marketing and sales

The revolutionary approach that Bernd H. Schmitt is advocating here wouldn't sound so radical to anyone who has ever been in therapy: be aware, see things from other people's point of view, address their concerns. If you've been in $150 an hour territory, this isn't radical, but in the suites of marketing, the author contends, it is brand new. The book is an interesting follow up to the author's earlier seminal work on the broader theory of customer experience. Entitled Experiential Marketing, that work made the case for a customer-experience focus. This book is more of a practical how-to, professorially organized into a neat near-outline format. Here, Schmitt makes the case for dissecting, designing and then improving, the customer's experience with your product. We recommend this book of marketing therapy to anyone selling a product or service - and it is lots less expensive than putting your consumers on the couch.

My experience with this book was generally stimulating and inspiring and sparked many insights. Customer Experience Management is so powerful because it is based on a largely intuitive idea.

Since the beginning of commerce, and buyer and seller interactions, there surely has been some element of customer experience management by the seller, and some subconscious understanding by the customer that he/she is not buying a product or service but participating in an experience.

In his previous book, Experiential Marketing, Schmitt demonstrates that firms who have capitalized on this recent movement and expanded and refined their experiential approach have reaped huge benefits and stayed ahead of the pack. Now, in this sequel to that book, Schmitt elaborates on his previous work and provides a framework for how to efficiently and effectively implement the customer experience management approach.

I found this book to be enormously helpful and an important addition to this fascinating and important field.

Customer Experience Management is a must-read for busy marketing executives. Although it was a quick read, it should not be taken lightly. The framework Prof. Schmitt outlines carries on where his eye-opening Experiential Marketing left off. It provided me with a good outline and a valuable set of tools with which to jumpstart my marketing department. The case studies were insightful and helped illustrate his methodology and the success many companies around the world are having by making their customer's needs and lifestyle top of mind.