Blinkpoints
Paul Marsden’s piece on “Thinking Fast and Slow” (thanks Hilton Barbour) raised some great marketing implications from Daniel Kahneman’s work that are well worth reading.
All posts tagged: customer experience
Coffee to go
I walked into one of my favourite haunts and they were busy – OK, frantic. Waiting staff were running everywhere trying to get things done, serving people they didn’t know, trying to make a good impression. I got my coffee – and nothing else. No hello, no eye contact, no sign of recognition. Just my usual coffee and cake. Almost dumped at my table. They were too busy dealing with the new people to go through the pleasantries with me. There was no need to smile. I’d become part of the furniture, another regular … This wasn’t the first time this has happened. But it was the last. I finished my drink, quietly settled the bill, closed the door behind me, and said goodbye.
Brands and the power of joy
From a marketer’s point of view, numbers don’t drive recessions. They may start them. They may justify them. But they don’t actually make them happen. What drives recession in a consumer economy is very much the same thing that drives boom: emotion. When enough people believe in it, it will happen – and that’s because there will be enough people acting in a recessive way for the mindset to become embedded, and for the behaviours to seem logical, sensible, responsible, unavoidable.
A simple value equation
Marketers put a price on something and call that its value. They arrive at that amount through a bunch of internal references – cost, margin, goodwill, disbursements … Then they talk about that value as if it is real. It isn’t of course. Value is simply an ongoing judgment call based on this equation:
Learning to think in analogue
Chris Anderson once observed that every abundance creates a new scarcity – and vice versa. So if digital is the abundance, what’s the new scarcity? I think it’s analogue – and by that I mean the things that are hard to reproduce and share quickly.
How do you run a brand story you can’t fully own anymore?
It’s tempting to believe that our brand story is ours. It’s not of course. Today, it’s owned by everyone – in the sense that virtually anyone, anywhere can input. And that means you’re not the only one telling that story anymore. Once customers simply provided validation that your story was true. Now they are part of the narrative, because their experience of your brand can so quickly become everyone else’s opinion of your brand, or at least part of it.
Sometimes, buyers need cake
Everyone loves secrets. The power of secrets is not just in the information. It’s in the fact that often secrets represent shortcuts. And the shorter road is something that fascinates many.
38 ways that brands generate “badwill”
Just been re-reading parts of Matt Haig’s Brand Failures. While the edition I’m looking at is now close to ten years old, its ideas are a timely reminder that though the purpose of brands is to generate goodwill and margin, failure to deliver on expectations and the subsequent “badwill” that engenders is never far away.
Customer retention isn’t just about more selling
It’s occurred to me recently that the interesting changes in customer attitude that accompany brand commitment are not necessarily on the radar of enough companies.
Always be interesting
Some years back, Paul Dunay wrote a post that has always stuck with me. Be what interests people. To me, that is everything a brand strategy should aspire to, captured in four words. And yes, on the one hand, it seems obvious. But don’t let the simplicity of the statement fool you – because whilst “interest” itself is a deeply familiar concept, it is also an elusive one.