Apple has an excellent experience. We could all learn a lot from how they approach business as usual to facilitate customer-driven growth.

Why do I like Apple’s experience? Before I answer, I should have my guitar.

I am just kidding. No one wants that.

What we do want is to know how to facilitate customer-driven growth. Apple is an excellent example of how to do this. In a recent podcast, we outlined some things happening every day in Apple’s experience, where you can see Behavioral Economics and psychology playing out in the real world. Here’s what we found:

Just over a decade ago, just as the world was coming out of the deepest recession since the Greatest Depression, we carried out significant research across the globe with the largest container shipping company in the world. We repeated the research a year later when the economy was in full speed recovery mode and while some key drivers remained the same we found a noticeable and consistent change in every model we ran. The world and the market had changed!

Now, a decade later, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the world by surprise. The cost of life is dire. The economy is in shambles, many people around the world are in quarantine or being asked to keep a social distance. As always, the world will emerge from this. There could hardly be many winners out of this but some will emerge stronger or less shattered than others.

We are living in troubling times fraught with uncertainty. There are many questions about what comes next in the COVID-19 outbreak.

We talked about this in a recent podcast. Many of our clients have been calling us about what to do. Here are ten things we have been telling them.

People are way more afraid of shark attacks than we should be. The reason we are is the same reason branding works for your organization to attract customers.

However, before we get to that, consider the following statistic. Since the year 1580, aka the year we started charting shark attacks, there have been a little over 2,000 shark attacks, of which 471 were fatal. Averaged over the whole period, that’s about six attacks per year, one of which is deadly.* It’s a remarkably small number given how much headspace it takes up for all of us. We fear sharks killing us, even though the amounts are objectively small.

We encourage clients to research their customers all the time. Late last year, we decided to take our advice and study our customers and prospective customers, and well, anyone. Some of the research told us what we expected to hear, but some of the revelations might surprise you. We talked about this research in a recent podcast.

Have you ever made a snap judgment about another person only to discover you were wrong? I have. Psychologists call this a Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), and it can wreak havoc on your customer-driven growth.  

We explored FAEs in our latest podcast and the effect they can have on your Customer Experience outcome. We also discussed why recognizing them is essential to your bottom line and some steps you can take to prevent them.