Brand is dead, long live the Customer

Brand is dead, long live the Customer is an essential guide for organisations who want to understand their customers and take the guesswork out of marketing.

Understanding customer behaviour and responding to it in ways that are truly relevant are the twin keys to survival in an ever-more competitive business arena, argues Humby, an acknowledged world expert in challenging accepted marketing ‘wisdom’.

Humby drives his essential point home with a simple fable for business today. A Tale of Two Kings uses the language and metaphor of a child’s ‘once upon a time’ story to explore what happens when an organisation relies on the wrong measurements to determine brand value and fails to listen to its customers.

Brought to life with a series of original drawings, the entertaining little tale of Kings Talkandtell and Askandhear exposes the fatal flaws in conventional marketing strategies and illustrates why it is time for businesses to tear up the rulebook.

“The message is simple but it’s not getting through,” says Humby, chairman of international marketing consultancy dunnhumby.

“Organisations that continue to put the brand at their epicentre and pay only lip service to the notion that the customer is king, will fail. It’s just a matter of time.”

Humby develops the fable’s theme with a detailed look at where so much marketing activity goes wrong in the real world.

“A whole series of misconceptions about what constitutes brand value and a sustained focus on the non-existent average customer are the biggest obstacles to sustainable business success,” he says.

“Most organisations also fail to understand that marketing can have negative effects as well as positive ones. All these mistakes undermine not just brand but corporate value.”

Brand is dead, long live the Customer details the five fatal fallacies about marketing that will ultimately destroy organisations that fail to recognise them and make changes.

“Successful marketing isn’t an art,” insists Humby. “It’s a science with creative bits around the edges. Businesses fail to understand that at their peril.”

Brand is dead, long live the Customer is the first in a planned series of books from dunnhumby that will use original fables to look at what is wrong with marketing today – and what can be done to fix it.