What are you really buying?
In a world of multiple channels, cascading competing products and vendors, what really are you buying? Many items have become not much more than commodities. Yet there are products and retailers that stand out. Apple, Nordstrom, MEC (Mountain Equipment Coop). So why do these products and retailers stand out? The brands are not selling products, the brands are selling an experience.
Apple provides outstanding design that creates intuitive ease of use. Apple has really differentiated themselves from all other competitors because of their design. It is their design that creates the Apple experience and consumers are buying this experience as opposed to the phone.
MEC sells mountain gear of their own private label brand and top product brands. Being a prolific buyer of mountain gear, I humbly submit that MEC is priced higher and their private label gear is not as good as most leading brands. I still shop at MEC because of the ease of use on their website and I enjoy the in store experience. Each store is an adventure wonderland. I leave the store excited for my next adventure whatever I buy there.
There have been volumes written about the customer service at Nordstrom. So much that when I was in Chicago I had to see for myself. I was not disappointed, in fact my favorite winter dress coat is from that trip. But it was not the coat that made me buy, it was the customer service that was outstanding.
Each of these above brands have focused on an aspect of the customer experience that they could excel at better than anyone in their industry (design, in store experience, customer service) and that has become their competitive advantage and allowed them to flourish. (And yes, they also have to be good at everything else as well, like logistics, product offering, etc.)
While the four Ps of marketing (Product, Placement, Promotion, Price) continue to be important and must be done right, the aspect of your business that will make you memorable is not any one of them. The customer experience you create is your best chance of standing out in the crowd and having a competitive advantage over your competitors.
Steve Whittington is President of Roadmap Agency Inc. He has also served for over a decade as a member of the Executive Team of Flaman Group of Companies an award-winning organization and has over 25 years of executive experience. Steve’s current board work includes serving as; President of Glenora Child Care Society; and Co-Chair of the Marketing Program Advisory Committee for NAIT’s JR Shaw School of Business. Previous notable board work included, Chair of the board for Flaman Fitness Canada, a national retailer, a Director for a meal prep internet Startup Mealife and Chair of Lethbridge Housing authority, the third-largest Social housing NGO in Alberta.
Academically, Steve was an instructor of Project Management at Lethbridge College for seven years. Steve holds a Bachelor of Commerce Honours degree; he is a Certified Sales Professional (CSP), Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Marketing Specialist (CMS) and (CCXP) Certified Customer Experience Professional.
Steve’s first book Thriving in the Customer Age – 8 Key Metrics to Transform your Business Results teaches about the customer journey and provides a guiding framework spanning all stages of the customer experience. The book explains how every metric impacts an organization and how leaders can best utilize each metric to provide a stellar customer experience. Everyone knows the customer is the most important part of a business. This book provides the tools to improve an organization’s customer experience and drastically transform business results.
Recently Steve’s Blog has been profiled as one of the Top 75 Customer Experience blogs