#5 UNCX NEWSLETTER | Our Responsibility
PLUS: Framing Your CX Strategy | Apple’s Vision Pro | The Belonging Movement | Latest Consumer Trends | CX Megatrend Report | Smart Thinking
Our responsibility
As CX leaders we have responsibility - to meet the needs of consumers suffering in the polycrisis and who are changing habits, needs, purpose and seeking brands to help them. Not just as a consumer but as a citizen. We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by digital proliferation, but we’ve been building sandcastles as the tide comes in. Failed promises, broken processes, trust breakdowns, envy-driven consumerism, machine-gunning customers for their attention and more wallet, and failing them too often when they seek human-to-human help. Our responsibility isn’t just to put food on our table, but to help in any way we can to build a society that can have stronger, more reliable paths for purpose, direction, growth and well-being. As I continue to highlight new consumer thinking, new consumer trends, new motivations and purpose, and fresh approaches to CX strategies. I hope it helps your unthinking.
Please forward the newsletter to a friend or colleague if you enjoy it. And if this email was forwarded to you, get your own by hitting the button below.
As promised, the 1st in my series on CX strategy
Starting Your Strategy Journey: Framing the Challenge.
The discussions to have that helps challenge thinking before scoping a strategy. What does it mean to frame the challenge? Why is framing so integral to starting your work? I always try to start strategy workshops with a series of discussions to help explore, challenge and frame thinking.
If you’re developing your strategy, my list may help guide you. If you already have a strategy, try using my list to test it. (And please let me know how it fits).
Most importantly, read this through a consumer lens.
My framework
#1: Do you already have a ‘Reason to Choose’?
A ‘good brand’ tells clear, meaningful stories; engaging consumers on an emotional level and influencing the way they perceive our brand. It’s no coincidence that some of the world’s most valuable brands are amongst the world’s most recognised and successful ones.
Brand experience is your customers (and your future customers) feelings as they interact with you, see or hear about you. These feelings and expectations sum up how your brand is perceived across ads, online UX, and storytelling, to support, product reliability and more - and the best brand experiences encourage consumers to buy into you on an emotional level.
Discussion Topic: What feelings, beliefs and behaviours is your brand demonstrating as distinctive differences. Are these strong enough to frame our CX design thinking?
#2: Are you Being Un-Stupid?
A CX strategy is not merely to be un-stupid. (See my Un-Stupid Strategy Rule #1 here). Merely being un-stupid is the booby prize. It doesn’t mean unique, and it certainly doesn’t mean differentiated. It may meet the standards customers expect of you in your service layer, but unless all of your competitors are rubbish in their service layer, you’re failing to create a meaningful difference for yourself. Your difference will lie across price, product or emotion, or a combination of the three.
Your brand’s strength is - but not always - built through your customers' experiences, succeeding best when meeting needs. And this is your starting point - knowing your customers’ needs. You may satisfy them through your product, pricing, emotions or all three. If you want to consistently outperform, emotional engagement is stickier, because long-term, most Product, Price and Service standards can be copied or matched. For a strategy that outperforms you often must design experiences that reflect your brand's essence and create meaningful, brand-reinforcing memories – branded experiences.
Discussion Topic: Are you earning the right to offer experiences by first competing very effectively in the service layer?
The opposite must also be a strategy.
Roger L. Martin’s simple strategy test asks, “Is the opposite of our strategy also a strategy?”
The point is this: If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the same strategy as you.
That means that you are likely to be indistinguishable from your competitors.
#3: Interactions aren’t Engagement
Don’t mistake interactions for engagement. Interactions happen in your ‘service layer’. Experiences happen in your ‘experience’ layer. It’s different across sectors but, typically, 80-90 per cent of your customer interactions will take place in your service layer. This is your table stakes layer where a bill is paid, a delivery made, a call answered, a contract signed, and so on. Customers don’t want to remember these ‘experiences’ but they are important - don’t diminish them as they build consumer trust - but they’re not usually critical to a customer’s experience unless done badly. Consistency creates trust – a crucial enabler because you can’t have long-term engagement without it. Trust breaks if promises aren’t kept or when poor service is inexcusable. Interactions normally need to be frictionless, must work, and must work consistently. You have to get the service layer dead-on right. Because you have to earn the right to offer experiences, the 10-20 per cent where you create preference, memory, and emotion.
Discussion Topic: What are the consequences if all remembered experiences by your customers are the same as everyone else’s? How can you change that?
#4: Think Archetypes
We’re after mindset. So I prefer thinking of archetypes, not demographics. When thinking archetypes you’ll discover common needs and wants across age, sex, religion, geography, education or income. Archetypes humanise - they have similar needs across different ethnicities, ages, and locations.
While demographics answer the question “who,” archetypes answers “why.”
