How to Attract and Retain Loyal Customers

Want your business to thrive? Then start thinking about all your pet peeves and how to solve them.

That’s the advice of Dave Peterson, who says that this is exactly the strategy that made Uber so successful.  In 2008, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp had trouble getting a cab on a snowy night, and came up with an app to help them get a ride.

It seems simple enough, and yet the number of established businesses that are in real trouble these days points to the fact that many companies are still missing the point about how to attract and retain loyal customers.

Peterson is one of the founders of Play Bigger Advisors, billed as the world’s first “category design firm.”

He explains that companies like Uber, Salesforce and Netflix are dominating their markets because they create a solution to a problem (not being able to get a cab) and become “category kings.” The companies that beat the competition and survive for the long term are those that focus on creating a category and then dominating it.

In his book, “Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets,” Peterson and co-authors Al Ramadan, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney explain that while being the first to invent something can be important, “it doesn’t mean squat if you don’t define and develop a category.”

“If you are the company that changes the way people think, people will see your company as the category king, and you will win the majority of the customers,” they write.

For example, Apple didn’t invent any products, but it (read more here)