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Examines the reasons for the rapid success of Saturn cars. The president of the Corporation, Richard Le Fauve, gave some answers in an interview with Richard Whiteley. Success is based on customer enthusiasm – involving customers in designing cars, changing retailing methods, actually listening to customers, etc. Other factors are making suppliers responsible and effective teamwork. Concludes with brief comment on the desired future of the company.

The author details nine pitfalls that sabotage efforts to execute a quality improvement strategy and insists that management must take a more active role in promoting the importance of customer‐focused quality.

Argues the case for lightening up in business, claiming that people who are internally focused and tense have little chance of turning their care and attention to customers. Provides many examples of how companies have used humour within their organizations, and turned it to their competitive value. Humour can make things more memorable, and puts things ‐ even problems and errors ‐ into a perspective where customers, and clients, will forgive. The payoff? If staff are excited about coming to work, it will show. “And people like to do business with people who like to do business.”

Suggests that companies can become customer centred by adopting five strategies: shift to a laser‐beam focus; hardwire the voice of the customer; universal collaboration; lasting customer enthusiasm rather than customer satisfaction, and a move to contact leadership.

Struggling to keep plant managers and plant personnel motivated about customers, manufacturers have spent a lot of money and tried various methods to make plant personnel sensitive to the needs of customers. The methods to do this, development of internal customers, continuous improvement circles, visits to customer sites and others, are expensive and have not been very effective. For small firms it is especially difficult. However, retaining customers is considered critically important by academics and management consultants. This article offers a method to directly link customer satisfaction with targeted manufacturing processes and management decisions that occur within the plant. By identifying the component attributes of a major plant process that can have an affect on customers, firms can find out more specifically how a specific plant process is helping or hurting the manufacturer’s ability to retain important customers. This knowledge can ultimately affect make/buy decisions, investment in new equipment, strategic plans, managerial decisions, and operational procedures.

Purchasing effectiveness is one of the most critical factors in determining the profitability of business, and yet it is typically one of the least well understood and managed. In a recent study with 50 leading European businesses we have established that an effective purchasing strategy can improve profitability by up to 30 per cent. Few businesses seriously assess their purchasing activity or invest in its development, so that usually this source of value remains untapped.

The paper seeks to conduct a qualitative analysis to determine if organizational attempts to communicate positive images affect consumer perceptions of organizational effectiveness.

Through a rhetorical analysis, the authors categorized responses into four basic types of issues: issues of fact, issues of definition or category, issues of value, and issues of policy. The authors then employed qualitative analysis, using a rhetorical approach to categorize respondents' opinions related to their shopping experiences.

Data results support the notion that consumers' buying habits are forged or altered based on stimuli outside the quality of goods or services. Some of the factors that most influence a consumer's decision to continue to patronize a retail outlet include courtesy of sales associates, responsiveness of management in dealing with complaints and concerns, and added values such as knowledgeable staff.

The authors acknowledge that further research could be employed, using a larger sample size. Their nonrandom, convenience sample provided the data.

The overall effectiveness of an organization in developing brand‐loyal consumers seems to hinge on a combination of factors. These include developing awareness through structured and poignant commercial messages, delivering products and services with an eye toward customer satisfaction, and hiring and training qualified and courteous sales associates.

The authors' methodology looked at the issue from a rhetorical analysis perspective, not a quantitative analysis. The study should prove to be of value to retailers and organizations interested in a marketing communications approach.

Since the early 1990s, the so-called government-to-government relationship between the United States and tribal nations has increasingly been executed pursuant to laws and executive orders requiring “meaningful dialogue between Federal officials and tribal officials” before taking actions that impact tribal matters. Thus, the legal claim at the bottom of the political action taken by Standing Rock Sioux and their allies against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline is that the Army Corp of Engineers failed to engage them in “meaningful tribal consultation” prior to fast-tracking their approval of the required permits. But what should “meaningful” mean in this context, particularly when it is learned that while agencies are required to conduct such dialogues, they are not required to heed them in making their final decisions? This chapter explores this question through an ethnography of legal language in one tribal consultation between the Hopi Tribe and the US Forest Service, arguing that the humanistic empiricism of such an approach affords an evidence-based, context-sensitive rule for how the meaningfulness of a federally mandated “tribal consultation” should be evaluated and enforced.