If you log onto http://www.TheBorgata.com The Borgata hotel, casino and leisure complex in Atlantic City, the website says “Take me to my happy place” just above the menu of things to do there.
Only six words, but shows a real understanding of how to see yourself through your customer’s eyes and be clear on the part you are offering to play in their lives.
Starbucks positions itself a The Third Place (a respite between home and work). The Borgata presents itself as ‘My’ Happy Place (more personal and also a lot clearer as a proposition than ‘The Third Place’, which means nothing to most people and is a bit pseud-y, to be honest). So, what part do you play in your customers’ lives? What place are you, from their perspective? How do you fit into their lives? This is the new marketing. It’s not about you as a product or service or company. It’s about you as a piece of someone else’s jigsaw, and about how you make them feel.
As Richard Branson will be doing a Q & A at ECMW in May, it’s worth noting that Virgin has refined its Upper Class customer experience still further.
You may have seen their new campaign, which is all about whizzing through security to their clubhouse. The point is that Virgin chooses to compete on the customer ‘touchpoints’ (the parts of your business process that touch the customer, affect how they feel about you, and collectively make up their customer experience) that other airlines do not even think about.
Here’s the ad (below), a great reminder, if you need one, that you need to design your customer experience to be distinctive, which I’ll be helping you with at ECMW 2008’s Customer Experience Summit Monday 12 May, in a case study presentation with David Rowntree, Retail Divisional Director at Waterstone’s, on ‘Boosting Sales Through The Customer Experience’ :
Posted by: Shaun Smith, http://www.shaunsmithco.com . As well as his case study at the Customer Experience Summit on 12 May, Shaun will be chairing the Brand & Marketing Innovation Track at ECMW 2008 on Day Two of the Main Conference, Wednesday 14 May.
Virgin’s group brand manager for customer service, Michael Murphy, will be talking to us at ECMW 2008 in an extended session on Wednesday 14th May, called ‘Living The Brand: Bringing The Brand to Life Through Customer Service’. Here’s an interesting slideshare from Michael that I’ve just come across that gives you a preview of some of his thinking and practice:
Time is a constant. Time doesn’t start and stop. It’s continuous. Yet great events have beginnings and endings. We all love going to great events to listen to great ideas from great people, network with like minded people and recharge our intellectual batteries. You look forward to the start and you regret when it ended. You may wish you could be at a conference everyday.
So why don’t you? Leaders do. They think all the time. Learn all the time. You can. Blogs are socialism for leadership ideas. They are great for accessing great ideas continually. Not just at events. You can access the thoughts and suggestions of great people every day. A problem shared, an answer posted. Intellectual batteries charged daily! So that’s what this blog’s for. To stretch time. To bring great ideas every day up to the ECMW event. And after it too ! Enjoy As the the famous Mr Shakespeare would have put it:
To blog or not to blog, that is the question
Whether tis nobler in the mind to struggle alone
Or to share ideas and suffer the slings and arrows
Of outrageous unfortunates who take arms against your sea of troubles
And by opposing them together, end them?
So get posting your comments, questions and problems and start chatting with all the wonderful gurus you can tap into.
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