Traditional "push/pull" marketing no longer works. Even highly-touted customer relationship initiatives are failing. Smart companies are pioneering an entirely new route to higher margins and sustainable competitive advantage: customer advocacy. This book reveals how it works, why it works, and how to make it work for your company.

In today's environment, you must build unprecedented trust among customers who have more information, options, and sophistication than ever. You must transcend "relationship marketing" to focus on maximizing customer interests and deepening customer partnerships. It's not easy. But if you do it, you gain immense opportunities your competitors simply can't touch.

Glen Urban offers a complete blueprint for getting there. You'll learn how to improve on all eight elements of customer advocacy, from transparency to partnership. Urban answers frequently asked questions about advocacy strategies, helping you identify and overcome your most significant obstacles. Then, drawing on new case studies, he shows how to align culture, metrics, incentives, and organization, driving effective advocacy throughout your entire organization.

• Power shift: Why your customers now drive your relationship ...and why they no longer respond to conventional marketing

• Do your customers trust you now? Assessing your company on eight dimensions of trust

• Your customers are smarter than you think ...and they'll appreciate being treated that way

• Tools and plans for moving to customer advocacy Changing culture, people, metrics, incentives, and organization

• Straight answers on the pitfalls to avoid, and how to get results

In today's environment, you must build unprecedented

Beyond "relationship marketing": The new route to success with today's empowered customer

• Don't fight your customers: earn their trust!

• Craft customer advocacy strategies that work

• Reduce customer acquisition costs, increase margins, accelerate growth

• Deepen customer trust, one step at a time

• Learn from the experiences of today's customer advocacy pioneers

• For every CxO, board member, marketing leader, and strategist

Today, customers call the shots—and they know it. You can fight them, and lose. Or you can become a true customer advocate, and win.

Customer advocacy means faithfully representing your customers' interests. It means giving them open, honest, and complete information (because they'll discover the truth no matter what you do). It means talking with them, not at them. And it requires a massive transformation in both your culture and your processes. Now, one of the world's leading marketing innovators shows why you must make that transformation— and how to make it work.

MIT's Glen Urban covers the entire "pyramid" of customer advocacy: the "base" (starting with TQM and customer satisfaction initiatives); the "middle" (relationship marketing); and the "pinnacle": new advocacy techniques built on trust, not coercion. Drawing on the latest customer advocacy initiatives at firms such GM, Intel, Qwest, and John Deere, he identifies crucial lessons for earning customer trust, keeping it, and profiting from it.