CHAPTER 5
Examining the Principle of Content
The Beauty of Having a Multitude of Branches
While most kids were watching The Flintstones or The Jetsons, Steve Ells was watching Julia Child’s The French Chef. Years later, when he graduated from college, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life, but Child’s unforgettable voice still lingered in his head, and Ells was sure he was passionate about food. He decided to follow that passion and enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America. After graduating, he moved to San Francisco to work at the famed Stars restaurant.
One day, while visiting a small taqueria in San Francisco’s Mission District, Ells bit into a burrito and had a vision: Could a simple and relatively quick item like a burrito be transformed into something even more unique?
Ells decided to act on this vision. He found a small building and, with help from his dad to the tune of an $85,000 loan and equity purchase, Ells launched his first casual restaurant. Unlike other fast-food joints, Ells’s establishment featured super-fresh produce, meats that came from animals raised naturally (without the use of hormones or antibiotics), and a unique customer experience that allowed patrons to create their own individualized burrito—starting with a fresh tortilla and working their way through a wide selection of ingredients, ending with different salsas. Sound familiar? This was the birth of Chipotle.
Chipotle doesn’t just sell burritos; it offers a magnificent customer experience—one that’s been carefully crafted and cultivated over the years. A page on Chipotle’s website describes the vision: “It takes more than great tasting food to make a terrific meal. It takes an awesome location and eating with fun, interesting people. Unfortunately we can’t make your friends any more interesting or fun. What we can do is carefully design each of our restaurants to create a unique dining experience fundamentally different than you would get with traditional fast food.”1
Ells gets it. He understands that Chipotle’s success derives from more than just the food (the content) it offers. He knew from an early stage that his restaurant needed to embrace the character of the company he wanted to build as well as the community he wanted to build it for. Chipotle’s success has been nothing short of remarkable. What started with a single store, a single vision, and a loan from Dad has grown into a company with more than 1,595 stores and revenues of $3.21 billion. Chipotle is Evergreen!2
This is the principle of content.
WHAT, EXACTLY, IS “CONTENT”?
The word content is commonly used by most marketers to describe the material that a company generates to discuss its products and services. Think blog posts, tweets, articles, and books. This is the “content” most people are familiar with. In my utmost humble opinion, however, in this day and age the word content should be used in a more expansive manner to describe the products you sell, the services you offer, or the information you create. In other words, content is what your company does or provides for your customers. But, more than that, content refers to all exchanges of value in the digital era. And in that sense, content is less about the actual physical manifestation of what you do and more closely related to the experience you provide. Confused? It may take a little while for this concept to fully sink in, so read on.
Many organizations believe what they do is the most important component of their success. They get caught up in their core product or service offering and pay little attention to the things that matter most—mainly the customers’ experience and the feelings they associate with doing business with the company. The principle of content is about offering your products and services in a way that best compliments your character and community, and it’s about finding the best ways to serve your existing customer base, without resorting to continuously trying to come up with the Next Best Thing guaranteed to entice new customers.
For decades, organizations found their competitive advantage through low product pricing, high product quality, and strong customer service. But recently, the model has shifted. Now the best and most profitable organizations find their competitive advantage by providing a compelling and emotionally engaged customer experience. Consider a company like Dell, for example. Dell realizes that its content needs to be great, but in this day and age, that alone is not enough. That’s why Dell invites its customers to “Build It Yourself.” Each person is able to specify the various components of his or her computer, customizing it to meet specific desires. Dell recognizes that this creation experience provides a heightened level of attachment to the content that goes beyond what the customer actually gets once the computer is delivered. The computer itself ultimately has meaning beyond being a simple commodity; the business process itself creates an emotional attachment with the object. Is the principle of content starting to make sense now?
