Monthly Archive for September, 2003

Conference: customer service world

Published
by
Karl
on September 25, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

eCustomer service world is having a conference in November that includes a customer experience management track.

Some companies like T-mobile and Harley Davidson will be highlighting how managing the customer experience has contributed to their bottom-line.

blogs as marketing tools

Published
by
Karl
on September 25, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

what have mouthguards (gumshields(UK)) got to do with blogging or customer experience or design? Not a lot…

Except one mouthguard company, XLR8, is now hosting blogs. I don’t have any figures but I would imagine that they are experiencing increased traffic to there heavily branded web site. In addition to extra traffic and “impressions”, they could also gain a feedback channel about their product. One loyal blogger claims “I’ve added 5mph to my shot when I bite down hard and rip it.”

Apart from the blogs, this is a clearly a visionary marketing company, anyone with the audacity to make claims like

“Research studies have demonstrated that XLR8 can increase an athlete’s isometric force as much as 50% by aligning the upper and lower jaw’s position to maximize muscle output.”

is way ahead of there game.

experience branding and business strategy

Published
by
Karl
on September 16, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

Experience Branding was one of four trends that are changing the face of branding as proposed in a Prophet press release.

“Experience branding - Strategists are increasingly thinking beyond product to the full extent of the brand experience, which is consistently reinforced organization-wide in all customer interactions”
(quoted from the press release)

Now, most people who have been exposed to business strategy have heard of Michael Porter, but I donít think many would think of him as a pioneer of brand strategy. When it comes to experience branding though the Porter provides a framework that could help guide many brand analysis and strategy tasks.

There is a fascinating parallel between this concept of brand experience, and the concept of the “activity based view” of the organization as proposed by Michael Porter in his paper “What is Strategy”.

Southwest Airlines is given as an example of an organization with a network of interconnected activities that would be difficult for a competitor to duplicate. The essence of Southwestís (brand) strategy is to serve cost conscious travelers who value convenience, and their activities support that strategy.

click for larger version


Source: “What is Strategy” (Porter, 1996), Harvard Business Review

A key source of competitive advantage that Porter describes is “strategic fit”, or the level of reinforcment between the activities. The strategic fit for SouthWest airlines is quite evident in this figure.

When a full service airline, Continental, introduced Continental Lite to compete with southwest they were unable to compete, because they still had the infrastructure of a full service airline, charging the price of a discount airline, and slower turn arounds due to full service ground crew. The brand promise that Continental Lite communicated was not supported by the network of activities, therefore the brand experience failed.

If you conceptualize an organization as a network of reinforcing activities, and the brand as a network of reinforcing experiences, you can see that brand strategy and business strategy are two sides of the same coin.

“thinking beyond product to the full extent of the brand experience”
(quoted from the press release)

Related Links:
http://prophet.com
What is Strategy by Michael Porter

customer respect index

Published
by
Karl
on September 5, 2003
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

How can Siebel Systems end up toward the bottom of a “customer respect” report? The irony, of course, is that Siebel is one of the preeminent names in the CRM business.

Here’s the customer respect press release

The customer respect index claim to be “improving the online customer experience”, the group claims to measure “25 different attributes that combine to create the entire online customer experience.”