There are two kinds of companies: those focused on products, those focused on customers. You know which when you deal with them.
One company cannot assume both orientations: they’re mutually exclusive. Question: Into which category does your company fit?
The customer-oriented firm changes products frequently to buttress its consistent brand, its value proposition. Alternatively, the product-oriented corporation, like IBM, constantly alters its identity and messaging to match every new SKU and wave of technology.
Guess which orientation begets happier customers and higher profits?
Woven Into a Company’s Fabric
The hit TV sitcom Cheers was about a bar in Boston “where everyone knows your name.” That was its brand. The popular establishment’s neverending lure was experience. It was a customer-focused experience-generator.
Product-focused firms tend to view customer experience as an afterthought to be sprayed on like a coat of paint: they typically build costly, ineffective customer-service departments to mollify angry patrons. Makes zero sense. These brand-killing businesses abound.
Newsflash: real customer orientation is woven into a company’s fabric at inception.
The brand of a typical high-end beauty spa is: “Feel Beautiful, Young, Confident.” Why? It’s the value, the experience customers really want. The tagline is phrased in 100% customer language, with NO mention of product, technology, or jargon. Branding at its finest.
Moreover, it’s common for a client to visit her beautician for hair or skin treatment, to be told that she’s getting “the latest, greatest” product — only to return three weeks later to find that so-called great product replaced with a better one. Yet, the brand stays the same.
Wait, what? The brand stays the same, but the product rotates out?
That’s right: A product fulfills the brand’s value proposition — not the other way around. Never forget this axiom.
Parting Advice to CEOs
Generating experiences requires a strong brand, and vice versa: a concept foreign to many CEOs and boards of directors, especially in the product-centric tech sector. Become intimate with this concept, and make it part of your company’s culture. Brand like a beauty spa.
When building or rebuilding a company, make it an experience-generator — not a product-generator. Products come and go: they’re a means to an end; that end is experience.
Finally, what experience do you want your customers to have? Whatever that is, it’s what they’re having right now. Would you pay for that experience?
© 2015 Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.
About the Author
Marc Rudov is a branding advisor to CEOs,
producer of MarcRudovTV, and author of four books