The holy grail for organisations is customer loyalty. Less talked about but more important to building a brand is employee loyalty. Simply put, you can’t build a great (or even good) brand if you are constantly replacing people. A recent article in Inc. outlines the four things that help earn employee loyalty (and, no,...
A new campaign by BMW is a timely reminder that you can only be great at one thing. Finding that one thing. Focusing who you are and what you do around that one thing. Making decisions big and small to support that one thing. This is fundamental to building your brand. Knowing...
In the absence of expectations being set about what I can or can’t do, it is perfectly reasonable that you as the customer or other stakeholder will apply your own expectations to the situation. But here’s the problem with that. It dooms me to fail. Because there is no way that I can...
This is not the article I was going to write. I had a whole different one started about setting expectations. But then while reading about the recent promise fail by Domino’s, I saw this: “Phil McDonald, the Brisbane managing director of advertising agency George Patterson Y&R, said the fallout was another example of...
I’m going to keep this short and sweet. I’ve recently had a number of conversations with people where my brand advice to them ended with the following statement: Everyone is not your customer. It should be obvious and some companies do get it. Too many don’t. There are plenty of ways you can...
Subway is famous for their “foot-long sub”. It is one of the promises the brand stands on. They have talked about their “foot-long subs” for years. They’ve run ads about it. They have even trademarked the term, so we could be forgiven for expecting that the subs that carry that...
It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. A clever hashtag. A tweet. And then faster than you can say RT it all comes unstuck. I am of course talking about Kayser Lingerie and the somewhat infamous #kaysermaleinsider tweets. But it was one in particular that really sent things off...
Too many organisations have become stuck in the “delight” fly trap. It bears repeating – customer satisfaction and loyalty are a function of organisations meeting the expectations they set. The “delight” fly trap. I gave a talk this past week for the City of Monash Women’s Business Network. The topic was “seven things...
Customer loyalty is top on the list of strategic goals of many companies, and to my thinking that is very last place it should be. Loyalty isn’t a “goal” to be reached. It is the result of doing the right things for your customers (and, yes, we can expand that to...
I love organisations. I think the vast majority of them have good intent. They don’t set out at the beginning of the day thinking, “How can we screw our customers today?” And that’s not to ignore that some still do, but I see that as the exception not the rule. I’ve...