Creating and using customer insight: 12 Rules of best practice

Abstract

It has become a truism that the ability to learn is an organisation's only sustainable source of competitive advantage. In practice, this means the capability of translating data about customers into customer preference and hence shareholder value. Firms with superior data-to-value capability understand both the stages in this process and the organisational actions that determine their efficacy. Our research-based understanding of how firms achieve such superior capability is extensive and wellfounded, but scattered and fragmented across various academic disciplines. This paper summarises this understanding of the data-to-value process and identifies 12 rules for creating and using customer insight. © 2006, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.