How crucial is customer-focused leadership in engendering brand loyalty in a slow economy?
I think it’s very important and it’s not something that we generally think about because we think that people are still going to spend money in a slow economy. But the fact is that consumers will still buy because they need to buy; however they will be much more deliberate about their purchases. From a customer perspective, our customers are so different in as far as what they expect, what they value and what they’re willing to pay for. In a slow economy we have to remember that we still have all of these different customers out there. And yes there will be customers who want to pay the least amount of money possible to get what they need. But there are also customers who will spend anything to get exactly what they need or want. We can’t lose sight of that. So internally you need to keep your group focused on the fact that there are multiple customers, they have different kinds of needs and even in a slow economy you have to continue to meet their needs. What is the significance of su
