All Of The People, All Of The Time

All around us big vanilla businesses and corporations are struggling to understand how to connect with customers and give people what they want. Businesses like McDonalds are ‘resetting’ and trying to find new ways to improve speed and affordability of their core offerings. Their strategy is to become even faster and cheaper. Meanwhile Mexican food…

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Intention Is A Competitive Advantage

Having a competitive advantage is not just about being better in ways that can be measured, it’s about understanding your difference and about knowing how that difference will impact the lives of your customers. Great business leaders know what they want to do well and also importantly what they won’t do. While other banks were…

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The Business Case For Creating Great Customer Experiences

Saren Indah is a tiny fifteen room hotel in Ubud. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd in a market where amazing seven star resorts line up alongside cheaper than cheap backpacker accommodation. How do you differentiate when you are not the biggest, flashest or cheapest? Saren Indah should be lost in the mediocre…

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Why This And Not That?

Why do some shoppers choose to pay $3.48 for a 500g bag of Quaker oats when they can buy a kilo of supermarket own brand oats for $3.29, which works out at less than half the price? Why do we feel better as soon as the doctor, armed with nothing more than a lolly stick…

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Pick One Thing

When you think of Apple you immediately think about great design. You are reminded that Apple chooses to lead with design even in the moments between the moments that matter to you as a customer. It’s hard not to be in awe of a company that cares so much about your experience that they make…

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Who Is Your Customer?

Joan works as a personal trainer at the local gym. She looks old enough to be someone’s grandma, but I don’t think she is. Unlike most women her age who live around here Joan doesn’t wear a wedding ring. She visits the same cafe for breakfast every day, but not at the same time because…

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The Value Of Asking What If

Have you ever been stuck waiting outside your hotel room while it was given the daily once over? It turns out that for some guests housekeeping can feel like more of an intrusion than a service. On average it costs a hotel $22 a day to deliver housekeeping services for each room. That figure probably…

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Whoever Gets Closest To Their Customer Wins

Let’s consider how the business world has been turned on its head in less than a decade. We only need to think about fourteen brands in order to understand the shift. APPLE vs. SONY. AMAZON vs. BORDERS. NETFLIX vs. BLOCKBUSTER. AIRBNB vs. HILTON. UBER vs. CABS. NEST vs. HONEYWELL. TWITTER vs. NEWS CORP. It turns…

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The Truth About Starbucks And The $4 Coffee

Before Starbucks you could buy your morning coffee for a dollar or two. So how was it possible for Starbucks to more than double the price of coffee overnight? The truth is that Starbucks didn’t actually invent the $4 coffee—they created the $2 experience. $2 felt like a bargain for the feeling of belonging in…

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The Limitations Of Knowing ‘How To’

For years we’ve been rewarded for knowing the right answer. All of those gummed gold stars licked and stuck in copybooks next to neatly spaced handwriting, served their purpose. We can’t help wanting to know the answer. Knowing ‘how to’ is barely an advantage to the twenty first century business owner or entrepreneur, because there…

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