You might, at first, find yourself reluctant to use the word content to describe your company’s products and services—and, especially, to describe an emotionally engaged customer experience. But the Internet has changed the world. There’s no denying that. And we’ll continue to see it change the world—in ways we’ve never imagined. The rise of mobile phones has dramatically increased our interconnectedness. It has also changed our posture; we have become people who walk around hunched over as we stare at our phones. While on our phones (or on our computers) we are constantly engaged in content, much of that related to products and services we’re purchasing. But is content really just marketing collateral—often referred to as “content marketing”—just simply the information used to sell our products and services? Or has content shifted into something bigger and something more profound than how we’re currently looking at it? I tend to think the latter.
WHY IS CONTENT SO IMPORTANT?
Your company’s content (what you do and the value that you provide) may be enough for you to sustain and survive, but your products, services, or information alone won’t allow your organization to thrive. It certainly is not enough to engage customers in a way that they’re likely to become raving customers. As this massive digital and mobile shift has occurred worldwide, your content has becomes less important to everything else your organization does. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Customers still want a high-quality product or service that both meets and exceeds their expectations. Yet at the same time they are silently begging for so much more. They are silently begging for brands to create products and services that meet deeper emotional and psychological needs.
Organizations haven’t been forced to meet these new needs before, but now we have no choice. Even the smallest of businesses needs to do more. Consider your local Laundromat, for example. You drop off your clothes. The company performs a service. You pick up your clothes and go home. In short, the laundry service provides its content, and in exchange you provide remuneration. On the surface, there’s little more to the equation. But I’ll show you how even a small business like this, with very little human touch, can do so much more than just provide content. And when a company is able to do more, it sees increased customer retention, increased profits, and greater word-of-mouth referrals—and it starts to experience the many benefits of being Evergreen.
Understanding Your Content in Context
Take a look at the pyramid in Figure 5-1. It shows each of the Three Cs and how they function strategically in an Evergreen organization.
The Evergreen Triangle
I can hear you now: “But, Noah, our products and services are what got us where we are today. They are the bedrock of our company. They belong at the bottom, right?” Most companies react this way. It’s natural, given the business models we’re used to looking at, but it’s misguided. Most business models would suggest everything starts with your products and services, and you spread your wings from there, but I’m asking you to approach things differently. I’m also suggesting that this is a necessity if you want to grow in our increasingly connected world.
These days the most successful organizations understand that the content their customers buy is judged on the overall experience with the company. Products such as the iPod and iPad are unique, no doubt, but Apple clearly recognizes it wasn’t the first company to have an MP3 player or a tablet device. Apple understands that the design and packaging of its content, the service provided at the point of sale, and the after-purchase support all impact the customer’s lasting impression of the brand. The content itself is only one small part of the overall experience. Apple is also careful to fully understand its ideal customer archetypes, which I’ll talk more about in Chapter 6.
Don’t get me wrong—or misread the figure. Your company’s content isn’t less important than your character and community. Rather, it should be supported by your character and community. Your content is what generates a response. It’s emotional. Content is about the benefit your products or services provide, or the way they make your customer feel. Content is value. Without great content, nothing is available to get the customer excited. Without content, nothing is available to solve a specific problem your customer might be experiencing. Your content changes lives and offers immense benefits. And, if you are willing to approach your content in a new way, it can become even more powerful.
Casting Off an Outdated Model
Most organizations don’t really care enough about the customer experience. Why? Well, for a long time it wasn’t how they maximized profits. Profits were maximized through the sale and delivery of products and services. Companies had a duty to their shareholders to do exactly that—sell and deliver products and services. Many companies still operate under this assumption, and rightfully so, to an extent. However, this is an outdated model.
While today’s companies still have a duty to their shareholders, the game has changed. More companies than ever are taking a progressive approach—recognizing that they need to use their content to support a far more engaging customer experience. Many organizations are quickly coming to realize that they no longer have a choice. It’s no longer enough to let all your decisions be guided by the endless pursuit of profit maximization without careful consideration of your customers and their experience. Let this be your guide to maximizing profits, but also to generating a new level of loyalty to what you do at the same time. Want to really impress your shareholders? This is the way.
EVALUATING THE NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Organizations are often clueless about the actual customer experience, let alone the creation of an emotionally engaged experience. Your content is one of the main reasons your customer decides to do business with you initially. It’s the utility of value you provide. But what makes your customer come back? What creates an experience that lasts and resonates? Let’s look at a unique example.
