People commonly agree that Joseph Pine and James Gilmore's 1999 book, The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press), foreshadowed today's customer environment. Yankelovich's J. Walker Smith, in a speech at the 13th Annual CRMC conference in June 2007, called today's consumers the "choice generation," with the customer in control and value (to the customer) existing in the experience.

This new Web 2.0, choice-generation world creates a number of difficult issues for traditional companies (and for those of us who were not early adopters of the ideas in The Experience Economy), including:

• Desires: what the customer wants
• Power issues: who decides what we do and offer
• Budget constraints: who decides priorities (for most, funds are not limitless)

This means, as a business leader, I need to clearly understand the wants, needs and desires of my current (and future) customers and, at a minimum, accommodate their input into the products and services I do, or will, provide and the order in which I work to provide them.

Actually, talking and listening to customers is a critical step in this process. Implicit is that, by doing so, we correctly interpret and understand their desires.

David's Bridal is the nation's leading bridal retailer. From 2006 to 2007, two-thirds of all brides shopped at a David's Bridal store for their weddings.

When I came to David's Bridal as director of strategic planning in 1999, I found a business that had been driven by operational excellence and supply-chain efficiency: low cost to operate, low cost to customer, high volume, focused on delivering practical, tangible value to the customer. While all of that was commendable, I questioned whether it was a sufficient roadmap for future success in this highly emotional business.

The original David's Bridal, a typical bridal shop, opened in 1950 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. An entrepreneur from Philadelphia purchased it in 1990, and, with a high school friend, he came up with the concept of mass merchandising bridal apparel. He opened a second store in 1991. Today, there are 277 David's Bridal stores in 46 states and Puerto Rico.