I was reading the manuscript for a new upcoming book by Roger Martin and was happy to find a reference to this 2003 post, “The One Number You Need To Grow” by Frederick H. Reichheld on HBR (cached). Qualifying customer loyalty has coming in different flavors made sense at the time. Life Time Value (LTV) has to be proportional to it — but the difference today is that we can micro-slice customers into so many kinds of segments.
But Martin points it out as an example of a generally accepted model for how we get convinced by one:
- a desired outcome is described of efficiency or growth
- a metaphor grounds it to assign a narrative for quick understanding
- we draw a cause-and-effect relationship to enacting it
- an imperfect KPI is chosen as a proxy for measuring its progress
Hmmmm. Deep. —JM
