The present defines the future. The future builds on the foundation of the past.

—Lailah Gifty Akita

Ultimately, marketing is about telling stories. Some observers peg the beginning of marketing to the mid-1400s and Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press, which made mass printing of fliers, posters, and books far faster, easier, and less expensive than existing printing methods. However, I believe the origins of marketing can be traced back even further, to the prehistoric humans who first started using tools.

At some point after they gained the ability to speak with one another, these early humans started to make small cave paintings of wild animals, other humans, and even stencils of their own hands. They used these paintings and other forms of art to tell stories that would connect them more closely with their family and members of their tribe or clan, and to leave something behind.

So, if you think about this as core to marketing, which is to tell stories about the aspirations, the momentous occasions, and the needs that people may have—whether you're selling toothpaste or a car or a home—I believe marketing today has its roots in our prehistoric past.

Just after Hurricane Sandy devastated New York and New Jersey, I was asked to make a presentation on social media. I was in a new role at Bloomberg, and until I was hired, the company had forbidden social media. I needed to come up with a theme for the presentation, and I settled on “Don't be afraid of social media.” My goal was to make social media less frightening to the folks at Bloomberg.

The heart of my message was, “Yes, social media is typically an extemporaneous, stream-of-consciousness kind of conversation and everyone can see it. But in truth, the guardrails are baked into our human DNA in the sense that we're still trying to do the same thing we always have, which is to connect with people, tell stories, and build community.”

I'll never forget a photograph published in Time magazine, taken in the aftermath of Sandy. The photo was of the inside of a Chase Bank in Midtown Manhattan, with a crowd of people sheltering next to the ATM machines—my guess is that it was one of the few places in the city with backup power. Everyone was sitting on the floor in a circle, with their smartphones and laptops plugged into the bank's AC outlets.¹ They built an instant community.

The scene reminded me of the standard illustration we've all seen in our history books of Neolithic humanoids, sitting around a fire and sheltering from the elements and wild animals. Even though we don't have written records from those long-ago times, it's easy to imagine that as they sat around the fire, they were telling stories and building camaraderie and community. They were entertaining one another, keeping people in line, and passing on their culture. They were showing their family and friends that they mattered.

Fast forward to the post-COVID world of today. There's widespread fear that modern communication channels such as social media are breaking us apart because they allow us to have our own echo chamber. But I believe, at its most elemental, when you strip away all the digital aspects of these experiences, you still get to what's most important to people: to know that they matter and to know that they're leaving something behind for future generations. In previous centuries, we used to put it in a diary. Today, we post what's most important in our daily lives to our Instagram or Facebook or TikTok.

I think it's time for us as marketers, executives, and communicators to go back to the future.

When I think about the idea of “back to the future,” I think back to my father and his visits to the Marshall Field's department store in downtown Chicago where the toy department salesperson knew his name and couldn't wait to show him the latest products. Although we never talked about it, I'm certain my father felt really good that this salesperson built a connection with him and treated him as though he mattered. The salesperson didn't know everything about my father, but he knew enough to give my father the impression that he had been thinking of him.

To me, that's the crux of what we're aiming for when we talk about humanizing digital. It's baking in what people have always wanted: connection with others, to feel like they matter, and building a sense of community.

How do we replicate that basic, elemental humanity in digital?

Today, we have far more information at our fingertips than that salesperson at Marshall Field's could ever dream of. Grad Conn,² the former CMO of Sprinklr, told me a story that touches on the opportunity we have as marketers to bring a new level of intimacy to the things we now take for granted. As we get back into the habit of traveling in this post-COVID world, Grad explained to me:

I'm a platinum rewards member with Marriott, and I'm also a loyal, 30-year airline frequent flyer program member. Hotels and airlines know something about you, but they don't know the complete picture—they don't know what happened to you during the course of the entire day. But the data exists. One time, I had a terrible flight. Not that I would say anything about it, but I messaged them. They quickly got back to me and that made me feel somewhat good, but it was just in that moment. I still had to rebook my flights and I still had a rough day.

By the time I got to my hotel, I was not in a good mood. I was not feeling great about the experience that I had on my flight, and that had nothing to do with Marriott. Can you imagine the data that exists now, and the ability for Marriott to know that you had a bad day? It's out there. And because you're a platinum rewards member, when you check in, they could instantly create an uplifting experience by giving you a room upgrade or a day pass to the spa or some other amenity. Those connections are now possible.

