The title is credited to Max Beerbohm, English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist best known today for his 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson. Taken from his 1918 work, Hosts and Guests, I interpret his work for a new era of hospitality. We live in a connected society now and as such, guests and the experiences they have and share, form the foundation of marketing and service. If we try to scale experiences for the sake of doing so, we miss the essence…
How Marketers Can Thrive in an Era of Digital Darwinism
While in London promoting What’s the Future of Business (WTF): Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, I spent some time with the folks who produce The Digital Marketing Show. In this short video, I share the rise of Generation C and how an era of connected consumerism created the perfect storm for digital Darwinism to accelerate. We also discuss how the future of marketing takes more than technology, it takes a philosophical shift to create meaningful and shareable experiences. It’s…
Customer Experience is Becoming More Important Than the Product Itself
Customer experience is the sum of all engagements and interactions a customer has with your business in every step of their journey and lifecycle. It’s what your customer feels, thinks, says (to you and others) and more so, what they do now and in the time to come that counts for everything. CX is measured not by NPS (Net Promoter Score) but instead by the sentiment and outcomes in every moment of truth throughout the relationship. That.is.the.experience. And, it’s yours…
Companies Profit When Customers Suffer
You’ve heard it a million times, a happy customer tells a couple of people and an unhappy customer tells everyone. Yet to this day, executives tend to run business strategy with an emphasis on transactions over experiences. More so, business value is expressed in short-term performance metrics and reports to an audience of shareholders and stakeholders over the very people who keep them in business…your customers. It’s all a bit absurd when you think about it. I know, I know…it’s…
The Future of Everything? It’s About People Connecting with People
These last few years have been an interesting ride. As fun as it has been, it is the next few years that will be the most telling and also transformative if all goes according to plan. As quickly as time flies, it’s important not to lose sight of the things that remind us of why we’re on this path together. I recently stumbled across a conversation with Eric Jacobson in which I shared what was driving me at the time…and…
The 6 Pillars of Social Commerce [VIDEO]
In April 2012, I wrote a piece that explored online social behavior and its impact on commerce and decision-making. The work was inspired by a series of studies based on the work of Robert Cialdini that identified six universal heuristics that shoppers use to make decisions. The importance of social psychology can not be overstated. This branch of psychology deals with how people think about influence and how individuals relate to one another. The social economy is shaped by how…
Digital is Just a Means to Reach People…It’s How and Why You Use It That Matters
Splendida Notizia! #WTF is going on in Italy? The future of business is turning a new page…that’s what. I’m excited to announce that What’s the Future of Business: Changing the way businesses create experiences is now available in Italy. To celebrate the launch, I spent some time with Luca Conti, new media strategist, Italian blogger, journalist, and author of several books on social media. In our discussion, we explored the future of business and why the time is now for…
A New Era for Search: The Zero Moment of Truth is Now Defined by Shared Customer Experiences
This is the story of when ZMOT met UMOT… Search is a natural step in the discovery process. In a web world, search engines offer a lens into a qualified and structured view to help online consumers focus and make informed decisions. With Google dominating search, marketers concentrated on improving search ranking through tried and true techniques to ensure that what they were marketing earned a coveted position in the likely search results a customer might consider clicking. Search is…
Stop Talking About Technology and Start Designing Experiences
As Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore wrote in the Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage, the future of business is less about products and more about creating experiences. That’s right. You’re no longer in the product business. Products are a by-product of experiences you set out to create. Products are also social objects that spark desirable relationships between you and customers and also among customers. The future of business is experiences. One year after launching What’s…
The Future of Business is Creating Meaningful and Shareable Experiences
Special guest post by Peter Guber, noted business leader and author of best-seller, Tell to Win While everyone’s talking about social media, professional motivation, or the need for change in business, people who are actually looking for answers to bring about change are left to draw upon the classic treatises of Peter Drucker, Dale Carnegie, Geoffrey Moore, Tom Peters, et al. Yet, what those pundits don’t provide is the “how to” shape your role and opportunity in this evolving landscape…
