Gregory Yankelovich
Can you have a Retail Marketing Strategy without knowing your Customers?
The great bulk of CPG startups operates as B2B companies. They only deal with their distributors, brokers, and retailers but need to communicate with people who actually buy their products. They need to be more curious about the way they get and use their...
Customer Experience is the Fuel for Word of Mouth Marketing
When it comes to the fuel that generates word of mouth marketing, customer experience in retail is the premium unleaded, high-octane juice that drives successful businesses. In fact, customer experience probably makes up a majority of the reason behind any type of word of...
The Key Components of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most powerful and time-tested methods of selling products in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. Among the many advantages that word-of-mouth marketing offers is that it cost a lot less than any other method of generating consumer demand....
Word-Of-Mouth Marketing – Shortcut to a billion $$ in revenue
I am fascinated by learning from the most successful digital marketing methods and applying my lessons to the retail marketing strategy of traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Very few practitioners of digital marketing are better known than Neil Patel. The other day, I was reading one...
Inflation impact on Retail Customer Experience
Business publications and news outlets bombard us with news about rising inflation and upcoming recession every single day. Our lives are impacted by the higher costs of everything we need as consumers, but we also are facing business challenges as providers of goods and...
Whole Foods Acquisition is a Wakeup Call to Independent Grocers
Buffer Much has been written about Amazon acquisition of Whole Food Markets. Every day brings an avalanche of opinions: from the industry pundits’ speculations on a scope of inevitable disruption of the grocery industry to flash analysis of the Wh...
Customer Experience – The Three Legged Stool
Over the years I witnessed the never ending debate between practitioners of Customer Service/Support and Marketing over which one of them is more critical to the delivery of outstanding Customer Experience. The debate itself is a testimony that these practitioners are more focused on...
End of Product
The phrase “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door” is often used as a metaphor about the power of innovation. If it is so simple, why has building a better mousetrap been so unrewarding? Why have most...
Airbandb vs Hotels – Which Provides Better Guest Experience
I recently returned from visiting Italy and for the first time used airbandb.com to find and book accommodations for a considerable number of nights. Now, whenever I share my experiences of this wonderful country with my friends, they eagerly ask for my opinion about...
Customer Reviews – Trust, but Verify
During the last two decades customer reviews and ratings became an ubiquitous part of e-commerce. Over 88% of consumers gratefully use them to select goods and services, whether they purchase them online or off. There are numerous studies that tie in availability of customer...
Poll Timing Dilemma
The other day I booked a flight on a popular website. As soon as the ticket order transaction was completed, I received a nicely designed request to share my experience with the agency. That request immediately made me feel uneasy because my flight is...
How Singularity Kills Customer Experience Management
Culturally we are conditioned to look for a SINGLE reason, element or root cause to solve any problem. Remember Curly’s “One Thing” in the City Slickers movie? Well, this concept of singularity does not work in customer experience management by definition because of the...
Voice of Customers Challenge to Product Managers
For years I have been puzzled by the fierce resistance of product managers to integrate customers feedback into the products’ design and marketing process. Surely, many use elaborate survey and market focus group studies to validate and refine an original concept, but the use...
Which is a better investment – Customer Experience or Brand Management?
The advancement of social media during the last ten years gave rise to the power of social customers. That power precipitated fundamental shifts to the marketing paradigm which was developed over 3 decades prior. Surprisingly, only relatively few companies noted the avalanche of research...
Innovation and Customer Experience
We live in amazing times with endless opportunities to experience and participate in the process of many established industries being re-imagined. However, an innovation is a risky business and most attempts to re-think how things are done conventionally do not produce commercial success. The single...
The secret to high rate of customers retention
It took me a few years to realize that happiness is based on one’s ability to manage expectations. We experience happiness when our expectations are exceeded. We may experience content and satisfaction when our expectations are met, or nearly met. A disappointment is not...
Cheap Gas, Electric Cars and Customer Experience
Even if you sell a commodity, customer experience often outweighs price considerations. Just because the term Customer Experience Management (CEM) is relatively new to corporate vocabulary, the power of “experience” is not lost on marketing professionals. The world of marketing is drastically changing, moving...
Without trust, a business cannot grow. Without reputation a business cannot be trusted.
Customers prefer to buy from companies they trust. When consumers’ choices are limited and they have to do business with companies they don’t trust, customers only care about price or looking for ways to avoid to do business all together. The television broadcasting companies are...
Algorithms vs People – Customer Experience Perspective
During the last few months I’ve seen a significant increase in a number of articles warning about the onslaught of automation in workforce. A lot of very respectable and technologically advanced people, from Stephen Hawking to Elon Mask, express their deep concerns about implications of...
Why is it so difficult to get funding for Customer Experience change?
If you are reading this post you are likely well aware of customer experience’s capacity to improve your company’s performance. You are also likely very frustrated with a lack of actual commitment from your boss. Oh, he is probably saying all the right words...