The Marketing Book Podcast: "The Customer-Base Audit" by Peter Fader

The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity by Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie and Michael Ross

About the Book

As a leader in your organization, you will be very familiar with your organization’s key financial statements and monthly management reports. You may have spent countless hours discussing budgets and expenditures.

But how much time have you spent reflecting on the fact that these revenues are generated by actual customers―the people who pull out their wallets and pay for your products and services?

In The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity, experts Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross start you on the path toward really getting to understand your customers’ buying behavior as well as the health of your overall customer base.

A customer-base audit is a systematic review of the buying behavior of a firm’s customers using data captured by its transaction systems. It will help you answer questions such as:

How healthy is your customer base? How realistic are your growth objectives?
How do your customers differ in terms of their behavior and value?
How has the quality of your customers changed over time?
What changes in customer behavior lie behind period-to-period changes in firm performance?
What is important to your high-value customers? Which products help you acquire and retain your best customers?

Fader, Hardie, and Ross present five “lenses” through which an executive can address questions like those above. The answers are often lurking in various parts of the organization, but it is rare to find all the relevant analyses in one place, let alone performed on a regular basis (as an audit should be).

Yet without such a basic, systematic understanding of the foundations of the firm’s primary source of cash flow, how can executives make informed decisions?

Fader, a Wharton professor, is the author of Customer Centricity and coauthor of The Customer Centricity Playbook, both of which have helped businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers.

In this first step of the journey, Fader, Hardie, and Ross assist leaders in gaining a fundamental understanding of their customers’ buying behavior―and thus their company as a whole.

About the Author

Peter S. Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities.

He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as telecommunications, financial services, gaming/entertainment, retail, and pharmaceuticals.

In addition to his various roles and responsibilities at Wharton, Professor Fader is also co-founder of Zodiac, a predictive analytics firm that was sold to Nike in 2018.

He then co-founded (and continues to run) Theta to commercialize his more recent work on “customer-based corporate valuation.”

Peter is the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage and co-author with Sarah Toms of the book The Customer Centricity Playbook (which was featured on episode 222 of The Marketing Book Podcast in 2019).

He has been quoted or featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Washington Post, and on NPR, among other media.

And, interesting fact – he was a math major at MIT!

Listen to the Interview…

Links…

The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity by Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross (Amazon)
Peter Fader (Wharton)
Peter Fader (LinkedIn)
Peter Fader (Twitter)
Theta
Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers’ Hearts by Neil Hoyne (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How to Succeed by Building Customer and Company Value by Thomas Barta and Patrick Barwise (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Avi Goldfarb, Ajay Agrawal, and Joshua Gans

P.S. – If you have rated and reviewed the podcast on Apple Podcasts, please let me return the favor and mail you some Marketing Book Podcast bookmarks and laptop stickers. Just click here to provide your postal address (I’ll send it anywhere in the world)! ~Douglas Burdett, host of The Marketing Book Podcast.