Category Archives: marketing

Tailoring Experiences at Scale

Leave a reply

The Power of Personalization

Tailoring Experiences at Scale

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For decades, the dominant logic in business was mass production and mass consumption. The goal was simple: optimize for the average customer. But in today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive marketplace, the average customer no longer exists. They are individuals demanding recognition, relevance, and respect for their unique context. As a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the future of competitive advantage lies in mastering The Power of Personalization — the ability to deliver tailored, meaningful experiences to millions of people, simultaneously and seamlessly. This is the ultimate convergence of human-centered design and technological scale: using data and intelligence to make every single customer feel profoundly understood. Innovation must move beyond simple segmentation to anticipatory intimacy.

Personalization is not just about slapping a name on an email. True personalization is a strategic innovation challenge that addresses the fundamental human need for relevance. When a product, service, or communication is relevant, it eliminates friction, conserves the user’s valuable time, and builds trust. Conversely, irrelevant experiences create “digital noise,” foster annoyance, and actively erode loyalty. The challenge for leaders is to establish the infrastructure—both technical and human—that allows the organization to perceive, remember, and respond to the unique needs and behaviors of its individual customers, moving from a transaction-based relationship to a personalized partnership.

The Three Dimensions of Human-Centered Personalization

Effective personalization at scale requires a deliberate strategic focus across three integrated dimensions, ensuring that technology serves human purpose:

  • 1. Contextual Intelligence (The When and Where): Personalization fails when it is delivered out of context. This dimension involves using real-time behavioral data, location, time, and device context to deliver the right message at the exact moment of need. It’s about being helpful, not just interruptive. For example, offering a specific type of coffee to a regular when they step within range of their usual store, not hours later at home.
  • 2. Behavioral Prediction (The Anticipatory Insight): Moving beyond “what they bought” to “what they are about to need.” This requires deep data analytics to model future behavior and latent needs. The innovation here is in creating proactive experiences—solving a problem the customer hasn’t even fully articulated yet. This is the difference between recommending a product and recommending a solution to a future pain point.
  • 3. Ethical Transparency (The Trust Equation): The more personal your service, the higher the need for trust. Personalization must be built on a foundation of ethical consent and clarity. Customers must understand what data is being used, why it benefits them, and have meaningful control over it. Lack of transparency transforms personalization from helpful to “creepy,” immediately destroying the human relationship you were trying to build.

“The best personalization doesn’t guess the customer’s mind; it anticipates their next human need.”

Case Study 1: Netflix – Personalizing the Discovery Experience

The Challenge:

With thousands of titles in its library, Netflix faced a monumental human-centered challenge: choice overload. An average customer who spends too long searching often quits out of frustration, leading to churn. The vastness of the library became a liability rather than an asset.

The Personalization Solution:

Netflix innovated by turning its entire platform into a hyper-personalized discovery engine. Their personalization extends far beyond basic recommendation rows. They use data to:

  • Personalize Artwork: Displaying different title images for the same movie based on the viewer’s previous habits (e.g., showing a romantic image to a romance watcher, or an action scene to a thriller fan).
  • Personalize Rows: Creating unique rows that reflect highly specific taste segments (e.g., “Visually Stunning Sci-Fi Movies with a Strong Female Lead”).
  • Behavioral Prediction: Using complex algorithms to anticipate the titles most likely to be watched next, drastically reducing the cognitive effort required to choose.

The result is a service where the entire interface is tailored to the individual, solving the human problem of choice overload.

The Human-Centered Result:

By investing in personalization as its core product strategy, Netflix dramatically increased customer engagement and reduced churn. The experience feels curated and intimate, creating a strong sense of value. It proved that in the digital age, relevance is the killer feature, and the best way to innovate around a huge catalog is to make it feel small and tailored to each person.

Case Study 2: Spotify – Tailoring the Moment of Discovery

The Challenge:

The music world is characterized by an infinite library of new content. For Spotify, the challenge was helping users feel connected to new artists and music they would love, without relying solely on manual searching or static genre lists. The innovation needed to capture the highly personal, emotional nature of music discovery.

The Personalization Solution:

Spotify’s innovation, particularly the Discover Weekly playlist, is a masterclass in anticipatory personalization. The system uses a complex blend of collaborative filtering (what similar users like) and natural language processing (analyzing articles and blogs about music) to create a wholly unique, algorithmically-generated playlist for each user, delivered every Monday.

  • Contextual Delivery: The timing (Monday morning) positions the playlist as a fresh start and a soundtrack for the week.
  • Ethical Partnership: The playlist format feels like a gift from a trustworthy, knowledgeable friend, minimizing the “creepy” factor because the value exchange is clear: “We observe your taste, and in return, we give you this high-quality, personalized content.”

This system essentially turns data analysis into an act of creative, personalized curation.

The Human-Centered Result:

Discover Weekly became one of Spotify’s most successful features, driving massive engagement. It demonstrated that personalization can be an act of generosity, giving the user a valuable, curated product that is better than anything they could have created themselves. It solidified Spotify’s role not just as a music player, but as a trusted curator and partner in the user’s emotional relationship with music.