So, when I say, “back to the future,” that's what I mean. There have always been those consummate salespeople—such as the Marshall Field's toy department salesperson—who know how to connect and be intimate with their customers. And their managers knew how to teach and encourage other salespeople to do those things—to make it feel like they were thinking about you and making some of your problems go away. If you lived in a small town, that salesperson or shopkeeper probably knew that you ran the mill, and maybe someone was injured cutting down a tree the other day. Or that your spouse was a member of the PTA, and your daughter was on the high school basketball team. Those things were in their heads.

The most powerful computer on the planet is still the human brain, but it starts losing its ability to track individuals after 50 to 100 people. Our brains max out and it's increasingly difficult for us to remember their personal details beyond that number. But now we have the ability to get those prompts. We can use intelligent systems and pick and choose the right data to bring things together in a way that hitherto we would only have been able to do at a very limited scale maybe 150 years ago. The future is now, and it's our job to put it to work on behalf of our customers.

Obstacles to Building Empathy

Although this book digs deep into why organizations need to refocus on people and recalibrate their power sharing, making those things happen can be much easier said than done. In my experience, I have found there are a number of obstacles that often get in the way.

One such obstacle is that the structure of most organizations, whether B2B or B2C, is geared in many ways to only look at a slice of the customer. Individuals who touch the customer are only seeing a very small moment of their customers' lives or a very small part of their ongoing needs or frustrations. I go back to the example of the previously loyal Craftsman customer in Chapter 2 who stated that he would never buy anything from Sears again. He felt with great certainty that because he had spent so much money at Sears over a period of many years, and because he was in own mind as loyal as he could possibly be, somehow in the magic of technology the company would know who he was when he walked up to any touchpoint, whether it was online or in a store.

This gentleman had been a Sears customer for 15 years, and he had spent something like $20,000 in the preceding five years. At the time, however, there was just no way for Sears to track customer information with this level of granularity and then make it available to salespeople, online customer service reps, or anyone else in the company in any meaningful and timely way. He expected us to know him—to show him he was important to us as an individual—and he was immensely disappointed when he learned we did not. We let him down.

The problem is the difference between personalization and humanization. So, when we used to talk about being personal, we were really talking about how data and technology start to predict something. Again, not anticipating a human need, just roughly predicting. Surprisingly, even a company like Amazon doesn't—I believe—always get it right. For as much as the company knows about me from my ordering habits, I'm always bewildered that they seem to know so little. And then, even when they do know something about me, it's not the right stuff. It still feels very one dimensional, for all the data crunching that they must be doing. Although Amazon constantly works to improve their customers' experiences, most companies haven't really thought through what a great end-to-end customer experience should look like, much less implemented it.

Jeriad Zoghby is global lead of omni-channel commerce at Accenture Song. He has put a lot of thought into how data and technology can start to replicate what it means to be personal. Says Jeriad:

The question is this: How can we use data and technology to create a personal experience for consumers—not human, just personal? To get started on this problem, we used a framework we called the 4 Rs.

The first R is recognize. If you walk into a coffee shop that you go into every day, they're going to recognize you. They know you regularly come in there. If there's somebody new behind the counter, you'd say, “Oh yeah, I come in here all the time,” because the person has to ask your name. Everyone else already knows your name.

The second R is remember—they remember you and your preferences. When I walk into the coffee shop right next to my office, the barista always says, “Same thing, right?” He knows I like a mocha with a little less milk because I prefer it to be slightly bitter. What's interesting about that is he doesn't just know what I want, he understands why I want it. That's an important nuance. He knows that it changes the flavor when there's a little less milk—the bitterness in the coffee and the chocolate comes through a little stronger.

The third R is recommendations. Not to cross sell, not to upsell, that's just obnoxious anyway. It's to help me make decisions because what we find in life today is that we are often overwhelmed by the choices we have. Amazon might be great for transactions when you know exactly what you want, but it's a challenging place to shop otherwise because there are too many options. You feel overwhelmed, you feel less confident in your decisions, and you will often abandon the experience. Recommendations should be about making life easier. It could also be my barista saying, “Hey, I know you love mochas, did you see the new drink we've got now? It's made with dark chocolate which has the kind of flavor profile you like.” He knows what I might care about in a new product.

