The Difference Between Saying You Care And Caring

I’m not sure when we became defensive about customer care became. I suspect it might have been when we began to put more distance between the customer and us. In the days when there was a cash register that rang with ‘real money’, when we sold eye-to-eye and transacted hand-to-hand, instead of digitally, we had…

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A Reason To Come

“Hey! Are you after some lunch?” asked the young woman on the pavement waving flyers during the 1 pm rush. She gestured to a place on the side street as she tried to lure people down it with the promise of a discount. Most diners who eat at a restaurant down a side street go…

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What Is A Strategy?

In business, we use words that are designed to help us to better understand, articulate and achieve our objectives. Often those same words end up doing exactly the opposite. ‘Strategy’ is one of those words that can tie us up in knots if we allow it to. Imagine you’re on a riverbank. The place you…

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Marketing Inversion

When Amazon.com was still in its infancy, Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO had this to say; “In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.” Shouting brought us Pop Tarts, Alka Seltzer…

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Owning The Story

The little deli around the corner just started opening an hour earlier on weekday mornings. Of course, it makes sense for a business located in a walkable neighbourhood to serve commuters who will grab a coffee on the way to work and maybe even buy a sandwich for lunch later in the day. The last…

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Why How Matters

How you design the product changes how it feels to use it. How you train your staff changes how the customer is treated. How you answer an email changes how the recipient responds. How much of yourself you bring to work changes how you perform. In a world where more people understand the impact of…

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The Instructions We’re Looking For

It was probably Stephen Covey’s ‘7 habits’ that got us addicted to the idea that success had a formula, one that could be pinned down by a number and executed in stages. Now we’re wired to seek it out. The headlines we see in our digital publications are proof. We are tempted by the notion…

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Getting On Your Customer’s Radar

Many brands believe the biggest challenge they have is creating more brand awareness. If they could only get on the radar of potential customers then many of their problems would disappear. And yet brands like Macy’s and Ralph Lauren that have built awareness for decades are struggling to remain viable. Their biggest problem isn’t getting…

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It Matters

The sign had been hastily scrawled in blue biro. The letters gone over and over again to make them more visible to the passer-by. A short cut, that in the end didn’t give the benefit of a short cut at all. It matters that your investment in recruiting doesn’t stretch to buying a sharpie to…

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The Way We Do Things Matters

My boys are lucky enough to have eaten pasta in Rome, croissants in Paris and hamburgers in New York. Yet, when the conversation turns to food memories, the one they treasure most is eating potatoes next to the Aga in a friend’s kitchen in Scotland. They remember the story of the potatoes freshly dug from…

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