Conclusion: The Future of Business is Individual

The Power of Personalization is the core strategic challenge of our time. It requires leaders to embrace a fundamental truth: human connection scales. You don’t need to choose between mass market reach and intimate relationships; technology has finally allowed us to achieve both.

To succeed, organizations must move from seeing personalization as a marketing tactic to recognizing it as a holistic innovation imperative — a guiding principle for product design, service delivery, and ethical governance. By leveraging contextual intelligence and behavioral prediction with unwavering ethical transparency, we can create a future where every customer feels understood, valued, and served with a precision that delights. The most profitable innovations will be those that master the art of the individual experience, delivered on a global stage.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Pexels

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Emotional Connections Drive Customer Loyalty

Leave a reply

Emotional Connections Drive Customer Loyalty

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

There are many reasons a customer might come back to a business again and again that have nothing to do with loyalty. A repeat customer can come about because of a convenient location, a lower price, a bigger selection and more. But those don’t create loyalty. It just looks as if the customer is loyal.

Actually, you could say that they are loyal—but not to the company. They are loyal to the price, convenient location, etc. The customer who comes back again and again for those types of reasons can deceive you. Not on purpose. It’s their behavior that imitates loyalty. Consider a retail store with repeat customers (not loyal customers), and ask this: If a competitor moves into the neighborhood, has a more convenient location and advertises lower prices, would the customer switch?

If you want your customers to be loyal, you must find a way to create an emotional connection.

Meet Zhecho Dobrev, a principal consultant at Beyond Philosophy and the author of the newly published book, The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Value of Emotions. I interviewed Dobrev for an episode of Amazing Business Radio, and he shared his insights on what drives loyalty.

According to Dobrev, “Emotional connection creates preference over the competition. Customers don’t just come back out of convenience. They see a difference between doing business with your company and other companies.” His research has found that the amount of business a company gets is dependent on its relationships with customers.

The relationship you want with customers is rooted in emotion. A good experience creates a positive memory. Dobrev is a fan of Professor Daniel Kahneman, who says that people don’t choose between experiences. They choose between the memories of their experiences.

Often, memory is based on interactions customers have had with a salesperson, customer support or a process that a company has. Ideally, it’s a good memory. And when the customer comes back a second time and third time and has similar experiences, the memories of those interactions become an owned experience. The customer expects it. They know it’s going to happen, just like last time. That’s where the relationship starts to solidify, with a consistent and predictable experience. It goes to an even higher level when the customer feels valued and appreciated. Ultimately, the brand becomes more important than just a place to stop and do business.

Dobrev surveyed more than 19,000 customers in the U.S. and UK and determined that emotional attachment was the biggest driver of value, being responsible for about 43% of business value. Compare that to a company that promotes product features, which came in second at 20%. “Customers don’t know what they really want,” says Dobrev. “They say they want a product, but what really drives business value is emotional attachment.”

Emotions can start to develop even before the customer chooses to do business with a company or brand. Emotions can be found in a marketing strategy. Consider the automobile manufacturer BMW, which in the 1970s used the slogan The Ultimate Driving Machine — a description of the car — until it switched its focus to the emotion of owning and experiencing the car with the slogan BMW is Joy. While BMW still includes The Ultimate Driving Machine in its descriptors, today’s slogan is Sheer Driving Pleasure. Joachim Blickhäuser, head of corporate and brand identity at the BMW Group, says, “The ‘Sheer Driving Pleasure’ slogan delivers positive emotions and does exactly what a claim should.”

While an emotional connection may help create customer loyalty, you can’t ignore other competitive features. While loyalty makes price less relevant, there is a breaking point. Being easy to do business is also a big factor, so eliminate the friction that will potentially cause customers to run to your competition.

So, here is your assignment. Ask your customers, “Why do you do business with us?” Their reasons will help you define the differences between features and benefits compared to feelings and emotions. Once you have your features and benefits in place, work on creating emotional connections, and your customers will come back for the right reasons—because they love doing business with you.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Pixabay

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

The Role of Instagram in Customer Experience

Leave a reply

The Role of Instagram in Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Part of what fuels a good customer experience is the content experience. That’s where companies and brands serve up content in numerous ways, which could include (but is not limited to) articles, blogs, text messages, newsletters, YouTube videos, podcasts, TikTok content, Tweets, LinkedIn posts and the subject of this article, Instagram. (Note: Check out this recent article about TikTok for business. TikTok has become the No. 1 visited social platform in the world, even bigger than Google!)

Customer behavior has dramatically changed as technology has allowed us to deliver content in numerous ways. There are plenty of platforms, such as the ones mentioned above, so which one should a brand focus on? The short answer is any platform you know your customers are on. That said, as new platforms evolve, some companies and brands aren’t quick to adopt them, although maybe they should be.

Who would have thought that Facebook would become a marketing machine for some brands? And it’s the same with other platforms. And that brings us to the topic—and platform—that is the focus of this article.

Instagram started out as a photo- and video-sharing social media platform in 2010 when Kevin Systrom (co-founder) uploaded a picture of a dog with the caption “test.” Over the past 12 years, it has evolved into much more, including an opportunity for brands to incorporate the platform into their content and marketing strategies.