The fourth R is relevance, which is when I say, “The last time I came in here, it was super busy, and somebody bumped into me and I spilled my coffee.” And the barista responds, “Hey, sorry about that, it was really crazy last time you were here.” Relevance is about contextual knowledge.

Some institutions—L'Oréal, for one—are now trying to aggressively build a great experience for their customers. They want to have those touchpoints, and they want to be able to do something with them when they're having those conversations, whether they're digital or face-to-face. Still, while organizations are starting to talk about it, very few can do it—in many cases because it seems so overwhelming. There's no roadmap for organizations to follow, and they don't actually have a complete story to tell—they have neither the beginning nor the ending. There are pieces of it scattered across the organization, but they're not stitched together into a coherent whole.

Most organizations tend to be reactive rather than proactive. Proactive in their minds translates into mass communication, mass marketing, and broadcast. But proactive in my mind—and I think Grad's and others' minds—is at a very granular level using things like automation and technology to promote the illusion that you have a greater connection. It's predict versus anticipate, which is more about the customers and where they are in the moment. At least you've made the effort, but you can't do it if you don't have all these pieces working together.

In an interview, Jeriad Zoghby told me about a company where three key systems—their recommendation engine, their testing tool, and their digital analytics platform—were definitely not working well together. He says:

It used to drive me nuts—all three had different measurement systems. They were working against one another, and they had different objectives. One was trying to cross sell. Another was trying to engage in a conversation. And the whole goal of the testing tool was, “Hey, if I want to introduce something new that you're going to experience, how do I know it's going to work with everything else?” This is not being human. This is just trying to get data and systems to feel more like the personal coffee shop experience.

Now, put that aside for a second. The basic foundation that many companies still struggle with is how [to] not act like a technology platform and actually feel personal. Now, if I want to be human, that's different—a big leap beyond.

More often we will talk about experiences, and a lot of organizations think they can solve this by hiring chief experience officers. But if you think about it for a moment, that is at least a declaration that experience matters and that you want to bring things together under this umbrella. You might be a B2B company like Caterpillar or John Deere, and you've come to the realization that marketing needs to be part of customer service and they need to work hand in hand. And this needs to promote an overall experience that then ladders up into what we think the brand promise is and being able to manage it in a more granular, personal fashion.

The problem is that this is not enough going forward. The next frontier is fusing the human back into the overall experience, and believe me, that is not easy. Not because of the data and technology needed to pull it off, but more important, because of the mindset and organization required to be truly authentic.

Right now, we're at the point at which maybe a few companies understand that this is critically important. They're all-in, and they're striving to get there. But I believe most organizations still think that since they've devolved a lot of authority to individual operations—marketing, sales, customer care, analytics, and so on—and each one has an executive who has a very clear idea of what their parts should be—that they've done all they need to do.

I liken the situation we have right now to the Japanese film Rashomon, in which a particular event was described in different—and often contradictory—ways by each of the main characters who were involved in it. You never got the full picture of what actually happened until the very end of the film because everyone told the same story over and over again, but from their own unique perspective. Then finally all the threads came together. That's where we're at today—it's one thing that's structurally in the way.

I think we're also in a place where people are a little jaded. They've been told that they can accomplish some amazing marketing things—building the classic Peppers and Rogers one-to-one relationships, for example—by using all the remarkable technologies at our disposal. Build a fantastic data repository, and they will come. But in truth, it's much more difficult than just gathering gobs of data and analyzing it. The installation of a great platform isn't going to solve your complex marketing, sales, and service problems all by itself. You've got to go much deeper than that. Solving those deep problems requires rethinking your operational imperative, how you function together, where data resides, how it's distributed, how quickly it's distributed, and in what form.

Jeriad Zoghby has identified three things required to turn everyday digital experiences into something more human. As Jeriad explains:

The first thing is shifting from profiling customers to listening to them. Profiling is where you gather as much data about your customer as you can—age, gender, ZIP code, income level, and so on—and then decide what product to pitch them. In reality, profiling is not personal, it's not human. It's very cold. And, let's be honest, in this day and age, it's also to the point of being provocatively on the wrong side of public opinion. Instead of profiling, ask: “I want to know not what you do; I want to understand why you do it.” The big shift is from the what to the why.

