<b>Q: How does transparency affect customers’ attitudes?</b> <p> <b>A:</b> The corporation has become society’s dominant institution, and most people are conflicted about companies. We love brands, but we’re uneasy about the corporations that make them. We really care about the environment, but we buy SUVs. We love Main Street, but we shop at Wal-Mart. We really love it when companies give us one-to-one attention, but we’re concerned about our privacy.

Technical barriers to an internationalized Web experience are few, but strategy should drive translation.

It’s often said that organizations that neglect to update their processes and adapt to evolving business environments will cease to exist.

In emerging marketing strategy is making some brands come to life. It’s no slight of hand or magician’s secret. It’s called experiential marketing, and as the newest iteration of event marketing blended with product sampling it melds the art of customer reaction with the science of fact-based management. Experiential marketing manages sophisticated customer interaction by integrating data into event planning and execution. It delivers on the brand promise in more meaningful and relevant ways.

The right business processes are integral to building customer relationships, especially if you’re a retailer adding more than 900 storefronts in the space of a year. This was the case at FedEx Kinko’s Office and Print Services.

in the automotive business they call it a “Ride and Drive.” It’s the term used for introducing a new car to dealers. Typically, a car company takes its new models to as many different markets as it can for a weekend of letting car dealers and sales reps drive new models and get trained on new technical enhancements.

Successful marketing is determined by how well companies know their customers across the enterprise, but long-term success of a holistic marketing program is determined by how well companies first train their employees to understand and accept the new data processes.

Over the past several months we’ve had the great experience of sharing our thinking on Return on Customer^sm (ROC) through speeches and meetings from New York to New Delhi, and we’re pleased that everyone seems to embrace two of ROC’s central ideas: that companies should strike a healthier balance between short-term earnings and long-term value creation, and that customer trust is an essential tool for creating genuine value.

The Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) was created in 1949 with one goal: to serve the students, teachers, and administrators of Texas’ school districts. The association has an impressive 100 percent membership rate from each of Texas’ 1,042 school districts. These school boards represent more than 4 million students and 560,000 school system employees, as well as $28 billion in annual expenditures.

Some companies today are providing access to unprecedented levels of customer data—and in the process are building trust. In his book <i>The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business</i>, Don Tapscott introduces a quietly growing strategy: transparency. Businesses for the first time must make themselves visible to shareholders, customers, employees, partners, and society. This level of data transparency, he says, will revolutionize industries.