A recent Passport-Photo.Online study surveyed more than 1,000 Instagram users to find out how the Instagram content experience is influencing their buying decisions. Here are some stats (followed by my commentary) to get you thinking about the power of Instagram and how this social media platform can work for you and your organization.

  • Instagram has 1.4 billion users each month, making it the fourth most popular social network. The potential to be seen is huge! Take advantage of another social media channel that gives you great exposure.

  • Ninety-two percent of Americans who use Instagram follow a business, with most following six to ten business accounts. The majority of Instagram users are Millennials and Gen-Z. According to a Hootsuite survey, ages 18-44 make up just under 88% of the Instagram audience. If that’s the age range of your target audience, this is a place for you to be.

  • Of those Instagram users who follow businesses, 26% typically visit business profiles every day. Another 27% visit business profiles every week. Daily or weekly visits from customers and potential customers are high. This is genuine marketing gold. Creating content that gets followers to come back again and again—daily or weekly—is something you don’t want to miss.

  • Seventy-one percent of Instagram users feel more connected to brands they follow on Instagram. Feeling connected to any company infers there is a sense of loyalty. Furthermore, 93% of people on Instagram are likely or very likely to buy from a business they feel connected to over a competitor. Some presence is better than no presence. Don’t miss the opportunity to engage and create a stronger connection with your customers.

  • Replying to the question, “Did Instagram ever inspire you to shop from businesses even when you weren’t looking to do so?,” 79% said, “Yes.” Do you need any more proof? Can you afford not to participate in an Instagram content strategy?

  • Eighty-nine percent of Instagrammers prefer short-form content (less than 1,000 words) over long-form content (1,000+) when it comes to text posts from brands specifically. Here is where the content marketing strategy comes into play. A 1,000-word post is still long. Consider experimenting with shorter posts, 400-500 words. Follow some of your favorite brands and notice their content strategy. Look for length, frequency, etc.

Content marketing is a powerful customer experience strategy. While it may cost to produce content, it costs nothing to post. And good content can be repurposed across all social media platforms. A good article on Instagram can work on LinkedIn. A few compelling sentences out of the article can become several tweets. One piece of content can be repurposed in numerous ways.

As you look at the stats and findings from the survey, you can immediately recognize the opportunity that Instagram offers. As the fourth most popular social network, this is a marketing channel you can’t afford to ignore.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Detecting the Seeds of Future Innovation

Leave a reply

Weak Signals, Strong Insights

Detecting the Seeds of Future Innovation

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In our hyper-connected world, we are inundated with information. Market data, analyst reports, and competitive intelligence systems all provide a clear picture of the present. But as a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that the most transformative opportunities don’t emerge from this flood of “strong signals.” They emerge from the subtle, often contradictory, and easily dismissed weak signals on the periphery. These are the whispers of change, the fringe trends, the unarticulated customer frustrations, and the strange technological mashups that hint at a future yet to be built. The ability to detect, interpret, and act on these weak signals is the single most powerful competitive advantage an organization can cultivate. It’s the difference between reacting to disruption and proactively creating it.

Weak signals are, by definition, not obvious. They are often dismissed as anomalies, niche behaviors, or fleeting fads. They can come from anywhere: a casual comment in a user forum, a viral video that defies a category, a surprising scientific breakthrough in an unrelated field, or a quiet startup with a baffling business model. The challenge for leaders is to move beyond the comfort of big data analytics and embrace the messy, qualitative, and deeply human work of foresight. This isn’t about guesswork; it’s about building a systematic, human-centered practice for sensing the future and turning those faint whispers into a clear vision for innovation.

Why Weak Signals are Your Best Innovation GPS

Cultivating a weak-signal detection capability offers profound benefits:

  • Foresight, Not Just Hindsight: While strong signals confirm what has already happened, weak signals provide clues about what is *about to* happen. This gives you a critical head start in preparing for, or even driving, market shifts.
  • The Source of True Disruption: Most truly disruptive innovations—from personal computing to smartphones—began as weak signals on the fringe, often dismissed by established players who were focused on optimizing their core business.
  • Uncovering Unmet Needs: Weak signals are often an early indicator of deep, unarticulated human needs. They are the seeds of a problem that a current market solution isn’t addressing.
  • Building a Culture of Curiosity: Actively looking for weak signals encourages a culture of curiosity, open-mindedness, and a willingness to challenge assumptions—all essential traits for innovation.

“Strong signals confirm your past. Weak signals whisper your future. The most innovative leaders are the best listeners.”

A Human-Centered Approach to Detecting Weak Signals

Detecting weak signals is not an automated process. It is a deeply human activity that requires a specific mindset and intentional practice:

  1. Go to the Edge: Move beyond your core market and familiar customer base. Talk to fringe users, early adopters, and even those who reject your product. Spend time in adjacent industries and with unconventional thinkers.
  2. Embrace a Beginner’s Mindset: Temporarily suspend your expertise. Look at your industry as if you are seeing it for the first time. Why do customers do what they do? What seems strange or inefficient to an outsider?
  3. Connect the Unconnected Dots: A single weak signal means little. The true insight comes from identifying patterns. Is a new technology in one field combining with a new consumer behavior in another? The unexpected combination of two seemingly unrelated signals is often where the magic happens.
  4. Create “Listening Posts”: Form small, cross-functional teams whose sole purpose is to scan the periphery. Empower them to read obscure journals, follow niche social media communities, and report back on anything that feels “off” or interesting.

