Mary Ann O'Brien

Mary Ann O’Brien, Founder and CEO of award-winning marketing firm OBI, and the brains behind the revolutionary O’Brien Voice of Customer (O.VoC) survey, has been called “The Mother of Modern Marketing.” Now she’s sharing her unique, highly-successful approach to helping clients attract and retain customers in Ask and Deliver: Discover the Heart of Your Business by Listening to the Voice of Your Customers. In the book, O’Brien demonstrates how directly asking the people who buy from you what they want from your business, listening to what they say, and then designing your customer experience accordingly has the power to transform your brand and spark exponential growth.

The book follows the evolution of both OBI and the O.VoC through several iterations, beginning when O’Brien first developed the survey for Gateway Computers, in hopes of pinpointing where the once-beloved company had gone wrong with its customers. O’Brien quickly learned that the insights gleaned from the survey data—customer data—were like gold, providing a roadmap to bring Gateway back from the brink by putting the customer at the center of everything they did. It explains how O’Brien refined and added to the survey as she worked with clients across different sectors, growing her business while helping them achieve their dreams. And finally, it explores what happened when O’Brien subjected her own company to her methodology, and the unexpected changes that followed. It’s a fascinating education in a new and exciting marketing methodology, as well as an exploration of how one woman guided her business through the Great Recession and the Covid crisis in order to change the way marketing is done.