On 29th January 2025, FlexMR’s CEO will give a guest lecture at Lancaster University Management School where he will explore the Customer Gap and the need for Customer Salience. FlexMR's Customer Salience Framework is based on the idea that the Customer Gap is more prevalent and damaging than most stakeholders realise, with over half of consumers believing that the way an organisation behaves influences their satisfaction, but only 48% of managers say they use customer data or insight when making decisions.
So Paul Hudson is visiting Lancaster University Management School to try and spread the word about this issue to the generations who will be involved in businesses in a variety of roles very soon, to encourage the use of market research insights at data from the beginning of their careers.
Over the past two decades, there has been significant focus, and investment, in understanding how consumers make decisions. Yet, despite this, UK customer satisfaction scores have been in steady decline. And less than 15% of executives believe their organisations are achieving customer-centric goals.
In this guest lecture, Paul Hudson, CEO of FlexMR, will outline why he believes there is a glaring gap – and problem – in the way businesses focus more on understanding consumers and not enough on the market orientation of their organisation. That requires understanding how teams, managers and leaders make decisions. And how to influence those decision-making practices to align with customer needs.
In short, creating a lasting competitive advantage doesn’t simply rely on a better understanding of customers. It must be complemented by a robust, inward-looking understanding of how businesses make customer-centric decisions. To do that, we must address the value to action gap, and develop new ways for organisations to build high levels of Customer Salience.
Lancaster University Management School is a highly-ranked global business school, a place of cutting-edge learning where internationally leading research is applied in the real world, positively impacting the lives of individuals, businesses and society. It is ranked 5th in the UK for research impact, 13th in the world university rankings for masters in Supply Chain Management, and has 5 stars by QS for Accounting and Finance, Teaching, Employability, Global Engagement, Research, Facilities and Environmental Impact.
FlexMR is the Insights Empowerment Company. The hybrid consumer insights agency and cloud platform provider develops thriving insight communities that streamline online research and enable customer-centric decision making. Since launching the InsightHub platform, FlexMR have connected UK marketing, research and product teams to 300,000+ customers across the globe. Today, the platform supports robust data collection, analysis and activation workflows to empower informed decisions at the speed of business.