Case Study 1: The Rise of Social Media – A Weak Signal Ignored by the Giants

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, the internet was dominated by large, content-heavy portals like Yahoo! and search engines like Google. Communication was primarily through email and instant messaging. The idea of people building public profiles to share personal updates and connect with friends was seen as a niche, even trivial, activity. It was a weak signal, a seemingly minor behavior on college campuses.

The Weak Signal Ignored:

For established tech giants, the signal was too faint. They were focused on the strong signals of search queries and content monetization. Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster were dismissed as “just for kids” or a “niche social trend.” The idea of a public profile as a primary mode of online identity and communication was too far outside their core business model to be taken seriously. They saw a minor curiosity, not the future of human connection.

The Result:

The companies that paid attention to this weak signal—and understood the human-centered need for connection and self-expression—went on to build a multi-trillion-dollar industry. The giants who ignored it were forced to play a decade-long game of catch-up, and many lost their dominant position. The weak signal of a simple public profile evolved into the foundational architecture of the modern internet and the economy built on it. Their failure to see this wasn’t a failure of technology; it was a failure of imagination and human-centered listening.

Case Study 2: Netflix and the Streaming Revolution – From DVDs to a Weak Signal

The Challenge:

In the early 2000s, Blockbuster was the undisputed king of home entertainment. Their business model was robust, profitable, and built on a physical presence of thousands of stores and a lucrative late-fee system. The internet was a nascent and unreliable platform for video, and streaming was a faint, almost invisible signal on the horizon.

The Weak Signal Detected:

While Blockbuster was focused on optimizing its core business (e.g., store layout, inventory management), Netflix, then a DVD-by-mail service, saw a weak signal. The signal wasn’t just about faster internet; it was about the human frustration with late fees and the inconvenience of physical stores. The company’s leaders started to talk about the concept of “on-demand” content, long before the technology was ready. They were paying attention to the unarticulated desire for convenience and unlimited choice, a desire that was a whisper to Blockbuster but a deafening call to Netflix. They began to invest in streaming technology and content licensing years before it was profitable, effectively cannibalizing their own profitable DVD business.

The Result:

Blockbuster famously dismissed Netflix’s weak signal, seeing it as a minor inconvenience to their existing business model. They believed a physical store experience would always win. Netflix, by acting on the weak signal and a deep understanding of human frustration, was able to pivot from being a DVD service to the global streaming behemoth we know today. Their foresight, driven by a human-centered approach to a technological trend, allowed them to disrupt an entire industry and become a dominant force in the future of entertainment. Blockbuster, unable to see beyond the strong signals of its profitable past, is now a cautionary tale.

Conclusion: The Foresight Imperative

The future is not a surprise that happens to you. It is a collection of weak signals that you either choose to see or ignore. In an era of constant disruption, relying on strong signals alone is a recipe for stagnation. The most resilient and innovative organizations are those that have built a human-centered practice for sensing change on the periphery. They have created a culture where curiosity is a core competency and where questioning the status quo is a daily ritual.

As leaders, our most critical role is to shift our focus from optimizing the past to sensing the future. We must empower our teams to go to the edge, listen to the whispers, and connect the dots in new and creative ways. The future of your industry is already being born, not in the center of the market, but on its fringes. The question is, are you listening?

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Pexels

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Five Lessons from a Harvard Professor on Selling with Service

Leave a reply

Five Lessons from a Harvard Professor on Selling with Service

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Most people think that customer service is a department that handles complaints and problems. There may be a department or contact center that does, but customer service is more than that. It’s a philosophy that must be embraced by everyone in an organization, and that includes sales.

I had a chance to interview Frank Cespedes for an episode of Amazing Business Radio. Cespedes is a Harvard Business School professor and author of six books, including his latest, Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing. One of his books, Aligning Strategy and Sales, was hailed by Forbes as “… perhaps the best sales book ever.” Here are five lessons he shared, with my commentary following, that should convince you that selling with service is today’s best sales strategy.

1. Sales and customer service merge together. Selling with service is all about what we do to enhance the sales experience. We make it easy, eliminate friction, stay in touch and make the customer feel (at least in the moment) that they are the most important customer we have.

2. Sales and customer support are increasingly intertwined. Typically, the sales team makes sales, and the customer support team delivers service. More and more, these two responsibilities (and departments) are connecting to create a seamless journey for the customer. During the “after experience,” as I like to call it, what is traditionally referred to as customer support continues the sales process with upsells, cross-sells and other tactics to generate revenue for the company.

3. The sales team is becoming a smaller part of the sales conversation. This doesn’t mean the sales team is any less important. However, the days of the salesperson being, as Cespedes says, “an organic, walking, talking version of product and price information” are gone. Customers are just one or two clicks away from getting the information and price they need to make decisions. We must recognize that to have a winning combination, online information, customer support and sales must work together.

