Chapter 5: Customer Discipline

In this chapter we will introduce special elements that constitute a customer discipline. The elements are mapping, idealizing, coexperiencing, synchronizing, customizing, and delighting.

The general OGD discipline should then be applied to the customer disciplines.

A customer may be an individual, a family, a domestic partnership,¹ a for-profit company, a nonprofit organization, a government entity, etc. A customer unit may consist of one or more individuals playing various formal or informal roles of decision initiator, influencer, decision maker, purchaser, conveyor, or user. It is but a truism to say that absent customers, absent profits. In order to grow, customers need to be sold more products and better still more customers must be sold more products. To do so requires knowledge of potential customers, choice of customers to serve, choice of additional customers to serve, being alongside customers as they undertake their consumption journeys, ensuring their satisfaction, and changing as they do and helping them change. In general, understanding why customers need allows a firm to be ready with what customers need, when they need, how they need, and where they need is a customer discipline for growth. Each of the elements of customer discipline is detailed in the rest of this chapter.