Mike Fisher ’90 and Marty Abbott ’90, co-founding managing partners of growth and scalability advisory firm AKF Partners, have co-authored their third book together, The Power of Customer Misbehavior (Palgrave-MacMillan).
The Power of Customer Misbehavior explores the importance of customer driven innovation for top line and bottom line growth. It shows how companies should not only learn to identify how their products are being misused, but also how to use this knowledge to innovate new products and services that better meet customer needs and promote viral growth. These techniques also promote long-term customer loyalty and growth even in hypercompetitive environments.
This unique new book is the first to explore the idea of 'customer misuse': when customers modify features or expand the usage of products and services in ways that were never intended. Reacting appropriately to customer misuse will allow companies to enter new markets, create more loyal customers, and encourage customers to tell others about the company's products, all of which foster faster growth. These compelling concepts are presented in the form of simple actionable principles and illustrated with rich case studies from successful companies such as Twitter, Intuit, eBay and Coca-Cola, to offer the first practical guide to harnessing this new source of strategic innovation.
Their first 2 books, The Art of Scalability and Scalability Rules (Addison-Wesley) addressed how to build products to meet the needs of hyper growth, while The Power of Customer Misbehavior is their first in defining how to achieve viral growth.