Find your archetypes. You may have several, so recognise them, their behaviours, and their needs. Then you can cut through with relevant messages and experiences to attract their attention and work out the best way to communicate and tell stories to each. (For example, confident traditionalists don’t follow social media or interact with brands or retailers on social media).
Today’s largest archetype (cohort) can be described as confident traditionalist. At around 18 per cent of the population they display distinct behavioural characteristics different to other archetypes. Difficult to influence, they rarely make impulse buys nor are early triers of new products. They’re frugal, frequently focusing on low prices and saving money. Discounts and sales can sometimes influence their purchasing habits, causing them to choose the cheapest alternative. Traditionalists don’t enjoy the shopping experience. The more convenient and efficient the buying process, the more likely they are to repeat purchase. They value in-store shopping above online, and are more likely to do their research and make purchases in-store. Source: Euromonitor International
Discussion Topic: Do you know your archetypes? What are they? What can they be?
#5: Are you Different?
Clearly articulating what is different about your brand, and using that as a framework for all elements of your CX, gets you to target memorable and distinctive experiences that matter to your customers. And, more closely connecting customer experience to your brand identity will also supercharge your brand and pricing power. When customers feel an emotional bond between their needs, expectations, and experiences, they are likelier to be loyal. Your brand ‘feels’ right.
So for experiences to succeed, you should aim to create a strong emotive identity rooted in what makes your brand meaningfully different. Identify what makes you stand out from the crowd, then communicate it and execute it.
An effective CX strategy doesn’t have to be unique in every way but is something in a consumer’s memory separating your brand from another. Different is hard to substitute, not easily copied, and more readily comes to mind (saliency) when building mental connections with consumers.
There are, of course, many ways to be different. Some are more obvious - lowest price, for example (think Ryanair). Or the highest price (think Loius Vitton). Others exist in the minds of consumers as memories, knowledge, feelings, and experiences. Different can also be the product design, your purpose, convenience, packaging, speed, and many other factors, and that may interact with each other. (Think Apple, Patagonia, Amazon, Dove and Ferrari).
For Ferrari, it wasn’t simply about fast/luxury. Wanting to evoke Thrill as a key emotive difference, they re-engineered their perfect exhaust to evoke the exact noise, without any performance loss, that research informed them was most aurally thrilling for their customers. It took them three years to get the noise exactly right.
Discussion Topic: What are your differences, what can they be, and how are they/can they be delivered?
#6: Digital is not a channel
This may surprise you. (I’m sure to get some emails about this statement). And, surely, everyone and everything is doing digital, right?
But my point is, digital is a mindset. And how you use it is the strategy. Your way of doing things. It’s thinking about how to use digital’s capabilities to improve how your customers are served. This should be grounded in understanding each step of your customer’s purchasing journey—regardless of channel—and thinking about how digital capabilities can design and deliver the best possible experience, across all parts of the business. Digital and mobile devices are now fundamental to customer experience. From Uber to Mobile payments, no one knew these apps were indispensable until they were indispensable. One example: Nike uses their mobile app to go beyond ‘selling sports shoes and other gear ’ to become a motivational coaching companion to help us reach our goals. They use the channel to bring innovation and inspiration to us, embedded in our day-to-day life. That’s both Personalisation and Purpose. Other examples; Speed (Amazon’s app and web), Loyalty (Starbucks’ app).
Discussion Topic: Think of other examples using digital channels to strengthen engagement and extend a customers’ experience.
#7: Choose wisely, not epically
I’m not sure that ‘epically’ is a word, but my point is: You’ll likely have limited resources. This is one reason not to try to be epic in everything you do. Why? With limited resources, you must choose how to spend them to best effect in a few standout ways. Better to do three things superbly than ten tamely. But one reason I eschew everything epic is that ‘epic’ wanes as a memorable experience - over time it becomes normal, not epic, forcing you to raise the bar further.
Discussion Topic: Can you identify where your biggest investments offer the most important paybacks?
#8: The “Better” trap
You may be a better version than X, but that does little to differentiate you. (Better may actually be worse if it costs you more). Different and Distinctive is what matters.
Discussion Topic: do you have any Different or Distinctive elements to your experiences and promise? What would you want them to be?
#9: Customers don’t always want your brand to care
But they always want you to be fit for purpose. Table stakes, and executed well.
Far too many of us talk about delivering the most basic, simple, and essential of customer tasks as if we’re innovating, even caring. But there’s a BUT - being merely functional won’t get you first prize.
Discussion Topic: Are your metrics driving operational functionality or the stickiness of your customers engagement?
#10: Are you defining yourself by your competitors?
Defining yourself against your competitors ties your identity to theirs, which can be limiting. Where are you/can you be different? Even better, where can you be distinctive? Strong brands say and do something distinctive compared to other brands.
