What separates market leaders from their competitors? What makes your product or service different from the rest? Although a number of factors are important, the one that matters most is the answer to: “Why is the customer spending money with us rather than with our competitors?” At the center of every great market strategy is…
We all engage in business. Every day, we take part in business. It may not be obvious, yet from the moment we wake, we are consumers — by turning on a light; running water; dressing; eating breakfast; gassing up the car; stopping for coffee; and, of course, texting and emailing. Throughout the day, you engage…
Throughout the history of business, we have found ourselves trying to figure out how to maximize our human potential. Meaningful innovation is the most important issue that organizations continue to grapple and struggle with. As mentioned in a previous post, in our pursuit of innovation, we have created complex organizations, with many moving parts, all adding…
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” —Albert Einstein The collective imagination is humankind’s greatest genius. Throughout our human history, as we developed and created the world around us,…
Part Four: Awareness Design, The Fifth Order Over the past two decades, and with the furthering of social media, our business environment has evolved into one in which the relationships between companies and their customers are becoming more open and interlinked. With the acceleration of changes in technology that advance our capability to communicate and…
Part Three: Designing Loyalty to Brands A goal of any product or service is for the customer to emotionally identify with its brand and, as a result, for the customer to trust enough in their experience that they are willing to continue to buy and use it into the future. Furthermore, the aim is that…
Part Two: Designing Customer Happiness What makes for a happy customer experience? How can you better design a user experience that evokes happiness? What are the key elements you need to consider? There’s a broad set of influences and circumstances that are part of every customer experience. At face value, these elements fall into two…
Part One: Perspectives of Empathy In this week’s blog, whether you’re a novice or experienced user of design thinking, I invite you to begin exploring how you can better understand the human experience and use design thinking to design and deliver great customer experiences, as well as apply it to solve the most complex of…
As we unfold the new calendar year, I’d like to begin by focusing on how leaders and their organizations and teams can be more innovative in taking on the challenges that lie ahead. Design guru Thomas Lockwood and I dedicated a great deal of the last two years to researching and defining the makeup…
Culture informs people how to individually and collectively achieve success, and to understand what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. As a result, it is at the core of how people come together to innovate. That being said, how does a leader assess and understand the culture of their organization enough to know what its sources…