Learning from Uber
Taxis provide very basic content. Actually, the taxi experience itself hasn’t changed much since the seventeenth century, when horse-drawn carriages, also known as hackney carriages, first took passengers to their desired destinations. Not that you need a lesson in hailing a cab, but here’s how it has worked for the past 300 or so years: You see a taxi and you wave your hand; a car (usually yellow) pulls over; you tell the driver where you want to go; the car takes you from point A to point B. Simple and effective content. Normally, very little else happens. But in 2009, two serial entrepreneurs, Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, had an idea that would change the industry.
Camp and Kalanick launched Uber—a company based on a game-changing idea that really couldn’t be simpler. Using an application on your mobile phone, you request a car, and moments later a black town car or SUV picks you up. Very similar to the taxi model described previously, you tell the driver where you want to go and the driver takes you there. The “cash” transaction happens behind the scenes. Your credit card is billed automatically, and you don’t tip the driver. It’s seamless, which creates a far more enjoyable experience for the customer—one that resonates. Uber’s rapid growth is the direct result of creating an emotionally engaged experience that people want to talk about.
Let’s take a behind-the-scenes look at Uber from an operational perspective. Camp and Kalanick realized that cities all over the world had these small armies of private limousines idling outside office buildings, hotels, and apartments at any given time, literally just waiting for passengers. Their stroke of genius was to create a way for people looking to get from point A to point B to contact these town cars. They did this by giving each driver a mobile phone with an app that automatically processes each customer’s request, identifies the closest driver, and allows that driver to either accept or deny the pickup. (If the pickup is denied, the request then goes to the next-closest driver. And so on.) Brilliant!
In his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Clayton M. Christensen coined the term “disruptive technologies” to describe a phenomenon where innovations in products or services (in other words, the content that the company provides) drastically change the way the market uses those products or services. Uber has disrupted the taxicab industry. The existing industry didn’t see it coming, nor was it prepared for how quickly Uber would rise as a major threat to the entire industry. And, because the threat has been so severe, Uber has faced a slew of regulatory opposition in almost every city it’s entered into.3 Alas, Uber has pushed forward and gained incredible momentum. But I digress. Let’s get back to the content.
In terms of the car service that Uber offers, what has really changed? Besides allowing the consumer to use a mobile application to “hail a cab,” the content has remained the same. An automobile still moves a customer from point A to point B. There’s no flying car. No teleportation device. Uber didn’t drastically change the content; Uber simply changed the customer experience. Uber can now be found in more than thirty-four countries and more than ninety cities, and that number is increasing rapidly.
The main takeaway is this: Regardless of the industry you’re in, you don’t need to create disruption. If you want to build a competitive advantage in our new (insanely connected) world, you may not need to change your content, but you do need to change the experience. Are you starting to see why character and community are so important to this equation?
Hyperfocusing on the Content—a Common Pitfall
In the endless pursuit of perfection, many organizations fail to build Evergreen relationships simply because they are too focused on their content. Let’s face a cold, hard fact right here, right now. If you’re in business and succeeding up until this point, then you’re providing products and services that, most likely, already overdeliver and exceed your customers’ expectations. Congratulations!
Now ask yourself, how many organizations do you know that don’t provide, at the very least, satisfying content? You simply can’t expect to stay in business long if your content isn’t up to par. Whatever you provide has to be the very best. And if you’ve made it this far, it most likely already is quite good. Don’t you think it makes sense, then, for you to spend your time ensuring that your customer experience is far superior to what your competitors are supplying? Don’t you think it makes sense to focus on articulating your company’s character and building a community among your customers?
