Thanks.

“CEOs tend to balance talent, efficiency and innovation as their main strategies to drive growth, but during crises, cost cutting can drown out the other two, said Stanford University professor Robert Sutton, author of “Good Boss, Bad Boss.”

In the same way, today’s urgencies overtake long term strategic thinking.

CEOs at banks see acquisitions of other banks and globalization as the way to grow. They serve shareholders, not customers.

And most of them did not come from marketing but finance. They look at assets in terms of funds that are somehow unrelated to customers.

That’s one reason banks are not generally well liked by customers. Customers know they are just an account number. And if they go somewhere else, they will simply get replaced by another dissatisfied bank customer.

But the day will come when banks will run out of steam and they will either become customer driven or disappear.

Any company’s wealth does not lie in its managers or physical assets. In the final analysis, all of a bank’s assets work only if they have customers with some degree of loyalty. And right now, most banks have earned zero customer loyalty.

So banks have gone the way of steel. They are just a commodity where customers shop for the lowest possible price.

So many companies consider everyone as their customer without segmenting customers from inquirers or simply targeted prospects.

You can always tell the difference in a company’s marketing philosophy when they refer to their customers as consumers instead of customers.

An organization‘s worth lies in the size and loyalty of its buying customers and not the plants, real estate, buildings or other infrastructure.

In my opinion, such companies survive only by virtue of their momentum.