Another gem from the ecsw newsletter. Fred Reicheld on loyalty:
There’s a paradox at the core of loyalty. Business is the pursuit of self-interest. Loyalty implies self-sacrifice. So business loyalty is an oxymoron. A customer is not going to be loyal to most organisations because most organisations have their own interest not the customer’s, at heart. When the Harvard Business Review was choosing a cartoon to illustrate a paper of mine on loyalty, they chose a dog.
I linked to this paper on wicked problems the other day and Chris Corrigan commented “there’s a lot in that paper eh?”. Which is true.
I’m experimenting with marketing less and listening more
Passion brands bring people together based on common interests and excitements. I’m particularly interested in ones created from the bottom up, as opposed to driven by producers concerned mainly with profit.
Just back from another extraordinary gathering at Medinge where the community that has produced Beyond Branding meets each summer. I was planning to keep this
Interesting research from Stanford suggests that exciting brands get more trusted after making mistakes and putting them right whilst more “sincere” brands start with more trust but lose it more easily. Perhaps the sensible interpretation is that second-guessing customers can be a waste of time!
Michael Hammer’s new book, The Agenda, is about the rise of customer power. But is customer-centricity really such a good model for business and society?
Thanks to Matt Tucker at Smith Associates for telling me about What Brand Are You. It strikes me that lots of companies waste money on
The AntiBrand: blackSpot sneakers, a project by Adbusters attacks Nike directly. In doing so they take on what has become one of the great icons
We live in a world of too much marketing and too much branding. People’s faith in advertising has fallen to new lows as we simply
So the Abbey National is rebranding itself this morning. As I write this entry, they are revealing their new look, their shortened name (just “Abbey”)
Harold Jarche reflects on Tom Gram’s post Everyday Experience is not Enough. Tom argues: No one in their right mind would argue that experience is not a powerful teacher or
The Trouble With Meritocracy – Ross Douthat Blog – NYTimes.com "Part of the problem with meritocracy is that it homogenizes in the name of diversity: It skims the cream from
I’m not a fan of jargon but I do have a soft spot for “disintermediation”. It’s what happens to industries where a middleman is rendered obsolete by innovation. It has
Simon Gough tweeted: For every high-profile project there are ten better versions quietly getting on with it which strikes me as poetically true if not always literally so. I see
