Modern Challenges to Brand Development

Strategic Brand Development is driven in part by changing customer needs, emerging technologies and competition.  With both the fragmentation of communications channels and the ease of crossing borders and entering markets, it is more difficult than ever to create and maintain a brand that is meaningfully differentiated in the mind of the customer.

Replace people with technology.  Technology is more consistent, less expensive, requires no supervision never refuses an order.  There is the argument that an electronic device will give better customer service than a human.

It's Not Easy Being Cool...

Anyone paying attention to the news this last week may have seen the blurb that some Orbitz users discovered that those among them who were Mac users were being charged higher prices than their PC-using brethren. In what can only be described as a shameless and cynical technique to exploit customers by making assumptions about their sensitivity to pricing, Orbitz has shown a special kind of disdain for its customers in an age where many of us still wrongly assume that the businesses we patronize are constantly looking for ways to keep our loyalty. Oops.

I had the good fortune this week to facilitate a Business Leader Roundtable at the offices of our own local Puget Sound Business Journal here in Seattle (event details here). This is one of my favorite ways to hear about the challenges that businesses have today. This one reinforced a lot of what we already knew about what it takes to be "Customer-First". There are a few "Universal Truths" about this topic that always come up in these discussions:

"Looks like great experience, but can she execute?"

As part of our series on what makes a "Customer-First" company, I recently spoke with Carla Archambault, General Manager for the Seattle Region for Zipcar, a Boston-based company that is shaking up the old rental car model with a new approach defined by it's urban self-service model and it's tagline of "Wheels When You Want Them".

"Be yourself, everyone else is already taken..."

This is a favorite quote (and book title by Mike Robbins) I have heard frequently in 2011 at one of the networking groups I belong to, quoted by our moderator at the start of most of our meetings. While I have always had a personal philosophy loosely organized along those lines, this quote sums it all up very neatly and reflects where I  intend to dedicate more time and effort to in 2012.

How Will Your Business Be Remembered For the Holidays?

You may have provided many things to your clients and customers in 2011, but did you remember to provide "Peace of Mind"?

As promised from Part I last week, this week we are going to be a bit more visual. Last week we quoted a study from Bain & Co (“Closing the Delivery Gap“) that called out just how few customers agree with the CEO’s perception of the customer experience they are providing. We then laid out the four core elements of the “Customer-First” Org as:

Clarity of Purpose

A couple of weeks ago a reader commented on how their team suddenly gelled and had a new-found clarity to their team's mission once they worked through who their real customer was. In their case, it turned out that their customer was an internal group - someone we might normally define as a "colleague". This is sometimes hard to manage, in part because everyone wants to feel like they are close to "the" customer and in part because in some business cultures it is just difficult to treat a "colleague" that way for a number of reasons - you might have been trained to think of them as a competitor, or there just might be a sense of "territory" around your relationship.