The second thing, and to me this is the most important, is the difference between prediction versus anticipation. If Uber shows up at my house before I ask for it, that's creepy—a bad experience. But if Uber understands the demand in the area, and makes the car available when I need it, that's wonderful. Giving me what I want on my own terms is a phenomenal, wonderful experience. The difference, when we start to talk about anticipation versus prediction, is who's in control? Prediction says, “As the brand, I know what you need. I've come up with all your customer journeys and now I'm going to direct you down this path.” Anticipation flips the script and says to the customer, “You're in control. All I'm going to do is give you all the various options that are available and you pick whatever journey you want to be on.”

The third thing is the difference between shifting from assistance to expertise. Amazon's Alexa, for example, is not expertise—it's an assistant. This is the thing with expertise. If you went to a Best Buy and you asked for help with a television sound bar, the salesperson you talked with might not have been an expert, but they knew who in their store was. They'd say, “Let me ping Kathy. She knows everything there is to know about these sound bars. I'll go get her.” Expertise meant something to us because it built confidence in the decisions we made. In digital, we've lost that expertise because what we've moved to is a cost-savings and efficiency model and we've pretended that expertise came along with it. It didn't, and we need to figure out how to inject expertise into the digital realm.

There are definitely organizations that do this very well, but they tend to do it in areas outside of marketing. They have put a stake in the ground about what they are and what they're going to bring to bear as a company, and then how that's going to infuse this into every decision they make, every person they hire, every project they run. One such company is Capital One, where for the first time in financial services, they made the decision to create a company where analytics would dominate every aspect of their DNA. Their commitment was to out-analyze the competition, and to do it faster and more granularly than anyone else. They believed with tremendous certainty that this would provide them with what they needed to create new products that no one had ever thought of that would meet some very specific customer needs and demands while earning a profit.

Capital One's approach was fascinating to me. Here's an organization that has an organizing principle—top down, bottom up—where everyone who works for or with the company all have to go through a rigorous assessment of their analytic capabilities because that's their DNA. They want everyone to think that way, they select for it, and as a result they do.

And of course, if you want to find a company where design is core to their DNA, you need only look to Apple. Everyone who plays a role in the company—employees, vendors, consultants, and so on—must keep that in mind and align around this principle. They may have other duties and things to consider as they do their jobs, but they have to appreciate that they are building solutions, not just products, that are well-designed for people so that they can use the company's technologies effectively.

These kinds of companies are anomalies—I don't know if you could come up with a list of even 100 such organizations, which demonstrates just how hard it is. But somewhere in the history of Capital One and Apple, someone put a stake in the ground and said, “this is who we are and what we're going to stand for.”

Another obstacle—although increasingly it's changed from being a fixed one to a moving one—is privacy. It's an obstacle because it's constantly changing and because social norms are constantly changing. That makes it hard for organizations to determine the best or the right way around it. But privacy is a trade-off. If I as the customer feel I am really getting value for sharing a piece of information, then I don't feel so concerned that an organization knows something about me. But if that same organization sucks up my every keystroke without providing me anything obvious in return, then I may have a real issue. It is about sharing power, and those organizations that get it and take meaningful steps to change the balance of power with their customers, employees, and wider community will have a major advantage over their competitors in riding the next wave of growth.

I believe people tend to think about privacy as an objective to overcome versus something that you need to embrace. I know a lot of companies that have made privacy an important part of what they do and their brand promise—most every company today says, “We're not going to sell products to you based on the information we gather about you—this is just for us.” And then they proceed to use that information in a tone-deaf way to bombard the person with marketing offers, even though they haven't sold off the information to someone else.

Again, I think you have to put yourself in your customers' shoes and think about what privacy means to them. Many customers are okay with letting you know something about them, so long as there's a real benefit to them and so long as you stick by certain principles that they know they can count on. They expect you not to constantly change the yardstick or move the goalposts. It's amazing how much information there is available about people out in the world today, that they were quite willing to give away for free. But I think people are also starting to realize that there's a value to be had from their data, and there will probably come a day when people want to be rewarded for the information they provide, and they will want to be granted more control over it.

