When Kevin Roberts of Saatchi and Saatchi proposed the concept of Lovemarks (http://www.lovemarks.com) it represented a paradigm shift in brand communication away from the ‘hard sell’ and towards the creation of a desire or ‘love for the brand.’ Whether through celebrity endorsement and association – think the latest perfume ranges – humorous advertising or creative design, ‘love’ was now intended to be truly ‘all around’. Perhaps not the kind of love that makes you want to hug trees, but a warm ‘I love that brand’ glow, that infuses an offering with a certain mood.

Critically, this approach was not meant to be some esoteric exercise but a genuine and fundamental means by which brands could differentiate themselves in an environment where both products and services were fast becoming indistinguishable from each other.

Consider for instance the insurance industry. Faced with a plethora of similar competitors...

The promise of Customer Experience is to improve the return on loyalty through better customer emotional engagement. But what about in recessionary times when the simple survival of the organisation in the short-term is at stake and cost cutting is a top priority, how can Customer Experience help here?

We do not deny that cost cutting is an important part of your business and should be undertaken in lean times (or at least seriously considered); the point is that you want to cut those parts of your experience that are a cost, not those parts of your experience that are fundamental to differentiating yourself from the competition and drive value.

So, how can we determine the difference between those parts of your experience open to cost cutting and those that should not be cut as they are value driving?

The first thing here is to understand that when we look at ‘what to cut’ and ‘what to keep’ we are looking across the whole Customer Experience. This means we...

For about a decade, my Beyond Philosophy colleagues and I have been fortunate to help some of the world's most recognizable brands improve their customer experiences. Through that work, I've recognized the value of an international perspective on customer experience management (CEM). To this end, we recently conducted a survey to gauge the state of CEM around the world. The 2011 Beyond Philosophy Global Customer Experience Management Survey had intriguing findings, and we believe they have significant implications for the CEM industry.

The research was conducted in two ways:

• We analyzed data from a pool of more than 8,000 customer experience executives across 2,106 companies covering a total of 239 countries and regions. We selected the 8,000 from "CE-active companies."
• We conducted in-depth interviews with 53 industry executives and experts whose official titles included the phrase "customer experience." Our sample size represents a balanced cross-...

Following on from the earlier Blog on the concept of Silent Attrition, I thought I’d enclose what has been in the Customer Experience world quite a useful model. This is from Cherry Tree research and highlights the high defection rate from the ‘do not complain’ but had a poor experience segment! This is like the Convergys model and resonates highly within Social Media: especially when you think about how ‘do not complain’ can turn into ‘but I’ll talk about it any way in my Social Media.

One word of warning, Gartner has just released a useful article: Social Media is the New CRM.  To quote from...