If you’re truly a brand-led company, you need to send the signal that your competition shouldn’t register on your consumers’ radar.
Discussion Topic: Challenge yourself to dig deeper. Go past the obvious and discover an approach that excites you just as much as it scares you.
#11: Are you in ‘The Dive’?
One common and fatal mistake with CX strategy is ‘the dive’ - we jump in and waste resources on ‘experiences’ without context, that don’t add value, create brand dissonance by confusing consumers, or supercharges your service layer to the status of ‘epic’ when it doesn’t matter.
Discussion Topic: Are you driving ‘experiences’ for their own sake? Where is the brand fit? Where is the fit with your financial objectives - for example, improving loyalty or more mobile sales?
#12: There is no ‘best practice’
When thinking strategically, the only best practice you should follow is what is appropriate to your competitive context, what customer needs your competition is missing, how you will meet them, how you’ll meet your company’s financial objectives and how you best use the resources you have available.
Discussion Topic: Are you finding the gaps? And in the areas where you want to be standout – those fundamental to how you will differentiate – are you aiming to be better than best practice and keep improving to remain ahead.
#13: Swot
Have you read these two books?
A colleague, the late Sampson Lee, was the proponent of the PIG theory, Pain Is Good, and I recommend reading his articles, starting here, and if you like the theory, follow it up with his book.
Discussion Topic: Do you understand the thinking behind JTBD (Jobs To Be Done)?
#14: Why is Ryanair so hated, but so successful?
Ryanair is one of Europe's low-cost airlines. It consistently ranks at or near the bottom in all customer satisfaction surveys. Yet it’s grown into Europe’s biggest airline by far, and by most metrics.
Discussion Topic: Why? (Explores why ‘Good’ is not equal to all brands, and there are price, expectation management, and other influencing factors that are vital to attracting preferences and choices)
Yes, I too have a take on Apple’s Vision Pro
Apple didn’t say AR or VR, and it didn’t say ‘metaverse.’ Meta talks about a place somehow different from ‘the internet.’ For Apple, it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps and places.
On a Vision Pro, the ‘Meta Metaverse’ is one app among many. Developers can make whatever they want. Apple’s strategy is straightforward: Make the best headset, charge early adopters a lot of money for it, charge developers a slice of their app earnings through the App Store, release early to allow time for app developers to discover use cases, and reposition the narrative away from VR and Meta to Spacial Computing and Apple.
Apple isn’t primarily a VR device. It’s an AR device. When you put on a Quest you’re placed into another world, but when you put on the Vision you don’t go anywhere. As Apple puts it, you look through it. Apple's focus on AR – virtual objects placed in the real world – as opposed to Meta's interest in VR and virtual worlds, is telling. The company has always been about using computers to enhance our connection with our environment, culture and other people, rather than escaping from them.
Apple is also a trusted brand among consumers. Apple trades in trust. So the Apple announcement was a masterclass in product narrative focusing on what it can do, and hiding its complexity. The plumbing is safe. Is trusted by design.
No one agrees on what spatial computing’s killer use case might be. It could be commercial (surgeons, engineers and architects have dabbled), educational or experience. Me? I’m also betting on personal AI because the next big market will be Personal AI.
The Belonging Movement
So much human behaviour, thinking, and emotion comes from our psychological need to belong. Belonging matters, so much that it’s a source of our self-esteem.
Now translate that to experiences, with communities aligned with the company, the brand promise and what it stands for. Social identity, a component of personal identity, involves defining ourselves based on our social groups.
Social identity is relevant because social groups influence our choices and preferences. Communities of belonging on platforms like Reddit, Discord, and Twitch, are connecting citizens and consumers to engage and talk about shared topics. There’s a digital channel for everything and anything, it seems, from vinyl recordings, sports, home renovation, ghost-hunting, activist causes, skincare, coffee-making, and many more. They exist globally and locally, off- and online, creating places where people feel they can belong.
It’s the Belonging Movement
Many brands rely on social identity, suggesting that as other members of the customer’s social group use a product so should they. So brands are creating social networks exclusively for their customers, essentially forming a social group around their products - because consumers may be more likely to adopt a brand if their social group does, too.
The author and marketing expert Mark Schaefer believes the community is the last great marketing strategy.
Schaefer says, “Helping someone belong to something represents the ultimate marketing achievement. If a customer opts into an engaging, supportive and relevant brand community, we no longer need to lure them into our orbit with ads and SEO, right? What we used to consider marketing is essentially over.”
Schaefer explains that engaging with intrusive advertising and marketing messages isn’t needed once the customer is part of the community. Instead, you will want to find meaningful ways to connect with customers, other meaningful advertising and marketing programs, customer experiences, quality services and products, and the contribution the Brand or company makes to making the world a better place and the customer more of what they want to be.
