Shaun Smith
Aligning the employee and customer experiences
Zappos Culture – © Zappos.com, Inc, 2011 "A company's culture and a company's brand are really just two sides of the same coin. Brand is just a lagging indicator of culture." Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com It's time for organizations to pay as much attention…
Leaders need to lift their gaze from their numbers to their purpose
"Spreadsheets only reflect the past, not the future"Richard Reed, innocent Drinks As we emerge from the recession, business leaders will once more be thinking of revenue growth rather than cost cutting, market share rather than share price, and finding the right people rather than 'right...
It’s time for a radical and remarkable approach to marketing
"Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable"Robert Stephens, The Geek Squad Marketers face enormous challenges today. Targeting, locating, communicating and maintaining any form of reliable relationship with customers or consumers has never been more difficult. Digital, mobile and web technology has transformed the…
How Zappos Used a Bold Vision to Profit from a Purpose Beyond Profit
It's time for leaders to lift their gaze from their numbers to their purpose. "Spreadsheets only reflect the past, not the future"– Richard Reed, Innocent As we emerge from the recession, business leaders will once more be thinking of revenue growth rather than cost cutting,…
Redesigning the reading experience
Gutenberg invented the printing press 570 years ago and the reading experience hasn't changed much since. Almost every other form of communication has changed beyond recognition, yet we still read in largely the same way as our ancestors did in medieval times. But what about...
How BOLD Brands Deliver Dramatically Different Experiences
"From the store windows, the store touch-points, the website, social media or a magazine: it has to be one pure customer experience, not just to gain market share but to gain mind share." — Angela Ahrendts, CEO Burberry Customer experience as a concept has been…
Beat the retail blues
This is the season when retailers publish their trading results for the Christmas and New Year season; it has made for gloomy reading. HMV, the UK music retailer, has announced the closure of 60 stores across the UK due to disappointing trading figures, and...
Focus on the dollars, not the dimes
The atrium / lobby at the Al Bustan Palace Hotel in Muscat, Oman There is a saying in the US: "Don't nickel and dime me", which means to accumulate money in small amounts. There are examples of this in many areas of customer service and...
Creating an Engaging Employee Experience
More and more organisations are coming to the realisation that in order to deliver a great customer experience you must first create an engaging employee experience. There is no doubt that creating a powerful customer experience requires the full and continual commitment of the...
Live the brand or drive the sale?
Natwest – part of the RBS Group which is now largely owned by the UK taxpayer – have committed to a Customer Charter and launched an advertising campaign built around the promise of 'helpful banking'. HSBC too have been active with the recent launch...
Authenticity – you can’t force it, fake it or fudge it
When Tony Hayward gave his final press briefing shortly before departing as Chief Executive of BP he said that BP had shown itself to be "a model of corporate social responsibility" but it was "not a great PR success". On the face of it BP...
Bold Brands: How to be Brave in Business and Win
Bold is an attitude of mind, but it's measured by how you behave. As we emerge from the recession it is becoming evident that those brands that have stayed true to their purpose and focused on differentiation are those that are gaining and sustaining...
The ice cream and the airliner: which carries the most value?
At the Farnborough Air Show this weekend, Britain saw its first Boeing Dreamliner (above) – on which the company has bet its future. 'Parked' alongside it in the civil airliner area of the air show is Boeing's European rival, the latest Airbus. But, amazing,...
When is a store not a store – the next stage of the retail...
The Luxury Institute issued a press release last week saying that our client Burberry has been found by independent research to be offering the best customer experience of any luxury retailer by some margin. The survey found; "The top three factors that shoppers consider...
Fix it or feature it: turn your customer experience into a talking point
I had dinner recently with Greg Gianforte, CEO and Founder of RightNow Technologies, who was telling me about his mantra ‘fix it or feature it’. In other words either improve a software or product characteristic or turn it into a product advantage and feature...
Toyota: Look who forgot the Golden Rule
Who’d have thought it could happen so quickly? From the carmaker with a reputation for manufacturing the most reliable products in the world, constantly topping JD Power customer satisfaction surveys, to the laughing stock of the industry. From first to last Toyota has a UK…
Why Steve Jobs doesn’t listen to customers
Watching the launch of Apple’s iPad, I was struck by the fact that Steve Jobs famously doesn’t pay too much attention to customer research. (“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants,” he said recently). And yet – or should that be because...
Bold Brands – why now is the time to be brave in business and...
Shaun Smith previews a major talk he is giving on February 1st in London, by outlining what it means to be bold, with a little help from Picasso and Apple. This will be the first preview of new findings from Shaun’s new book: Bold...
Ryanair-a branded customer experience?
We are currently researching leading brands for our forthcoming book ‘Bold brands-how to be brave in business and win’. There are some obvious examples that we shall include but one brand that is causing us to pause for thought is Ryanair, the low cost...
The power of word of mouth: from the ladies who lunch
Marketing is all a-twitter with the opportunities represented by web 2.0 and social media for sharing consumer word of mouth – both good and bad. But the reality is we have always had the ‘twitter’ effect, with reputations made and broken by consumers sharing...