Customer strategy results in some interesting questions. Recently, Claire Hillman, a listener (and viewer of our new YouTube channel) asked us one she has been mulling in her strategic planning: Should I move to where my customers are or move them to where I want to be?
It’s an interesting question. My knee-jerk reaction is to say, where they are. It’s a customer-centric answer, and we know how critical customer-centricity is.
The world is crazy. There’s a war in Ukraine. The UK has a cost-of-living crisis as energy prices are rising, and loads of people are moving into fuel poverty. There’s inflation, strikes, and the looming threat of a recession and catastrophic climate change.
The current environment I describe is very stressful, with many things you cannot control, which makes a few things on the path forward uncertain.
Change is hard. So, when you have to make changes in your organization, you face many challenges. However, we have a secret superpower you can unlock to help you: Influence.
On a recent podcast, we hosted writer, teacher, researcher, and Climate philanthropist Zoe Chance, Ph.D., author of Influence is your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen. Chance is an assistant professor of marketing at the Yale School of Management, where she teaches the most popular course, “Mastering Influence and Persuasion.” Her research on influence has been published in top academic journals and often garners the attention of global media outlets. Her website, zoechance.com, also has numerous content resources regarding using interpersonal influence for a positive impact. In addition, half of the profits from her book go to 350.org, a global network of climate activists seeking change through the power of ordinary people.
Fear is a powerful motivator for what we do. It is also a powerful tool for marketing.
So, with Halloween coming up, we decided we would dive deeper into why this is and why it works to get people to do things. Some of the reasons might, well, scare you.
Okay, they probably won’t scare you but will surprise you. See, we were tricking you. Wasn’t that a treat?
We’ve got a pickle. I love a pickle. Tonya Dunn, an insurance professional, wants to know why her Customer Experience efforts aren’t moving the numbers. She wants to know what we think they should do.
For those who don’t know, Tonya listens to our podcast and is using our “I’m in a Pickle” feature. The pickle is a business problem with which she wants help. I am sharing her pickle here also because I am sure some of you have the same problem. We all need to move the numbers, as it were, so it’s a familiar business problem, and the advice will be widely applicable.
This newsletter issue is the second of a series based on a podcast we did with Beyond Philosophy’s own Zhecho Dobrev (@ZhechoDobrev), author of The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions. We talked with him before on our podcast a month ago about how emotions drive customer behavior. This week, we dive a little deeper into this concept and explore how emotions affect the insights we get from Customer Science.
Customer Science is a relatively new development in the area of customer strategy. It combines data, behavioral science, and artificial intelligence (AI) to gain insight into customer behavior and predicts what they will do next.