KNOWING WHAT BUSINESS YOU’RE IN
In his quintessential 1960 article written for the Harvard Business Review, titled “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt suggests the decline of many industries has essentially been caused by a misguided focus on the core delivery of what they do, rather than whom they do it for. They focus on the content and leave everything else up to the customer. Levitt’s primary example is the railroad business—a booming industry only years earlier—which found itself in serious trouble with the disruption caused by the automobile. Levitt suggests that the decline of railroads was caused by the fact that industry executives assumed they were in the railroad business—that is, their business was focused solely on the content they offered. Levitt argues that they missed the fact that they were really in the transportation business.
In 2004, the Harvard Business Review suggested that marketing myopia was the most influential idea in marketing in the past fifty years. That doesn’t mean that everybody has gotten the memo, though—or, perhaps more appropriately stated, not everyone has read the memo. Much like many of Peter Drucker’s ideas are overlooked by today’s executives (although his books adorn their shelves), so were many of Levitt’s. However, in the past few years, there has been a dramatic rise in organizations that are trying to understand how customer loyalty, customer experience, and customer-centric focus can improve their operations.
That said, we need to be careful not to shift our entire strategic vision to one of only the customer, leaving our content to fend for itself. (It is possible for the pendulum to swing too far in the opposite direction, and that, too, would have disastrous consequences.) That’s the reason I’ve positioned content as the third of the Three Cs. It represents both what you do and how you do it.
The key takeaway: More important than the core products or services that you offer is knowing what business you’re actually in. Since you are reading this book, chances are good that you’re in the marketing business (at least part of the time, if you wear multiple hats)—meaning that you have an opportunity to continuously create a customer experience that supports your content. Most restaurants, whether they know it or not, are in the experience business and rarely in the food business. Most boot companies are in the fashion business, not the footwear business.
Furthermore, sometimes you need to be nimble and shift course in defining which business you’re in. With the disruption caused by advances in digital technologies, Kodak realized that it was no longer in the film business or even in the photography business, but that if the company wanted to survive (and thrive) it needed to position itself in the business of capturing and preserving memories. I hope this is making sense to you now. Don’t confuse your content with what business you’re really in.
KEEPING FOCUSED ON WHY YOU DO WHAT YOU DO
Here’s another simple truth about content: In today’s world, it’s more about the why than the what. Simon Sinek is right. We need to start with the why, but simply figuring it out isn’t enough anymore. We need to take the why a number of steps further.
Now this is surprising to many people, largely because there was a time when it really was primarily about the what (and the why was a distant and distinctly secondary concern). In 1908, when Henry Ford introduced the Model T, it was really about the what. The Model T was new! It had a steering wheel on the left-hand side; the engine and transmission were enclosed; the four cylinders were cast in a solid block; the suspension used two semi-elliptic springs. It was simple to drive, and it was cheap. This was a car that everyone could afford. That’s what it was. (Ford’s empire took off, by the way, when he also focused on the why. Ford wasn’t in the car business. He was in the personal independence and freedom business. But that’s another story.)
Today, it is apparent that value, connection, and feeling have become more important factors than the content itself. Customers want more than just your content. They want to have an emotionally engaging experience with your company that makes them feel good. They want their intrinsic desires not only to be met, but to be exceeded. They want results and a specific outcome. This is the true meaning of value. Value is a term that’s often misunderstood in business. Value is the result or outcome that customers receive when they do business with you. Indeed. But more than that, value is the feeling they get during the process. This seismic shift has changed, and is continuously changing, the face of doing business as we know it.
KNOWING WHEN MORE CONTENT IS BETTER—AND WHEN IT’S NOT
Let’s talk about another fallacy related to content—that giving more intrinsically adds value to the customer experience. Furthermore, you may think that the more content you give, the happier your customers will be, and the more likely they will be to continue doing business with you. Let me tell you, this is a common misconception. Not only that, but it’s one that, when put into practice, can seriously backfire. I’ve seen it happen. Many times. One of the critical details to establish about your company in regard to content is figuring out when less is more and when more is truly more—and knowing how to tell the difference.
Why Less Is Often More—Both for the Customer and You
Why would too much content be harmful when it comes to keeping customers and helping us build stronger relationships with those customers? We’ve all heard that bigger is better and more is better. And we know that customers want a bang for their buck. After all, there’s nothing like a good deal, right?
