive in this new “connected customer” competitive environment? This is the question that Nicholaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch set out to address in their latest book, Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage. Design/methodology/approach A guide to building better business models in a new “connected customer” competitive environment. Findings The key promise is that a connected strategy can allow a firm to increase the customer’s happiness – or ‘willingness to pay’ – while at the same time reducing the cost of creating this better experience. The efficiency frontier is the graphical representation of the trade-off between ‘willingness to pay’ and fulfillment cost. Practical implications Instead of selling a product, firms can sell an outcome by creating a pay-for-performance network. Originality/value The biggest potential of connected strategies is to be able to move up the hierarchy of needs of a customer. By learning more about a particular customer a firm is able to personalize the offering and create a better fit between the needs of a customer and the available product/service.