When, for example, my wife and I started making the move to television streaming services, we thought, “This is great. We like having control over our programming. We like watching the shows we want when we want. We like having more granular control over what we pay.” There were also businesses running ads in these streaming services, which was fine with us—we didn't disagree with that. In those early days, we were given the opportunity as customers to say, “I don't like that ad,” and the idea was that the ad would be pulled from our streams and they would show us a different one. The thought was that someone or something was taking a look at the kinds of things we didn't want to see, which we were quite willing to tell them. We actually looked forward to getting advertisements that were more relevant to us.

Truth is, that never happened.

Even when you told them the five things you were most interested in, none of those ads ever showed up on the streaming service. It struck me as the most bizarre thing I could imagine. In this world in which we live, we have the ability to tell advertisers the things we're most interested in, and the adjacent things we would be open to hearing more about. How much more impactful would it be if marketers actually followed through on that ability? The impact would be massive, but at least in the case of the streaming service my wife and I were using, someone clearly made the decision that the approach wasn't working for them, and so they took it away from their customers.

Maybe it's naivety on my part because I don't buy ads every day, but if you were able to say, “Here's my audience, and here's how I've segmented them, and here are the things they are really, really interested in, then approximately 10 percent of them would be very interested in this kind of luxury vehicle and those types of snack foods and this type of a getaway vacation,” (because—wait for it—they told us). And that would seem to be a very powerful competitive advantage to me.

If we didn't have to sell everything and couch everything in terms of cost per thousand (CPM), but instead something came up with a measure that was more about cost per impact (CPI), I believe that would change the game. The value of those impressions should go way up because they're more targeted. But it's very hard to put something like this in place because, as hard as it is for me to understand why, it's considered to be an extremely radical idea.

How Should We Frame the Problem?

I think part of the problem is that when we're hunkered down doing our jobs, nose to the grindstone, we simply forget to be human. I can't count how many meetings I've been in where someone says something like, “And if we did this, then people would do that.” My first thought is to ask them, “But would you want to do this? Would you react to that well?” If we could use facial recognition as someone enters a grocery store to see that someone is unhappy, and do a quick scan of their previous purchases to discover they have a hemorrhoidal condition, should we shoot them a text message with an offer for half off Preparation H?

The answer is probably not, because we didn't first take the time to walk a mile in that person's shoes, and we didn't think about the process empathetically.

I believe that we have to get away from the idea that people are audiences to be marketed to and instead focus on how to forge real connections with our customers. Part of that's going to happen through automation, part through one-to-one, and part through face-to-face. But it's all got to feel the same when the customer experiences it.

What's key, I think, to this transformation is changing the mindset. It's putting yourself in that person's shoes, in that audience's shoes—as difficult as that may sound—and getting away from traditional segmentation. That old-school approach might have worked to some degree in the past, but it's not going to get us where we want to go in the twenty-first century. Segments aren't static—people's wants and needs change. Context is everything.

So how do you build the experiential part of your organization around context, and how then do you go back to the future?

My suggestion? Organize your entire organization around these kinds of basic principles: Anyone who has any contact with any customer has got to think like a marketer, a salesperson, and a customer service rep, because those touchpoints are the experiences that, in the end, tell you what your brand is. You don't tell people what your brand is anymore—that flavor of brand promise is dead, in my view.

I don't buy suits often, but I did have to buy a few recently when my wife said to me one day, “I don't like the suits you have.” Admittedly, they were totally old fashioned (the pants had pleats and the jackets three-buttons), but I countered that they were very high quality, and no one cares about the pleats anyway. But my wife stuck to a consistent message and hit me with this kicker: “I think they make you look old.”

That was all she had to say, and with that we went shopping together one weekend. I hadn't gone suit shopping for about 10 years, and after some fits and starts we walked into a Hugo Boss store. They were having a sale, so it didn't take too much persuading.

The salesperson who helped us was brilliant. First, he plied me with alcohol before we even started looking—nothing gets a customer limbered up to shop faster than a whiskey. Then he sat down and listened to me and my wife like a marriage counselor peeling back the core of a long-buried friction. “Tell me what you both like and are hoping to accomplish today,” he asked.

After he quickly processed our answers in his mind, the salesperson proceeded to bring suits that he thought would address our individual and joint objectives. Brilliantly, he would occasionally bring something out he knew both of us would instantly dislike just to get us both on the same side. Eventually, I found myself being fitted for two suits (primary because they ticked my boxes for classic cut, value, and quality along with my wife's conclusion that they made me look young and hot rather than old and stodgy.