4. People don’t want to be sold. They want to buy. This expression has been around for some time, but it’s never been more relevant than today. In the past, most customers would want to talk to a salesperson at the beginning of the sales process. Today, however, most prefer to start their buying journey with their own research. There’s great information to be found through a quick Google search. Before the customer ever talks to a salesperson, they may be close to a buying decision, if they haven’t already decided to do business with the company. The conversation with a salesperson becomes more of a formality.

5. The most important thing about selling is, and always has been, the buyer. Let’s never forget this commonsense, but very sage, advice. Customers get to decide how they want to buy. If they want to skip the formal sales process, let them do so. If they want to do their own research, give them the tools they need (a knowledge base on a website, videos on YouTube, etc.). If they want to talk directly to someone in the company, give them easy access to the right person. Let the customer buy from you the way they want to, which might be different from the way you’ve traditionally sold in the past.

With all the changes caused by the pandemic, supply chain issues, employment problems and a scary economy, we must be prepared to give our customers the journey they want, which is not always how we’ve done business in the past. Sales are not just sales. Customer support is not just customer support. Both fall inside the bigger concept of the customer experience. Heed Cespedes’ advice. Sell with service, and create the experience that makes customers want to buy from you.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Your Brand Isn’t the Problem

Leave a reply

Your Brand Isn't the Problem

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Cigarette companies rebranded themselves because their products caused cancer and they wanted to separate themselves from how their customers experienced their products. Their name and logo (which stand for their brand) were mapped to bad things (cancer) so they changed their name and logo. The bad things still happened, but the company was one step removed. There was always the option to stop causing cancer and to leave the name and logo as-is, but that would have required a real change, difficult change, a fundamental change. Instead of stopping the harm, cigarette companies ran away from their heritage and rebranded.

Facebook rebranded itself because its offering caused cancer of a different sort. And they, too, wanted to separate themselves from how their customers experienced their offering. The world mapped the Facebook brand to bullying, harming children, and misinformation that destroyed institutions. Sure, Facebook had the option to keep the name and logo and stop doing harm, but they chose to keep the harm and change the name and logo. Like the cigarette companies, they chose to keep the unskillful behavior and change their brand to try to sidestep their damaging ways. Yes, they could have changed their behavior and kept their logo, but they chose to change their logo and double down on their unhealthy heritage.

The cigarette companies and Facebook didn’t rebrand themselves to move toward something better, they rebranded to run away from the very thing they created, the very experience they delivered to their customers. In that way, they tried to distance themselves from their offering because their offering was harmful. And in that way, rebranding is most often about moving away from the experience that customers experience. And in that way, rebranding is hardly ever about moving toward something better.

One exception I can think of is a special type of rebranding that is a distillation of the brand, where the brand name gets shorter. Several made-up examples: Nike Shoes to Nike; McDonald’s Hamburgers to McDonald’s; and Netflix Streaming Services to Netflix. In all three cases, the offering hasn’t changed and customers still recognize the brand. Everyone still knows it’s all about cool footwear, a repeatable fast-food experience, and top-notch entertainment content. If anything, the connection with the heritage is concentrated and strengthened and the appeal is broader. If your rebranding makes the name longer or the message more nuanced, you get some credit for confusing your customers, but you don’t qualify for this special exception.

If you want to move toward something better, it’s likely better to keep the name and logo and change the offering to something better. Your brand has history and your customers have mapped the goodness you provide to your name and logo. Why not use that to your advantage? Why not build on what you’ve built and morph it slowly into something better? Why not keep the brand and improve the offering? Why not remap your good brand to an improved offering so that your brand improves slowly over time? Isn’t it more effective to use your brand recognition as the mechanism to attract attention to your improved offering?

In almost all cases, rebranding is a sign that something’s wrong. It’s expensive, it consumes a huge amount of company resources, and there’s little to no direct benefit to customers. When you feel the urge to rebrand, I strongly urge you to keep the brand and improve your offering. That way your customers will benefit and your brand will improve.

Image credit: Pixabay

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

How to Use TikTok for Marketing Your Business

2 Replies

How to Use TikTok for Marketing Your Business

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

If you think your business isn’t right for TikTok, you may want to think again. If you’re like most businesspeople, TikTok is not what you think. It’s not just 20- to 30-second videos of kids dancing, dogs doing tricks and influencers showing off the latest fashions. It’s become a serious contender for online/digital advertising dollars from all types of businesses, both B2C and B2B.

Most of you reading may still believe that the TikTok audience is made up of 20-somethings and younger. Again, it’s not what you think!

Dennis Yu is the CEO of BlitzMetrics and co-author of The Definitive Guide to TikTok Advertising. Yu’s company has placed more than a billion dollars’ worth of ads for its clients on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google and others, using ads and algorithms to drive sales. And now he’s focusing his efforts on TikTok.

I had the chance to interview Yu on Amazing Business Radio, where he said, “TikTok in 2022 is Facebook in 2007. It’s now the largest property on the Internet. It has more traffic than Google. It has a higher average watch time than Facebook or Netflix. People are spending more time watching short 15- to 30-second videos than two-hour-length feature films.”

Yes, TikTok has more traffic than Google! In 2021, TikTok was ranked No. 7 on social media platforms. In 2022, just one year later, it is now ranked No. 1. In Q1 2022, TikTok became the most downloaded app in the world.