Example communities
Harley Davidson asked its community of customers to make suggestions that would get them to come back and buy its motorcycles. Tattoo parlours boomed.
Lush, a cosmetics retailer, makes its products cruelty-free, appealing to a cohort of customers against animal testing practices. Those customers are intensely loyal.
These companies (and many others) create communities of customers willing to evangelize the Brand. And they love the companies so much that they provide some of the most powerful and engaging experiences with reviews, referrals, and talking about the brand.
It makes sense.
Brand Differentiation.
A community can create an emotional connection beyond price and product. People like belonging to something, and when they love a brand and find others who think and feel the way they do, they naturally gravitate toward a community. Once people join, they participate at a higher level of brand engagement, and their connection to the business is deeper.
Market Relevance.
It’s a two-way street. You stay relevant by listening to your customers. The community gives you a forum to listen to and engage with. The conversations you hear or join in on can fuel ideas to make you even more relevant to your customers.
Brand Loyalty.
Loyalty is an emotional connection, and communities are a powerful way to drive it. Schaefer shares data to confirm it: Sixty-six per cent of brand community members say they are loyal to the Brand. Twenty-seven per cent of customers say belonging to a brand influences their decision to do business with it. And sixty-six per cent of companies claim their community has a positive impact on customer retention.
If you haven’t already got one, think about community as a powerful loyalty approach.
And to get started, read his latest book, Belonging to the Brand, subtitled Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy, by Mark Schaefer.
My Pick of the Latest Consumer Trends
Trends are your opportunities. Spotting behaviours or wants early enough allows you to differentiate - to lead instead of following your competitors.
Set-Jetting
Set-jetting is now in, with travellers seeking out the same destinations on films seen and books read. Millennials are anything up to x5 more likely to take a set-jetting vacation, compared with 10 per cent of Gen Z adults, 7 per cent of Gen X’ers and 5 per cent of baby boomers. They are also more likely to follow a destination based on a podcast.
Why it matters
It underscores the value of using content to introduce destinations, particularly to millennials - the travel-happy generation, and a generation that favours travel experiences such as a culinary holiday, or rock climbing.
Pret shows the way
Four decades after the first Pret opened – and three years after it faced an existential crisis when the coronavirus pandemic emptied the offices that fed it most of its traffic – it is experiencing a massive expansion.
It seals its status as a barometer of our changing tastes and working habits.
“We were a business built mainly on where people came to work. We used to say we would follow the skyscrapers. But we’ve learnt that it’s not the customer’s job to come to Pret; it’s our job to come to them.” Clare Clough, Pret’s managing director.
And that means the small retailers traditionally serving office workers are in trouble.
Pret talks about retail psychology. Monday’s have become quiet as hybrid workers tend to start the week at home. There has been a change in eating habits, with healthy options replaced by more indulgent pastries, perhaps as part of a wider snacking habit that retailers and food manufacturers started noticing amid the gloom of the pandemic. Vegan is becoming much more popular, and boozy lunches have been replaced with healthy takeaways to eat.
Customers are also eating-in at Pret’s newer, non-central stores, as Pret finds locations with more space for seating.
The sandwich industry tends to lose customers from the bottom end of the market in hard times, but an equal number of people who were previously lunching in restaurants instead start buying sandwiches at the premium end. Pret’s consistency of sales during the price hikes shows that this may be happening.
Why It Matters
When forced to adapt, Pret shows you can have a brownie bar - and eat it.
Megatrends Report
Over the next decade, CX will be reshaped by a set of influential and pervasive megatrend drivers.
Megatrends tend to be transformational, spanning all generations. And they will influence your CX trajectory with their long-term, fundamental shifts in consumer behaviour.
Some will overlap, some intersect and some be contradictory. But they will shape values, priorities and preferences, informing us about lifestyle and buying decisions.
Sign up to get the Megatrend report for free this Summer.
Smart Thinking?
I recently heard a radio advert for a UK utility company. They were asking listeners to ‘join them’ in the fight for a greener, more sustainable, future - whilst elsewhere in the press they are being shamed for wasting resources. It’s called greenwashing. Or, Unauthenticity. A one-word change would have made the ad much more authentic. Instead of asking consumers to ‘join them’ say we will ‘join you’.
More precisely it’s about values.
Values that draw tribes to you. If you’re unauthentic, they aren’t your values and you’re just box-ticking.
Thank you for reading my newsletter. I hope I’m giving you food for thought with fresh CX thinking, and trends driving consumers’ new behaviours. Subscribe, or to share your thoughts or feedback, comment using my substack or contact me at: michaelcooper@pobox.com.
Please show your support by sharing this newsletter with others you think might benefit.
Ive used your 14 or 15 narratives - great way to focus
Very intelligent and inspiring. Thank you for your clarity of mind.