Many companies respond to this impulse and say things like, “If we give our customer this much stuff, why on earth would they ever stop doing business with us? They will absolutely love how much value we give!” I hear variations on this statement all the time, especially from online service providers that are offering memberships, software services, and online tools.
This is a mistake. Too much choice and too many selections cause our customers to feel inundated. Too many e-mails and suddenly they’re feeling overwhelmed. Too much, too fast, and before we know it they’re looking for a way to stop doing business with us. All the while we are often thinking, There’s no way our customers will leave with this much THUD factor. But our customers are often thinking, I’m never going to use all this stuff. I’ll come back later when I have more time. Or they are thinking, Too many e-mails! Leave me alone! Or some variation thereof.
In short, we’ve missed an opportunity. A prospective customer hasn’t connected with our brand because we’ve relied solely on our (abundant) content as a means to motivate that person to do business with us. The real problem with this scenario is that we were so busy adding content that we forgot to consider the other two of the Three Cs.
If your organization is guilty of this, I have good news. By implementing and taking the other two Cs (character and community) seriously, you’ll reduce costs because you’ll be less likely to overdeliver on your content; in turn, customers will be thrilled about doing business with you because you are actually, in effect, giving them more by giving them less. Yes, I’m giving you permission to deliver less content. But, no, that doesn’t mean the local restaurant can start giving half its normal serving of food. And, no, the barber cannot cut half your hair. Not at all. It simply means—to reiterate what I said earlier—that content is a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for the ongoing and future success of your organization. Related to this idea is the importance of presentation, which brings us to …
The Messy Closet Theory
Buying a vehicle is hard work. There’s nothing easy about it. Today we can literally choose from hundreds of makes and models—not to mention countless variations of colors, options, and safety features—many of which change with each passing year. It can be one of the most challenging buying experiences on the planet. Entire magazines are dedicated to helping us choose the right SUV, the perfect luxury car, or the top budget minivan. On the one hand, we welcome the ability to customize and build our own vehicles based on personal tastes or budgets. On the other hand, the sheer number of choices is daunting, which is why some customers simply shut down during the selection process.
Take, for instance, my father-in-law, who bought a new truck a few years ago. He can be a little particular. He knows what he wants and knows what he likes. When he went to the dealership and asked for a truck with no stereo, eyebrows were raised. “You mean you don’t want satellite radio? Just a CD player?” No, he meant he just wanted a plain-Jane AM/FM radio. Then he explained to the sales rep that he wanted a manual transmission and didn’t want power windows.
In short, my father-in-law wanted a truck that would have been considered “standard” circa 1975, back before we were able to customize our selections ad infinitum. Personally, I think he would have kept my mother-in-law slightly happier on a recent 5,000-plus-mile trek across North America to see the majestic Sequoia National Forest if he had opted for air-conditioning. But he refused to engage with the customization process. It was all just too overwhelming. In the end, he was indeed able to get exactly what he wanted—though I think he actually paid more to have certain (now-standard) features taken away.
My father-in-law’s actions can be explained beautifully by the Messy Closet Theory, which goes something like this: Too much content can quickly lead to an impression akin to encountering a messy closet. And who enjoys that? A messy closet makes it impossible to know what choices you have, what you want, and what goes together. It is impossible to think in a messy closet. Customers who feel as though they have just walked into a messy closet are generally overwhelmed by the experience and often simply turn around and run for the hills. In fact, having a “messy closet,” is one of the primary reasons a business loses its existing customers.
In short, more is not always better. We’ve been led to believe that continuously adding new content can positively impact customer retention and loyalty. But it’s a lie, and we, as business professionals and marketers, need to resist the temptation to add more. These days, our customers are inundated with choice and selection in their daily lives. Adding more during their experience with your company can, at best, slow down the buying process and, at worst, turn your customers away altogether.
Are you putting your customers into a messy closet, or is your customer experience as clean, efficient, and user-friendly as it could be?