According to the Search Engine Journal, TikTok is becoming a search engine. SEJ staffer, Matt Southern, posed the question, “What if people started using TikTok as a search engine?” In his research, he found people treating the app as a search provider, some even preferring it over Google. So, his question turned from “What if …?” to “What now …?”

The point is that as a business, you can’t ignore TikTok as a viable marketing and sales channel. TikTok does an amazing job of understanding what the user is watching and will quickly start serving up content that is exactly what the user is interested in. That means that as soon as a customer watches a company’s TikTok video, the platform will start serving up more of the company’s content for the user to enjoy.

I asked Yu how businesses can use TikTok. Knowing that the podcast focuses on customer service and experience, he related his first tip to digital customer care. Today’s customers turn to the Internet, specifically social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, to ask for help or complain to a company. And more and more, they are turning to TikTok. “Whether you are on TikTok or not, your customers are there talking about you on TikTok,” Yu said. “Remember the early days of Twitter when many brands said, ‘We’re not ready to be on Twitter?’ And then they think that somehow not being on Twitter means that people can’t talk about them.”

As more customers turn to TikTok for customer care, it’s imperative that you (your company or brand) be the one posting the answers, not other customers. Your company must control the narrative even if customers are sharing correct information. You must be visible on this extremely popular channel. And you don’t need to spend a lot of money doing so. Posting simple, non-professionally edited videos are just as effective as highly produced videos.

Going beyond customer service and experience, whatever your company does or sells, B2B or B2C, just create a short video with tips and ideas that would interest your customers. Shorter is better. Keep it under a minute—even 30 seconds. TikTok rewards you for videos that are watched in completion. The likelihood of someone watching a 30-second video to the end is much higher than a video that lasts four or five minutes. And while not necessary, if you can make it funny or entertaining, that’s always a bonus.

Yu’s advice is simple. Just create content. Then let TikTok’s algorithm do its job and find people (your customers and potential customers) interested in whatever you’re posting. Yu quoted the famous line by Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner) from the movie Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” I’ll quote a famous shoe and apparel manufacturer, Nike: “Just do it!”

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Unlocking New Frontiers of Innovation with Strategic Partnerships

Leave a reply

Unlocking New Frontiers of Innovation with Strategic Partnerships

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, the idea of an organization achieving greatness alone is a myth. The most impactful innovations rarely happen in isolation; they are the product of collaboration, shared vision, and complementary strengths. As a thought leader in human-centered change and innovation, I’ve seen firsthand that strategic partnerships are not just a business tactic—they are a core competency for unlocking new frontiers of innovation and creating value that no single company could achieve on its own.

For too long, companies have viewed their competitive advantage through a narrow lens: what can we do better than everyone else? This mindset, while valuable for internal efficiency, can also lead to a dangerous form of tunnel vision. It prevents us from seeing the powerful opportunities that lie just beyond our organizational walls. Strategic partnerships are about embracing this external reality, recognizing that our biggest weaknesses can often be solved by another’s greatest strengths, and that by joining forces, we can create something far greater than the sum of our individual parts.

A strategic partnership is more than a simple transaction or a vendor relationship. It’s a deliberate, long-term collaboration built on a foundation of trust, shared goals, and a deep understanding of each other’s value proposition. It requires us to move beyond a culture of “not invented here” to one of “co-created here.” The power of these partnerships lies in their ability to:

  • Accelerate Innovation: Gain access to new technologies, intellectual property, and R&D capabilities without the long and costly internal development cycle.
  • Access New Markets: Leverage a partner’s established distribution channels, brand reputation, or customer base to enter markets that would otherwise be inaccessible.
  • Enhance Customer Experience: Combine complementary products or services to create a more holistic and valuable offering for the end user.
  • Mitigate Risk: Share the financial burden and operational risks associated with launching a new product or entering a new and uncertain market.

Case Study 1: The Nike and Apple Partnership

The Challenge: Marrying Physical Fitness with Digital Technology

In the mid-2000s, both Nike and Apple were industry leaders, but in completely separate domains. Nike dominated the world of athletic apparel, and Apple was revolutionizing personal technology. Both companies were aware of the growing consumer interest in personal fitness tracking but were individually limited in their ability to create a truly seamless, integrated experience. Nike had the expertise in footwear and athletic performance, but lacked the technological prowess. Apple had the technology, but lacked the deep understanding of athletic culture and the trust of the running community.

The Strategic Partnership and Innovation:

In 2006, the two giants formed a strategic partnership that was revolutionary for its time. They collaborated to create the “Nike+iPod Sport Kit.” This innovation involved a small sensor placed in a Nike shoe that wirelessly communicated with an iPod Nano, tracking the runner’s speed, distance, and calories burned. This was not a simple co-branding exercise; it was a deep collaboration between engineering, design, and marketing teams from both companies. The partnership allowed Nike to offer a tech-forward product and Apple to expand the functionality of its iPod into a new, lifestyle-focused category.

The Results:

The Nike+iPod partnership was a resounding success. It created a powerful new product category and a highly engaged community of users. The collaboration set the stage for the modern era of fitness wearables and was a precursor to the Apple Watch, which now integrates similar fitness tracking capabilities. By combining their core competencies, Nike and Apple were able to create a product that neither could have produced on their own, demonstrating the power of strategic partnerships to unlock entirely new markets and product experiences.

