Loyalty Myths: Hyped Strategies That Will Put You Out of Business -- And Proven Tactics That Really Work

by Lerzan Aksoy, Henri Wallard, Timothy L. Keiningham, et al.

Book Overview

In Loyalty Myths , the authors have assembled 53 of the most common beliefs about customer loyalty - all of them wrong or misconceived Each of the beliefs in this book is debunked with real-world examples. While other books speak in platitudes; this book is the only one to validate each proposition with real data. Granted unprecedented access to customer records from a variety of multi-national corporations. Through these records, Ipsos Loyalty was...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471743151
• ISBN13: 9780471743156
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

What you think you know about customer loyalty is wrong...

For millennia, people believed that the earth was at the center of the universe - that was until astronomer Copernicus provided contradictory observations and data that debunked the former myth in favor of the heliocentric truth. A similar paradigm shift (albeit not in the same scope or scale) is captured in the pages of a business book titled - Loyalty Myths - by contrarian writer Timothy Keiningham. The author uses his years of experience at one of the world's preeminent business research firms, coupled with hard-hitting data and hard science, to posit that the pursuit of customer loyalty may not be the center of the business universe that conventional wisdom supposes. Keiningham forces readers to face the provocative prospect that virtually everything you've been taught about customer loyalty was either wrong, won't work or no longer applies. Soundview likes this book because it looks at more than 50 of the most commonly-held beliefs regarding customer loyalty and convincingly refutes the fundamental tenets of each. While some may disagree with the findings, it proves to be a worthwhile exercise that should drive all conscientious businesses to reevaluate how they view and serve the customers. Rest assured that Keiningham still supports the general idea that businesses should revolve around the customer, but on a different axis, orbit and trajectory than previously thought.

Welcome Addition

This book is a welcome addition to an area of business where there are many misconceptions, highly touted anecdotal evidence tends to swamp more grounded empirical findings, and writing tends to be somewhat evangelical, if not apocryphal. Loyalty Myths is a very accessible book written in plain language that should be useful to anyone involved in loyalty initiatives, but especially those charged with leading such activities. The authors are loyalty consultants with strong connections to academe, making them well-positioned observers of the state-of-the-art in both theory and practice in this important area. The book identifies the most widely held beliefs about loyalty and outs them to the test using what they know from their own practice, as well as what they have garnered from their own research and that of other experts in the area. It also does a very nice job of laying out what the authors have learned about what really does work. I recommend it very highly.

Dispelling Loyalty Myths

Loyalty Myths does an outstanding job of dispelling commonly held beliefs - some almost sacrosanct - about customer loyalty through an effective mixture of anecdotes, research, and theory. It reads much more easily than most business books while not being completely quantitative. The authors, customer loyalty consultants themselves, disprove some of the most fervently held beliefs about loyalty such as an increase in customer retention of 5% leading to an increase in profits of up to 100%, how it costs 5x as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain one, long-term customers being more valuable than short-term ones, etc. The authors show how and where these beliefs go wrong and how to correct where possible. At the end of the book, they present 7 loyalty truths that organizations can use to implement better loyalty initiatives. This is a highly valuable book both for those looking to implement loyalty efforts as well as those evaluating existing efforts. I highly recommend it.

Fun and insightful book

I should preface this by saying that I have no experience in customer loyalty and read the book on the recommendation of a friend as a "fun read". It is indeed that, and provides many interesting anecdotes from the industry. The book is well written and is primarily an enumeration of errors in statistical inference common to the industry. The author cogently discusses these, elucidating his points with historical cases and numerical examples. The book has a light-hearted style, but maintains focus on the underlying thesis. The author supplements the cautionary aspect of the work with positive suggestions to guide his reader in future analyses.

Loyalty Myths in Review

This book delivers breakthrough thinking with an incredible amount of new understanding on how to make your customers more satisfied and have it truly pay off in profit growth. I already see three messages in Loyalty Myths that are particularly relevant for my company and that we can act on now. First, we need to spend more time identifying which customers we should focus most of our attention on, instead of throwing resources at the entire customer base. Second, we need to measure not just our customer retention but how much share of wallet our customers spend with us. And third, customers want good service and they also want to feel smart about using us, so we need our service operations and brand management teams to work together instead of independently and possibly at odds with each other. This book delivers a wake up call to any business that still approaches customer satisfaction in conventional ways that don't produce real benefits. Then, it lays out a new approach of smart customer management to grow loyalty and profits. I recommend this to every business person who knows they can get better results.