Beyond the Familiar: Long-Term Growth through Customer Focus and Innovation

Beyond the Familiar offers a practical framework to help companies achieve long-term organic profit growth. It focuses on actionable customer insights flowing freely through the business and ultimately leading to consistently great customer solutions and experiences and a strong brand. It gives specific advice and examples on how to:

• Offer and communicate a clear, relevant customer promise
• Build customer trust by reliably delivering that promise
• Drive the market by continuously improving the offer, while still reliably delivering it
• Get further ahead by occasionally innovating beyond the familiar
• Support all this with an open organizational culture.

If you're looking for valid, practical guidance on how to achieve long term organic profit growth, it's in your hands.

About the Authors

Patrick Barwise is emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School and chairman of Which?, the UK's leading consumer organization. He joined LBS in 1976 after an early career at IBM and has published widely on management, marketing, media, and research methods. He is an experienced conference speaker and expert witness, having worked on commercial, tax, and competition cases in Brussels, Frankfurt, London, Paris and Washington. He has also has been involved in two successful start-up businesses: the online field research company Research Now (acquired by e-Rewards in 2009) and the online brand community specialist Verve.

Seán Meehan is the Martin Hilti Professor of Marketing and Change Management at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since joining IMD in 1997, he has directed both its MBA program and its Orchestrating Winning Performance open executive program, but his main focus has been on designing and delivering customized offerings for leading global companies such as Air France-KLM, Caterpillar, Hilti, Mastercard, Sandvik, Telefonica, and Toyota. His research, going back to an award-winning PhD thesis proposal, is about understanding and addressing the challenges of becoming customer-focused. His early career was in client service and marketing roles at Arthur Andersen and Deloitte.

The authors' previous book, Simply Better: Winning and Keeping Customers by Delivering What Matters Most, won the American Marketing Association's 2005 Berry-AMA Book Prize and has been translated into seven other languages. Their research has also been published in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and other leading management journals.