'Want Customer Loyalty? Be Relevant; Anticipate Their Needs': Commentary by Ravi Dhar

In a guest post on the Real Business at Xerox blog, Ravi Dhar, the George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing and director of the Center for Customer Insights, outlines how companies can build stronger relationships with their customers by providing them with relevant information and by helping them discover unrealized needs.

"At a time when all of us are bombarded with information, relevance is the key to adding value and thereby building trust," writes Dhar. "Any business that can help make sense of today's overflow of information is going to come out on top. We see this already with brands like Google and Yelp that capitalize on their position as trusted sources of relevant information. But marketers can do even better by appealing to preferences that consumers are unaware of. What if Apple had asked consumers about the next thing they needed in a smartphone? The answer would probably have been improvements on existing dimensions and not touchscreen technology, or any of the other category-creating innovations that have raised them to cult status today." 

Read the blog post.