Key Insight: Strategic partnerships can create entirely new product categories and markets by combining complementary expertise from different industries.

Case Study 2: The Starbucks and Spotify Collaboration

The Challenge: Enhancing Customer and Employee Experience

In the mid-2010s, Starbucks was looking for a way to deepen its connection with customers and improve the employee experience. At the same time, Spotify, a leading music streaming service, was looking for new ways to expand its user base and build deeper brand loyalty. Both companies understood the powerful role of music in shaping an atmosphere and a brand experience.

The Strategic Partnership and Innovation:

The two companies announced a comprehensive partnership. Spotify became the official music partner for Starbucks, allowing baristas to help curate the in-store playlists from a centralized library of music. This wasn’t just a simple licensing agreement. Starbucks employees, who are avid music fans, were given premium Spotify accounts, and the partnership created a feedback loop where they could influence the music played in stores. Furthermore, Starbucks’ rewards members were offered unique access to exclusive Spotify playlists and could influence the music being played in-store. This initiative blurred the lines between a retail experience and a digital one.

The Results:

The Starbucks-Spotify partnership was a win for everyone involved. Starbucks enhanced its in-store ambiance and provided a unique benefit to its most loyal customers, strengthening their emotional connection to the brand. The partnership also served as a powerful employee engagement tool, empowering baristas to take ownership of the in-store experience and creating a sense of shared community. For Spotify, the collaboration provided a massive new platform for brand exposure and user acquisition, introducing the service to millions of Starbucks customers who might not have otherwise used it. It’s a prime example of a strategic partnership that created value not just for the companies, but for their employees and customers as well.

Key Insight: A well-designed strategic partnership can create value for multiple stakeholders—including customers and employees—by integrating complementary brand experiences.

The Path Forward: Embracing a Collaborative Future

In a world of increasing complexity and rapid change, the ability to form and manage strategic partnerships is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity for survival and growth. The most forward-thinking leaders will move beyond a mindset of isolated competition and embrace a new era of collaborative innovation. They will understand that the most significant challenges and the greatest opportunities require the combined strength of diverse perspectives, expertise, and resources. By thoughtfully identifying potential partners and building relationships based on trust and shared purpose, we can unlock new frontiers of innovation and create a more valuable future for our businesses, our customers, and our world.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Three Ways Technology Improves the Retail Customer Experience

1 Reply

Three Ways Technology Improves the Retail Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

E-commerce hasn’t killed retail—it’s just transformed it.

For years we’ve been hearing that retail is dead, and the rash of store closures in cities across the country would seem to confirm the trend. The local mall no longer serves as a de facto community hub, if it’s even stayed open at all.

Given what we think we know, would it surprise you to learn that retail sales in 2021 were actually up more than 10% over the previous year, topping $4.44 trillion? Although fears of recession loom, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that both personal income and consumer spending continued to rise in June. And while e-commerce may be an unstoppable force, much of this consumer spending is still happening in brick-and-mortar stores.

That said, there’s no question that the retail experience is changing—and must continue to change. E-commerce growth and tech developments, in general, have transformed customer expectations. I always advise my clients to meet customers where they are, and where retail shoppers are right now is standing in an aisle, smartphone in hand, comparing prices and reading online reviews. Technology has become an integral part of the retail experience, and retailers would be fools to ignore that.

Luckily, they aren’t fools. Whether saving their customers time or offering them unique experiences, retailers are incorporating technology to improve the customer experience. Here are three ways they’re doing it:

1. Smart Screens Digitize the In-Store Experience – You probably remember the first time you went to fill your soda cup at your favorite fast-casual spot and found yourself facing a dizzying digital array of fountain soda choices. Smart screens are on the march, and they’re not just in restaurants anymore.

Clothing retailers are using touchscreens to help customers build their wardrobes, while furniture stores use similar tech to let shoppers design rooms in their homes. Smart screens can offer retail customers what they love about online shopping—plentiful product information, eye-catching photos and on-the-spot promotions—in an in-store setting.

Consider the cooler aisle at Walgreens, where high-resolution smart screens from Cooler Screens have transformed the drugstore chain’s fridge and freezer doors. Shoppers no longer have to brave an icy blast—they can see the beverages and frozen treats inside at a glance without even opening the door. Plus, they can get calorie counts and take advantage of instant deals—and soon will also see customer ratings and reviews.

Data showed that 90% of Walgreens customers prefer the new smart screen cooler doors to the traditional kind. For retailers looking to bridge the online/in-store gap, smart screens present the opportunity to both accomplish some point-of-sale digital marketing and enhance the customer experience.

2. Click-and-Collect Services Save Time – Another way retailers are meeting their customers’ hybrid shopping expectations is by beefing up their click-and-collect capabilities. Buying items online and picking them up in person offers consumers the best of both shopping worlds. They can browse a store’s product selection on their desktop or phone, and once their order is assembled, there’s no wait or shipping expense. Curbside pickup goes one better by allowing people to order products online and pick them up without stepping foot in the store.

