The definition of digital transformation is… 2019: Digital transformation is the evolving pursuit of innovative and agile business and operational models — fueled by evolving technologies, processes, analytics, and talent — to create new value and experiences for customers, employees, and stakeholders. 2014 – 2019: The realignment of, or new investment in, technology, business models, and processes to drive new value for customers and employees and more effectively compete in an ever-changing digital economy. This is how I define digital…
Experiences Become Brands and Great Brands Become Experiences
These days, it seems that I travel to events overseas more than in the United States. While many companies around the world believe they are behind U.S. companies, I can say that from first hand experience, any company pursuing the future of customer experience, innovation, and brand is ahead of the game…regardless of where it’s based. When I receive an invitation to present, it exemplifies, at least to me, that those attending the event are keen on learning about how to…
This is a Time for New Leadership – Building Bridges Between People Who Think Differently
At the end or beginning of each year, smart folks ask other smart folks to contribute their thoughts about the year ahead. Then everyone promotes their participation and the host benefits from a landslide of new traffic and followers. I usually don’t participate. But my friend Tom Goodwin had a different take on the assemblage idea. He asked, “what’s the one thing you learned in 2016?” He had me at “learned.” The post is now live at Forbes but I wanted to…
Experiences are The Core Pillars of Any Brand.
This is for my Danish friends and anyone who believes that the future of business lies in experience design. Via Markedsføringdagen, I juni 2016 havde Dansk Markedsføring besøg af Brian Solis fra Altimeter ved markedsføringsdagen. Vi fik lejlighed til at tale både med ham og med deltagere, som havde fornøjelsen af at høre ham på dagen I’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately in Copenhagen. To be honest, I already miss it. There are three recurring topics that…
Sharing a Personal Story – A Rare Glimpse into What Inspires Me and How I Got Here
Believe it or not, I’m a private person. I know it seems ironic. After all, I was one of the early group that worked to bring social media to the forefront in the early 2000s. But, I still tend to not share personal information online. I do however, share my work freely with everyone in the hopes of creating a community of betterment in business, government and society. There are rare occasions however when I do open up to share stories that…
4 Keys to Designing New Customer Experiences
On a cold and rainy day in Minneapolis before year’s end, I joined my Prophet colleagues at Le Meridien Chambers where we hosted a breakfast of brand champions. It was the second time this year that I was invited to speak to some of the city’s (and the country’s) most prominent companies and this time I had even more new research and ideas to share. During the two hours that we were together, I presented findings from “The 6 Stages of Digital…
The Refiners Imports Foreign Startups to Silicon Valley for Global Acceleration
In 2016 I was honored to serve as the first “Godfather” for the Refiners, a group of foreign startups partaking in a new acceleration program in San Francisco. As Godfather, I serve as a mentor and resource to help entrepreneurs shape and optimize their companies to be successful beyond their country of origin. In this case, many of the companies were French hoping to expand to the U.S. and around the world. The Refiners is an interesting take on startup…
CX Starts with Understanding Today’s Customer Experience, Then Designing Them To Be Amazing and Integrated
The following discussion represents Part 2 of my conversation with Loyalty360 CEO and CMO Mark Johnson. In this last part of the series, Change Starts with You Altimeter Group’s Principal Analyst Brian Solis is dedicated to creating change within brands and bringing customer experience into the spotlight. The first step, Solis told Loyalty360 in a recent discussion, is to define the CX problem and use that to guide solutions. More specifically, he challenged businesses to rethink what CX really means across the…
It’s Time to Change How Companies Perceive Customer Experience (CX)
Last year, I spent time with Mark Johnson, CEO and CMO of Loyalty360, to discuss all things Customer Experience (CX). The conversation was so rich, it resulted into a two-part series exclusively for the Loyalty360 community. Now however, I’ve been given the green light to share the conversation (parts 1 and 2) with you here. Part 1 – This is the Year of Customer Experience If you ask 100 executives what customer experience means to them, you would likely get 100 different answers. The need to…
Level Up: An Introduction to the 5 Different Levels of Self-Driving Cars
With all of the talk about self-driving cars, you’d think that they were already on our streets. Well, technically in some states such as California, Nevada and Pennsylvania, automakers and technology vendors are already publicly testing autonomous vehicles¾with human drivers and engineers onboard. You might have also heard about the Tesla’s driving around town in “Autopilot” mode where drivers are doing everything but driving. Not all autonomous cars are the same. While engineers are striving for full self-driving mode one…
