Why we are different

We wanted to provide market intelligence that helped organisations see the world through the eyes of the customer - cutting across all the departments (marketing, sales, technology services etc). We wanted people to be able to learn from what was happening across different vertical markets. We also aim to forecast the impact - and opportunities - that the way customers behaved created. As a result, you can look at our intelligence through “your interests” and “our themes”.

So what do we do? We spend most of our time listening to organisation who have changed those who want to change and those that want to know why they should change. In practice this means we do research, we publish our information and we run events. We’re a typical analyst business - we’re independent both financially and intellectually (though we should declare that two of our founders are also shareholders in a solution business). We get our money from subscriptions, research report sales and consulting assignments.

By running a continuous service, we hope that we’ll help businesses adapt to the new world - and by adopting a truly customer perspective that everyone will benefit. Not just buyers and sellers but the economy as a whole - because the shift in control is already opening up new business opportunities.

Today's control shift means the best way for organisations to flourish is to start with the question "what do individuals want to acheve?" and to work back from there: "how can we flourish by helping individuals achieve what they want to achieve?"

There are countless opportunities for both sides to benefit from organisations taking this approach. But often 'push' interepretations of customer centricity sweep these opportunities aside. Consumer power is on the rise. Empowering consumers is actually a fast-growing business opportunity. We want to help businesses get ahead of the trend and create new value, not be blindsided.

To achieve this we do two things. First, we help organisations understand and track the many different manifestations of the control shift (definitions of value, uses of information, how relationships are managed, etc). Second, we help organisations find new win-win opportunities within these shifts.