Who Stole My Customer??: Winning Strategies for Creating and Sustaining Customer Loyalty, Second Edition

3. When Customers Leave

“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

—Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

As the automotive company we mentioned earlier has learned, today is a new day. What worked in the old environment, such as competing simply based on the attributes of your products, no longer works. Technology has rendered most new products easy to copy and given competitors shorter lead times to ramp up production of their own version. Improvements to differentiate existing products (such as true advancements in a soap product to get clothes “whiter than white” or the addition of slide-out room expanders to make a recreation vehicle a “home away from home”) often give companies little time to enjoy industry leadership ...