HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing (with featured article “Marketing Myopia,” by Theodore Levitt)

structure across the organization

companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value

an era of mass markets, mass media, and impersonal transactions.

The problem is, few managers are able to step back and assess their brand’s particular strengths and weaknesses objectively

Why do customers really buy a product? Not because the product is a collection of attributes but because those attributes, together with the brand’s image, the service, and many other tangible and intangible factors, create an attractive whole

Consumers still want a clear brand promise and offerings they value. What has changed is when—at what touch points—they are most open to influence, and how you can interact with them at those points.

These managers must also be sophisticated data interpreters, able to extract insights from the increasing amount of information about customers’ attitudes and activities acquired by mining blogs and other customer forums, monitoring online purchasing behavior, tracking retail sales, and using other types of analytics.

“T-shaped” people, who have broad expertise with depth in some areas.

THE ROLE of customer manager is the ultimate expression of marketing (find out what the customer wants and fulfill the need) while the product manager is more aligned with the traditional selling mind-set (have product, find customer).

We’d expect the most effective customer managers to have broad training in the social sciences—psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics—in addition to an understanding of marketing. They’d approach the customer as behavioral scientists rather than as marketing specialists, observing and collecting information about them, interacting with and learning from them, and synthesizing and disseminating what they learned.