Sneak Preview of the Personal Economy (speech)

What’s happening to our economy? It’s not just that the banks erred.

The view from the audience of Kasanoff's keynote at the 2009 World Conference on Mass Customization and Personalization. Credit: Kate Herd

We are going through a major transition from the old mass production, mass marketing way of doing business to one in which most customers – both businesses and individuals – expect a customized service.

Bruce Kasanoff calls this the Personal Economy. Signs of it are emerging in every industry, from healthcare and education to energy, retailing, financial services, and hospitality.

Competing successfully in the Personal Economy requires more flexible capabilities, better databases, and an entirely different mindset than most organizations possess.

Kasanoff has been studying personalization since 1996 when he was one of the original partners of Peppers and Rogers Group. Today, as founder and editor of NowPossible.com, he shows organizations how to compete successfully in the Personal Economy.

He is the author of “Making It Personal,” which Publishing News called “the new bible of personalization” and Publishers Weekly praised for its “cutting edge advice.”

Kasanoff has briefed executives from hundreds of leading firms including IBM, Microsoft, Unilever, Cisco, ACNielsen, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley and HP. He has spoken at dozens of conferences and at schools including Babson, Wharton, NYU and Yale.

Kasanoff was one of the original partners of Peppers and Rogers Group, which he built with bestselling authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers into a leading customer-based strategy firm.

He has long been at the forefront of customer-driven initiatives. Kasanoff helped build a global following around Peppers and Rogers’ highly successful One to One marketing books. He created a wide assortment of speeches, workshops, training and consulting programs that helped the firm grow in three years from eight to over 150 employees. In each case, he debuted new programs himself, advising executives from hundreds of firms.

For five years, he was the “marketing guru” at the Birthing of Giants program at MIT, presented by the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO.) He also was a visiting lecturer at Babson College, teaching the capstone course on entrepreneurship in the graduate division.

Publishers Weekly wrote of Making It Personal that “Businesses looking for slicker approaches in today’s iffy economy will appreciate this cutting-edge advice.” Paul Pedley, Head of Research at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said, ““I found this book absolutely fascinating, and didn’t want to put it down.”

Kasanoff earned an MBA at The Wharton School, with a dual major in Entrepreneurial Management and Strategic Planning.