Greg Kihlstrom

In today's dynamic marketing landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of innovation, offering unprecedented opportunities for marketers. This book enables marketing professionals to harness the power of AI, featuring in-depth discussions on key topics such as generative AI, personalized customer experiences, team and workflow augmentation, and data analysis optimization. It is divided into four parts, each addressing a different aspect of AI and marketing. Part I covers… Show more

In today's dynamic marketing landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of innovation, offering unprecedented opportunities for marketers. This book enables marketing professionals to harness the power of AI, featuring in-depth discussions on key topics such as generative AI, personalized customer experiences, team and workflow augmentation, and data analysis optimization. It is divided into four parts, each addressing a different aspect of AI and marketing. Part I covers the fundamentals of AI in marketing, including machine learning and generative AI. Part II explores growth areas for marketing and AI, using generative AI and customer journey personalization. Part III goes into detail about how to use AI, particularly generative AI tools, to enhance the marketing function. Part IV is about integration and optimization, providing insights on when and where to invest in AI and how to prepare your team for an AI-driven marketing future. Show less

What do our words truly mean, whether they are posted on a website, spoken on a shareholder call, projected on a wall in an internal meeting, or shared with a customer? While eloquently written prose may inspire and engage any audience for a short time, it is our actions that define both our priorities as well as our future success.

Our priorities are what we do not what we say we’d like to do. This premise forms the foundation of Priority is Action: 7 Principles for Better Strategies… Show more

What do our words truly mean, whether they are posted on a website, spoken on a shareholder call, projected on a wall in an internal meeting, or shared with a customer? While eloquently written prose may inspire and engage any audience for a short time, it is our actions that define both our priorities as well as our future success.

Our priorities are what we do not what we say we’d like to do. This premise forms the foundation of Priority is Action: 7 Principles for Better Strategies, Decisions, and Outcomes. In this twentieth book from best-selling author Greg Kihlström, readers are given a reality check on the difference between a strategic priority and business realities. The book is centered around seven principles that separate leading organizations from laggards, and the mindsets and ideals that make the difference between achieving important goals and getting mired in bureaucracy, groupthink, and a focus on the wrong things at the wrong times.

These seven principles are explained in terms of what we should be striving for as well as some of the myths that often plague otherwise high-functioning teams. Mixing real-world examples and stories with some hypotheticals, Kihlström has created a business book that offers practical advice and actions that readers can take immediately.

Drawing on Kihlström’s experience working with some of the world’s top brands, as well as hundreds of interviews with Fortune 500 customer experience leaders and industry-leading platform marketing technology executives and thought leaders for this book and his podcast, The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström, the blueprint to achieve a customer-centric, sustainable platform for growth is made tangible. Show less

Between consumer demands for more personalized and greater data privacy and competitive pressures to provide better omnichannel customer experiences, brands are faced with a dilemma: build a foundation for the future of customer relationships or lose relevancy in a crowded marketplace.

Doing this, however, is not without its challenges. While many enterprises a engaging in digital transformations in order to modernize and anticipate future changes, these efforts are often fraught with… Show more

Between consumer demands for more personalized and greater data privacy and competitive pressures to provide better omnichannel customer experiences, brands are faced with a dilemma: build a foundation for the future of customer relationships or lose relevancy in a crowded marketplace.

Doing this, however, is not without its challenges. While many enterprises a engaging in digital transformations in order to modernize and anticipate future changes, these efforts are often fraught with challenges, and many fail to deliver the results promised.

The way to do this forms the foundation of House of the Customer. In this best-selling book from author Greg Kihlström, readers are guided through the elements of a 1:1, customer-first, employee-driven enterprise that includes seven key elements, why they are important, and how to implement them. These seven elements are explained in terms of building your brand as a “house” for your customers and aligning, people, processes, and platforms in a customer-centric manner driven by strategic key performance indicators (KPIs) and measured by tangible business outcomes.

Drawing on Kihlström’s experience working with top organizations, as well as dozens of interviews with Fortune 500 customer experience leaders and industry-leading platform marketing technology executives and thought leaders for this book and his podcast, The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström, the blueprint to achieve a customer-centric, sustainable platform for growth is made tangible.

