Marketing-Gimbal

Is The Secret To A Great Customer Experience Less And Not More?

I came across a blog post by Matthew E. May this week that really intrigued me. As a marketer I have a keen sense of understanding in how hard it is, or can be, to make the complex simple, and that in many ways is our primary job.

In this age of challenging business times there is no doubt that we will or have already been pulled into multiple meetings to discuss our customer experience and what we can do to make it better. Usually I find these discussions to gravitate towards what more we can do or how much price can be cut or what products can be packaged together(sorry I work with a lot of sales guys).

In Matthew’s blog post he calls out a strategy utilized by Apple. They have a stragey that they call the “Stop Doing Strategy”. In this strategy instead of asking what more you can add, or bundle you would ask some very different questions:

·         What would our customers love for us to eliminate, reduce, or stop adding and doing in our current business model and engagement?

·         What is it that our competitors would struggle with if we were to stop doing several things?

I found that when thinking about my business and customers and prospects in this context that my eyes opened to a much larger landscape potential of what we could do if we could stop doing things.

So maybe the secret to a great customer experience is less and not more. Nuff Said.

An Automotive Company Gets It Right

Every day we read about how Detroit auto manufacturers are going to the government and asking for a tax payer bailout to support their years of waste, non-innovation, and inefficient manufacturing. Yet Detroit’s competitors for years have innovated, and adapted their manufacturing models for the change in consumer preferences and global economies. Toyota spends over $1M a day on R&D and has only 1500 dealerships in the US compared with 15,000 for GM. It’s no wonder they lead the new hybrid charge with their Prius model, as Detroit is rushing to retool its SUV factories to build hybrids.

In this economic time of challenges I saw another automotive innovation coming from somewhere other than Detroit. It was a marketing innovation, from Hyundai. Hyundai’s offer is simple: “Buy our car and if you lose your income within one year we will take it back from you”. Their tag-“We will see the tough times through together.”

 

What a great way to build brand affinity with your target audience, an audience who is a little bit scared to buy your product right now because jobs are drying up left and right. What a great, yet simple marketing innovation to spur demand, and to communicate to your target market that as a company Hyundai gets it.

This is the type of basic marketing 101 that Detroit has failed at for so long, and why Detroit is now going to the tax payer for a bailout. What scares me more is that Congress may actually mandate what Detroit builds. Talk about the blind leading the blind. Nuff Said.