I admit it’s not rocket science, but I believe that high-quality customer service depends on listening to what customers want, and many of them clearly value this hassle-free shopping experience. The 2022 Click-and-Collect Forecast shows that U.S. buyers will spend $95.87 billion via click-and-collect this year, a 19.4% increase over 2021. Retailers that expand their click-and-collect offerings stand to increase revenue by giving customers more of what they want.

Enabling this experience requires an up-to-date e-commerce website that’s optimized for mobile. Furthermore, retailers will need to achieve seamless integration between their online shopping platforms and on-the-ground operations. Many are already adapting by adding more parking spaces for click-and-collect customers and hiring more personal shoppers to gather orders.

3. Self-Service Improves Convenience – Another thing the e-commerce revolution has changed is customers’ expectations of self-service. From product page to shopping cart to checkout, the typical online shopping experience is a solo affair. While a retail store offers the possibility of assistance from a real person, many shoppers would rather take care of themselves. Smart retailers are using tech to let them.

Digital self-service kiosks help in-store shoppers get their bearings, look up product information, scan prices and see whether the item they want is in stock—and order it on the spot if it’s not. Retailers’ mobile apps enable customers to locate products, read reviews, compare prices and pounce on in-store discounts. By offering the right tech assistance, retailers give their customers a sense of control.

When customers think of self-service, self-checkout is usually the first thing that comes to mind, but even that is evolving. Going beyond the usual “Scan your first item and put it in the bag,” Amazon has launched fully autonomous checkouts. In its Amazon Go stores, customers scan a barcode going in and get charged electronically for purchased items as they leave. Instead of making customers do more work, Amazon employs its “Just Walk Out” technology to make customers’ lives easier and the retail experience friction-free.

Technology has greatly impacted people’s lives, and the retail setting is no exception. Retailers that use tech to improve the customer experience will see increased profit and customer satisfaction. Research has shown that experiences increase happiness more than things, so retailers that can provide both are setting themselves up for success.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

The Reasons Physicians are Losing the Branding Wars

Leave a reply

The Reasons Physicians are Losing the Branding Wars

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

Maybe the last time you walked into a retail-based clinic, you did not see an MD. Maybe the same thing happened at your hospital outpatient clinic or an urgent care center. Physician “extenders” and advanced practice professionals, like primary care pharmacists, nurse practitioners and physician assistants are winning the war on branding. They and their professional associations have done a good job branding their services while complacent doctors have not. What happened? Doctors are now “providers”. The latest spin is to call yourself a surgicalist. A surgicalist is a highly trained, board-certified surgeon who provides emergency surgical care within a dedicated hospital setting – the foundation of a surgical hospitalist program. A surgicalist career path affords talented surgeons the chance to design the life they want.

Staffing shortages among healthcare providers are having numerous downstream effects on everything from patient care to reimbursement and thinning margins. But they’re also causing a shift in public perception: More people now trust pharmacists to play a larger role in their care management, according to new research from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City and Express Scripts Pharmacy.

With more than half (51.8%) of the U.S. population experiencing at least one chronic condition, and one-quarter suffering from multiple chronic conditions, prescription medications are often the first line of defense to help patients manage these conditions, the report found.

In the period from 2015–2018, nearly one-half of the U.S. population was using at least one prescription drug, nearly one-quarter (21.4%) were using three or more, and over 10% were using five or more prescription drugs.

All of that is putting pharmacists in the spotlight – along with the rise of chronic disease, increased medication use and shifts to value-based payment models.

Doctors don’t understand that branding a service, particularly one that is becoming more and more commoditized, is not like branding a product, like toothpaste. There are four keys to branding a service:

1. Don’t Mass Market To Your Target Market Take a look at the doctor ads. They are filled with platitudes like “quality care”, “personalized service” and “caring staff”. I would sure hope so. But, marketing to the masses with platitudes is like a CPA saying “I can do your taxes”. Instead, you need to “touch” your patients with highly targeted messages.

2. Focus On Relevance Over Differentiation Most product branding is about cheaper, smarter, faster, better compared to the competition. Service branding is about how I can solve your unique problem.

3. Worry About Growing Revenue, Not Market Share. Payer mix is an obvious difference when it comes to sickcare branding compared to product branding. As we all know, doctors don’t make the same profit seeing all patients. Some, in fact, are loss leaders. Soon, all of sick care might be a loss leader.

4. Help Your People Be Your Brand. Particularly in sickcare, your people are your brand, including the doctors. You are the product, not the doctor.

When it comes to these four elements, non-physicians are doing a better job than physicians and they are building brand equity. Take a page out of the FedEx playbook, and expect to see

  • A genuine and defensible market position
  • Improved external awareness, perception, and desirability
  • The development of a collaborative internal culture
  • Alignment and integration of all messaging
  • Revenue growth

Here are 10 ways to beat Commodity Care. For doctors to brand their services and win as incumbents in the market, they need to practice Othercare .

In the face of competition, substitutes and turf wars, doctors need to do more about their sustainable competitive advantage, particularly when it comes to practicing at the top of their license, building brand equity and innovating, all things that, up to this time, they have not done because they didn’t have to.

Maybe then, they won’t call you a provider anymore, doctor.

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.