Here's some interesting Stats I recieved recently via e-mail from Christopher G. Fox of Bain & Company:
Bain & Company asked over 1200 global executives about their attitudes towards top management tools and trends, and much of the data suggest that executives across industries are showing new seriousness about consumer insight:
• Nearly 6 in 10 executives are concerned that their products and services are viewed as commodities, i.e., that their value is easily replaceable by cheaper competitors
• Just over half of executives believe that insufficient consumer insight is hindering their performance
• Customer loyalty is understood to be an issue, but 44% of executives do not believe their company has a clear vision for how to improve it
• So-called "soft" issues matter internally as well. 91% of the respondents felt that culture was as important as strategy for business success
Executive anxieties about losing touch with their customers is driving higher and higher usage of customer tools such as CRM and segmentation. These tools have moved from below average use to second and third place, respectively, in the 10 years since Bain has included them in the survey:
• 84% of executives are now using CRM
• 82% are using segmentation to tailor their marketing programs and offerings to groups of customers who exhibit common patterns of behavior
• New tools are emerging. Use of loyalty management is at 51%, and the use of ethnographic methods to observe customers in the real world is becoming more mainstream, at 35%. But in 2006, each of those tools rank below average in terms of executive satisfaction.
