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"The issues facing credit union professionals today surround how different services marketing is from product marketing. The faculty highlights the nuances of how to strategically market financial services in this economy! More importantly, we focus on how to protect the core of the profitable membership and drive better bottom line results while setting the lead generation for next year!" Nicolette Lemmon Founder Credit Union Marketing University |
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Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman Thomas L. Friedman is not so much a futurist, which he is sometimes called, as a presentist. His aim in The World Is Flat, as in his earlier, influential Lexus and the Olive Tree, is not to give you a speculative preview of the wonders that are sure to come in your lifetime, but rather to get you caught up on the wonders that are already here. The world isn't going to be flat, it is flat, which gives Friedman's breathless narrative much of its urgency, and which also saves it from the Epcot-style polyester sheen that futurists--the optimistic ones at least--are inevitably prey to. Return to Top
by Michael J. Silverstein, John Butman From Publishers Weekly In their bestselling Trading Up, Silverstein and Neil Fiske explained why people are willing to spend beyond their means for certain premium goods. But that's only half the story: as middle-class customers splurge on lingerie and appliances, they're bargain-hunting for everything else. Companies will thrive, Silverstein argues, by catering to the penny-pinching impulses of consumers, or by "spanning the poles" and appealing to both the high and low ends while avoiding anything else-there's only "death in the middle." The book's profiles of individuals who splurge-and-scrimp and case studies of companies that have successfully adapted to the polarization of the marketplace show the key to survival is to offer the perception of good value for money and an emotionally satisfying experience. This is where the book becomes a tad creepy: Silverstein analyzes female consumers' relationships with their mothers and attributes an advertising executive's "lack of a father's love, a social-climbing mother and several failed relationships" as causes of her binge-spending and scrimping. Silverstein's guide to cashing in on the top and the bottom is intelligent without becoming mercenary; business owners will take notice. Return to Top
by Jim Collins From Publishers Weekly In what Collins terms a prequel to the bestseller Built to Last he wrote with Jerry Porras, this worthwhile effort explores the way good organizations can be turned into ones that produce great, sustained results. To find the keys to greatness, Collins's 21-person research team (at his management research firm) read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. That Collins is able to distill the findings into a cogent, well-argued and instructive guide is a testament to his writing skills. After establishing a definition of a good-to-great transition that involves a 10-year fallow period followed by 15 years of increased profits, Collins's crew combed through every company that has made the Fortune 500 (approximately 1,400) and found 11 that met their criteria, including Walgreens, Kimberly Clark and Circuit City. At the heart of the findings about these companies' stellar successes is what Collins calls the Hedgehog Concept, a product or service that leads a company to outshineall worldwide competitors, that drives a company's economic engine and that a company is passionate about. While the companies that achieved greatness were all in different industries, each engaged in versions of Collins's strategies. While some of the overall findings are counterintuitive (e.g., the most effective leaders are humble and strong-willed rather than outgoing), many of Collins's perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense. This is not to suggest, however, that executives at all levels wouldn't benefit from reading this book; after all, only 11 companies managed to figure out how to change their B grade to an A on their own. Return to Top
by Larry Selden, Geoffrey Colvin From Publishers Weekly Conventional wisdom holds that the customer is always king, but not all customers are created equal, write authors Selden (a consultant) and Colvin (a Fortune editor-at-large); in fact, some may be hurting your business (e.g., people who phone customer service lines thousands of times in a single year). So, they argue, it's smart strategy to figure out which customers are most valuable to you, and to lavish your attentions on them. The authors point out a number of companies that are reorganizing how they operate, like Best Buy and Toronto-based Royal Bank. The tone is exceedingly businesslike; sans colorful narratives or rhetorical flourishes, the authors march stiffly through the points they want to make. It's unclear sometimes how behavior should be altered by this philosophy: should you, for example, refuse to do business altogether with unprofitable customers? But the book's central thesis manages that rare mix of being both surprising and eminently reasonable. |
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