When More Content Is, in Fact, Better
This is not to say that choices and options aren’t important. In fact, sometimes nuanced choices are essential—but only when they deliberately tie back to the content and are specifically designed with the character of the target consumer in mind. For instance, I have a friend who drives a Bentley. It’s a $250,000 car. When I nudged him about the cost of this incredible machine, he explained to me that the car is almost 100 percent custom. He and his wife spent months contemplating the various options for both the exterior and interior components. They labored for days over the color of the interior leather and the threading, which holds it together. In bed at night they would flip through brochures and talk about veneer. Would they choose chestnut, bird’s-eye maple, or maybe piano black? They loved the entire six-month-long process. The decision-making process created a sense of excitement, and they anxiously anticipated the car’s creation. It was a wonderful, emotionally engaged experience that we can learn from. Tremendous value can be derived by your customers’ experience of the content before they even have the actual content. Pretty cool, right?
This exceptionally hands-on buying process works beautifully for Bentley. After all, Bentley carefully tailors its selections to its ideal customer. Bentley knows what kind of experience most of its customers want—and it goes to great lengths to enhance that experience at each step of the buying process. Bentley buyers are discerning about the details and enjoy the selection process. If your company’s content profile is similar to Bentley’s, by all means indulge your customers with lavish choices. But if you find yourself adding more content in the hopes of attracting more new customers, or keeping your existing ones, then you’re more than likely simply adding confusion to the process. Try another approach.
Learning from Google
Remember a few paragraphs ago when I introduced the Messy Closet Theory? Well, here’s a helpful visual that will allow you to digest what we’ve been talking about and take it a step further: Imagine that every piece of clothing owned by everybody who lives in your house was dumped unceremoniously into a single closet, with no rhyme or reason. Every morning before leaving for work, you would have to sort through this random collection. Trying to find a specific piece of clothing would become a ridiculous chore. Looking for your favorite red sweater? Keep digging.
Google took the world’s largest messy closet and added one single thing: organization. Google understands that, more than anything else, what matters is organization and easy, reliable access to what you need. Why do you think Google’s home page is a single box? It is immediately clear that you should type something into the box, and Google will show you where to find information about that topic.
Search engine optimization specialists spend their days trying to keep up with Google’s continuously changing search algorithms. These specialists might help a client reach the coveted number one spot on Google through various manipulations, linkings, and other tactics. But that client might drop out of sight (and out of mind) when Google updates its search algorithms. What exactly is Google doing—and why? Well, very simply, Google is making it easier for you to find exactly what you want, and quickly.
Learning from Dropbox
One of my favorite examples of a company that gets it right is Dropbox, a free website that lets you easily share, store, and sync your documents, photos, and videos across multiple computers. On the home page you’ll find four links. That’s it. Four buttons you can press. Don’t know what Dropbox is? Learn more. (Click here.) Ready to join? Sign up. (Click here.) Download Dropbox. (Click here.) Already a member? Sign in. (Click here.)
Dropbox couldn’t make the customer experience any more idiot-proof. (There’s a lot to be said about the term “idiot-proof,” but I digress; that’s a discussion for another day.) Dropbox isn’t dillydallying around trying to convince you that this is the latest and greatest tech tool since sliced bread; instead, it cuts to the chase. The company focuses on offering a great customer experience based on the simplicity of the content. Could Dropbox add various bells, whistles, and features? Sure, but that would dilute the content. I chose a website’s brilliantly designed user interface to make my point, but—whether your company is a retail establishment, restaurant, or any other business, for that matter—the basic advice is the same.
Customers appreciate choice. Don’t get me wrong. What customers don’t appreciate is choice at the expense of the customer experience. They don’t appreciate an experience that becomes difficult because they are faced with too many choices. All too often, companies use choice as a crutch—a crutch that distracts us from creating better, more interesting, more appropriate experiences for our customers. Instead of asking yourself how you can give your customers more content, ask yourself how you can tidy up the content and make the customer experience more enjoyable.