House of the Customer is Kihlström’s eleventh book, following Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience (2022), The Center of Experience (2020), and his Agile series, which includes The Agile Brand (2018), The Agile Consumer (2019), and The Agile Workforce (2021). The House of the Customer will be available in January of 2023 in print and as an ebook from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and as an ebook from Apple Books. Show less

Customer experience has become the primary method of competitive differentiation between most brands today. While most companies claim that customers and their needs drive decisions and priority within their organizations, when it comes time to prioritize customer needs, it can often be more difficult and less clear exactly how and what to do.

There are several reasons for this, and these reasons form the foundation of Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience. The book provides… Show more

Customer experience has become the primary method of competitive differentiation between most brands today. While most companies claim that customers and their needs drive decisions and priority within their organizations, when it comes time to prioritize customer needs, it can often be more difficult and less clear exactly how and what to do.

There are several reasons for this, and these reasons form the foundation of Meaningful Measurement of the Customer Experience. The book provides guidance on how to create a customer-centric culture that prioritizes customer needs while aligning internal teams around a common goal. It also provides a framework to create a system of meaningful measurement that can not only improve the customer experience by holistically looking at the customer journey, but provide a sustainable method for analysis and optimization with a more agile approach to continuous improvement. This provides internal teams with the metrics and justification they need to continue improving the customer experience, creates a collaborative, customer-centric culture aligned around common goals, and ultimately benefits the customers, who buy, buy more, buy more often, and tell others about their experiences.

Drawing on Kihlström’s experience working with top organizations, as well as dozens of interviews with Fortune 1000 customer experience leaders for this book and his podcast, The Agile World with Greg Kihlström, the secrets of planning, implementing, analyzing, and improving great customer experience in a sustainable way are demystified and made practical. The book also features a foreword by Greg Melia, CAE, the CEO of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). Show less

The book discusses the future of work, and how humans and AI-driven machines will work together to create our future. It also describes the rise of the freelance economy, and how remote work, gig workers, and a global mindset will transform the traditional workplace into a hybrid model where the best of all worlds can be combined for the benefit of individuals and companies alike.

The book provides a blueprint for organizations to implement a center of excellence incorporating brand experience, or the combination of customer and employee experience. Each property of experience is articulated and explained in detail, including brand, governance, culture, platform, measurement, and environment. The book also provides recommendations on how an organization can begin to implement a Center of Experience of their own, and how success is measured.

The book gives practical examples of how agile thinking and approaches, as well as a shift in consumer behavior are changing the brand-consumer relationship with the opportunity for better outcomes for both. As brands become more sophisticated and consumers have an increasing amount of choices, the power dynamic in the brand-consumer relationship has shifted to giving consumers more control than ever before.

Brands have evolved over several centuries from simple tools for recognition to something much more nuanced and sophisticated in the modern age. Being an agile brand means taking part in a relationship with consumers. While this means giving up some control over your brand, it rewards you with loyal long-term customers. The Agile Brand follows the story of branding from its beginnings to the authentic relationship with brands that modern consumers want, and gives practical examples of what you… Show more

Brands have evolved over several centuries from simple tools for recognition to something much more nuanced and sophisticated in the modern age. Being an agile brand means taking part in a relationship with consumers. While this means giving up some control over your brand, it rewards you with loyal long-term customers. The Agile Brand follows the story of branding from its beginnings to the authentic relationship with brands that modern consumers want, and gives practical examples of what you can do to modernize your brand in meaningful ways. Show less

By tracing the history of software development back to its beginning, this book forces a re-examination of the website design, development and optimization approach that many organizations take for granted.

Building upon agile software development and agile marketing practices that are still evolving, author and agency founder Greg Kihlström walks the reader through new ways to look at the way we treat websites, and plan for their redesign and optimization. The life of a website becomes… Show more

By tracing the history of software development back to its beginning, this book forces a re-examination of the website design, development and optimization approach that many organizations take for granted.

Building upon agile software development and agile marketing practices that are still evolving, author and agency founder Greg Kihlström walks the reader through new ways to look at the way we treat websites, and plan for their redesign and optimization. The life of a website becomes a marathon with incremental improvements over time, instead of a sprint that ends when a new website is created to replace the previous one.

Kihlström builds on his experience designing and marketing interactive experiences for top brands, and running an agency since the early 2000s and provides a unique vision for how marketers can create websites that continue to grow in sophistication and effectiveness over time without the need for a continual process of redesigns.

This book is aimed at the marketer who wants to create the most effective website possible, and is willing to take a fresh look at how they approach their organization’s online presence. Show less