Colin Shaw

Advertising and marketing are part-and-parcel with the financial world. Many people simply decry any form of business or entrepreneurship as exploitative and manipulative. On the one hand, this camp’s perspective contains a kernel of truth: any form of persuasion for one’s own benefit (business profit) presents an ethical dilemma. On the other hand, enterprise drives human innovation and has a vital role in virtually all human societies.

The ICC International Code of Advertising Practice responds to this dilemma with the regulation that “all advertising should be legal, decent, honest and truthful.” But how does one measure honesty or truth? These seem like nebulous concepts.

Best business practices initiate the customer relationship with honesty, decency, and truthful information about your company’s goods and services. Building brand value through honest tactics over the long run always outweighs short-term financial results. For this reason, our primary...

On August 24, 2011 Apple CEO Steve Jobs resigned. Unlike the majority of CEOs who quietly leave their posts, Jobs’ departure from Apple was met with sense of sadness and grief among loyal customers and senior Apple leadership alike.

We all know Steve Jobs has changed the way we use computers, but this does not adequately explain the pervasive feeling of sadness surrounding his departure. Throughout our blog, we’ve analyzed how Apple and other companies link their brand to emotional attachment. So what’s Apple’s secret? And what was Jobs’ role?

A self-described “fan-boy” of Steve Jobs, Stephen Fry answers this question. In a recent interview he states that “Steve Jobs has always recognized our first relationship with anything is an emotional one.” In this case, “anything” refers to Apple products. Fry notes that where other industry leaders idealized a “hard business head” as the key to success, Jobs...

Twentieth century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once reflected, “many [people] are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, [but only] few in pursuit of a goal.” But what does twentieth century philosophy have to do with customer experience? In our 2011 Global Customer Experience Management Survey, we discovered that most companies, with a few notable exceptions – are following a path. And a path is not a goal.

To clarify, our results indicate a paradoxical trend: companies with the most CE resource allocation are often providing the least effective CE. After analyzing data from more than 8,000 CE executives and more than 2,100 companies, as well as the responses to a series of 53 in-depth interviews with CE executives, we learned that while companies are allocating resources to customer relationship management (CRM), many are merely re-branding CRM as customer experience management (CEM).

The difference between CRM and CEM seems trivial,...

We all know that making our customers happy makes us happy, but how exactly do we make our customers happy? You might be inclined to say that the right product at the right price is the way to go, and certainly that is a component of customer happiness, but the experience you provide your customer around that product or service is just as essential.

There’s a science behind igniting happiness that also applies when talking about customer happiness. Evolution has given our bodies four chemicals that trigger different types of happiness: endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Each of these chemicals serves a different purpose. For example serotonin happiness is triggered when you feel important and oxytocin happiness is triggered when we trust those around us. However, none of them are present all the time. After all if you were awash with endorphins...