You should also be asking how you can make it easier for your customers to buy from you. For example, are your invoices as easy to understand as they should be? Is your website experience optimized as efficiently as possible for customers to complete their desired tasks? Is calling your support line a straightforward process, or does the customer need to sort through piles and piles of clothes before reaching a human? You get the idea.
THE EVERGREEN DIAGNOSTIC
What type of company is yours? What type of business do you have? In this next section I’m going to share with you one of my favorite ways of showing business leaders how to understand what type of relationship they have with their customers and why a primary focus on content may be destroying their business.
One of the main comments I hear from clients is: “Noah, our company is different. We’re merely a transactional business and don’t have an opportunity to really engage the customer.” I don’t mean to be a spoiler, but most business transactions are just that—transactions. We give our customers content, they give us money, and the exchange is complete. It’s business as usual, and we’ve been told that as long as we provide great service, the rest will take care of itself.
Let me tell you, the rest very rarely takes care of itself. Your content may meet your customers’ basics needs and desires, and they may be mostly satisfied by the transaction. But who wants to run a business based merely on satisfaction? This scenario creates many lost opportunities on multiple levels, and it’s up to you to take action if you want to increase sales and profits.
I’ve developed the Evergreen Diagnostic, shown in Figure 5-2, which features distinct quadrants representing each of the four different types of companies (starting with the upper-left and journeying counterclockwise): Deciduous, Barren, Wilting, and Evergreen. A company is positioned in one of the quadrants based upon two criteria—how well it nurtures customer relationships (or not, as the case may be) and how successfully (or not) it retains existing customers. Read through the narratives that follow, and then ask yourself which description best reflects your company.
The Evergreen Diagnostic
Quadrant 1: Deciduous
Most companies, surprisingly, reside in the Deciduous quadrant. (I’d guess about 40 percent.) They operate with the intent to build great relationships with their customers and provide a high level of service. However, for one reason or another (such as the story I told about my bank in Chapter 1), this plan doesn’t fully materialize and, as a result, they are unable to retain their customers. Like deciduous trees, these companies lose many leaves (customers) each year and therefore need to “grow” new ones. This type of business has its ups and downs, but winter is always cold, with no leaves on the tree. Deciduous companies end up constantly playing the cat-and-mouse game of customer acquisition, and the new customer addiction often proves too strong to break. This is what the status quo looks like. Is your company Deciduous?
Quadrant 2: Barren
Many organizations operate like barren trees, incapable of bearing fruit (or sustaining leaves). In fact, probably 30 percent of organizations today exist in this category. There is no customer relationship, and because of that, there’s no longevity to the relationship. These companies exist in a state similar to Dr. Seuss’s Waiting Place in Oh, the Places You’ll Go, only applicable to businesses. They are just kind of stuck. Companies can survive in the Barren quadrant, based on a high investment in advertising and marketing that generates a continuous stream of transactions from new customers, but it’s a challenging place from which to do business.
Quadrant 3: Wilting
Many organizations operate like a wilting tree—the leaves hang on, but they do not receive adequate sustenance from the tree and therefore are not as healthy as they should be. This kind of company is able to retain its customers, but there’s no real relationship—or any attempt to create one. (Probably about 20 percent of businesses today fall in this category.) Classically, the insurance industry used to fall into the Wilting quadrant. On balance, insurance companies had high customer retention, but they did very little to make their customers feel as though they truly cared about keeping them around. (This business model, by the way, has been flipped on its head in recent years, since the Internet has made it easier for people to simply pack up and move to a new provider.) One downside of being a Wilting business is that since there is no customer relationship, the business fails to reap the benefits of positive word-of-mouth marketing and ongoing referrals. At the same time, customers of Wilting companies often exaggerate negative experiences and spread unflattering comments when things don’t go as planned. Because these bad habits are often deeply ingrained, it can be very difficult to go from Wilting to Evergreen.
Quadrant 4: Evergreen
An organization that has great relationships with its customer base will experience greater customer longevity and retention of those customers. In turn, these companies live a long and fruitful life. They are not just focused on building a wonderful relationship with each customer, but they are also strategically focused on keeping customers coming back. They’re also focused on increasing referrals and creating customer communities. They understand the true value of a customer and focus on keeping customers engaged and active. They have tactical retention and reactivation systems in place to keep customers coming back again, and again, and again. This is what it means to be Evergreen. About 10 percent of organizations get it right all the time. Don’t worry—I can lead you to the promised land.
GOING BEYOND “THE TRANSACTION”
It doesn’t matter what type of company you consider yours to be. What matters is that you are committed to moving out of your existing quadrant and into the Evergreen quadrant. So you might be asking what this has to do with your products and services. Well, I hope by now you recognize that what you provide in terms of content is far less important than how you provide it—and furthermore, that no matter what business you’re in, your company can benefit from focusing on the customer experience.
To prove my point, let’s consider tires for a minute—or, more precisely, how a tire company can build customer loyalty and maximize customer value. Perhaps you’re thinking, Noah, have you lost your mind? After all, isn’t every tire company the same? Absolutely not! Believe me. Some tire companies have taken the steps necessary to build Evergreen customer relationships, and they are thriving. They have done it by strategically moving their business toward the Evergreen quadrant. Their content didn’t change; they simply changed the customer experience. They switched from providing one-stop transactions, or simply selling a commodity, to creating emotionally engaging experiences.
You’re thinking: An emotionally engaged experience buying tires? How do you do that? Well, these companies are very clear about their character and they have created structures of community. Yes, it’s true. Even a tire company can have an effective monthly newsletter, or an active Facebook profile, or the structures for customer communities to form.
Consider a company such as Belle Tire, which is based in Allen Park, Michigan. With almost 4,000 Facebook fans, 3,500 Twitter followers, and a very active blog, this business is actively engaging its clients in an experience that goes far beyond just “I need new tires.” Online, Belle Tire invites its customers to participate in a wide range of discussions—from tires to (the Detroit) Tigers. In addition, the company blogs on a number of different yet highly relevant topics, such as car care, driving safety, and how to save on holiday road trips. It even publicly deals with any less-than-favorable customer experiences in an open, honest, and authentic fashion. Belle Tire is also actively involved in the local community, supporting schools, sponsoring youth hockey clubs, and donating to other nonprofit organizations. If a tire company can do it this well, then there’s no reason why your organization can’t be doing it, too.
Make no mistake. The concepts I’m sharing in this book aren’t for one specific type of company. They can be embraced by organizations across a wide array of industries. Organizations are learning that they can both maximize customer value and build remarkable, loyal relationships with their customers at the same time.
Every time you engage in a transaction with a customer your business has an opportunity to go beyond the transaction. Your goal should not be to simply sell your content in exchange for money. Your goal should be to look at every transaction with a customer as a chance to create a long-term relationship with a tremendous amount of long-term value. Remember: Your character and your community are what truly support your content.
Think about how you want customers to interact with and remember your brand. Creating emotionally engaged experiences shouldn’t be difficult. In fact, it can be downright easy and fun, yet most organizations continue to believe that customers come for their content. Customers don’t come for the content. They come for an outcome, and that’s really where value begins. And next, customers stay for the character and community—in short, the customer experience.
So how, exactly, do you go about building a dynamic customer experience? Remember the old cliché: “We provide wow service!” The problem with the “wow experience” is that everyone aspires to create one, but most are rather dull. They’re dull because they’re generic. The key to the power of the Three Cs is to effectively articulate specific things about your organization to create a more dynamic and engaging experience for the customers who do business with you. To be effective, your company’s “wow experience” needs to resonate with your customer on a deep emotional level. It’s too simple to say you need to create a Cheers-like atmosphere where everyone knows your name. In today’s world, everyone knows everyone’s name. You need to go above and beyond casual lip service.
To this end goal, I offer you this: The rest of the book will be far more tactical about how to put the Three Cs concept (and many more ideas) to work in your organization. I’ll offer numerous tactics that are guaranteed to generate massive increases in profits. Get ready to fertilize the ground, in preparation for encouraging tremendous growth.