To his credit, the salesperson sensed that I was still kind of clinging to my old suits—like old friends I was secretly betraying. So, in a final coup de grâce, he came back to us after speaking with the tailor. “I hear you would really like to hold on to those old suits—it sounds like they are good quality. I spoke with the tailor who I have worked with for many years, I'll give you his number, he can do amazing things with old suits. He'll come to your house, recut these suits to be more modern—more fitted, no more pleats or cuffs—and you'll have new suits that will fit like your wife wants.” And sure enough, he did.

The Hugo Boss salesperson made the sale because he listened, he had expertise, and he had passion to go beyond what he had in the shop. He essentially reprised The Miracle on 34th Street: I don't have that here, but I know people who can do it for you and they're really good. You're going to be very happy, and that's a complete contrast to our usual experiences as consumers.

To underscore this tension between assistance versus expertise, it's more common to be frustrated as a customer when you need something that isn't on the menu. Every time you call an 800 number, and you need help—perhaps urgently, for example, when you've lost your credit card—you first have to go through the automated phone system which may or may not know what the hell you're talking about. It asks the same questions over and over, or tries to get you to conform to its rules and programmatic parameters: “Can you say that a different way?” The system should be making it easier for me, not the other way around.

Jeriad Zoghby put it a different way. He was in Vegas some years ago and was introduced to Wayne Newton after a show. Wayne was a wonderful guy—very warm and personable. Wayne told Jeriad a story from when he was a couple years into his Vegas career and starting to see some success. One night, Wayne was sick and not feeling well, but he still had a show to do. He asked one of the singers who'd been around for a while, “Should I tell the audience that I'm a bit under the weather?”

“Dude,” the singer responded, “they don't come to hear your problems. They come to forget their own. Your job is to help them forget their own problems, not for you to share yours!”

What a powerful learning. If all organizations just had this mindset—that their job is to make a customer's experience a good one and to solve their issues, rather than add to them—how loyal do you think they would be, even if you didn't have the latest and greatest product or service?

We've all experienced the maddening situation of calling some company's customer service line seeking their help with a problem. After navigating their voice response phone tree, you finally—after 10 or more minutes—get through to a real person and explain your situation. “Oh, that's a different department. Hold on while I forward your call.” As often as not, when that hand-off is made, you hear a click, and the line goes silent—another call lost. Instead of solving your problem, they've given you another of their own.

Alexa and other automated assistants do not provide expertise because expertise asks questions. The very first thing the salesperson at Hugo Boss did (after he plied me with whiskey) was to ask my wife and me some very pointed questions that would enable him to provide the kind of suit choices that would tick our boxes. He didn't just drag out some suits and ties and ask, “What about this suit? What about this one?” Experts ask really good questions, and above all they have passion—it shows.

Your brand promise is the ante, and it's only as good as how your customers perceive you. Are you living up to that basic promise—across every channel, every customer touchpoint, every time? Remember: your brand is only as healthy as your weakest link. If I have a great online ordering experience with Target, but I walk into my local Target store to pick up my order and the person who rings me up is grumpy or won't help me find my order, that's your brand. It's my last impression of who you are. The lowest common denominator is going to cloud a person's perception of what that brand is and whether they're going to come back or recommend friends or family going there.

There's an old myth based on a 1970s study commissioned by Coca-Cola that every unhappy customer tells 9–10 other people about their negative experience with a brand. Whether or not that statistic is actually true (and it is probably way higher in this day and age), it's clear that social media has greatly amplified customers' ability to share their brand stories—good and bad—with the rest of the world. More than a decade ago, a guitarist, Dave Carroll, was upset that United Airlines customer service reps repeatedly refused to compensate him for $1,200 in damage to his Taylor acoustic guitar that occurred when the airline's baggage handlers tossed it to the ground. Said a very frustrated Carroll:

At that moment it occurred to me that I had been fighting a losing battle all this time and that fighting over this at all was a waste of time. The system is designed to frustrate affected customers into giving up their claims … but I realized then that as a songwriter and traveling musician I wasn't without options.³

Those options included writing a song about his experience (“United Breaks Guitars”) and posting a humorous video to YouTube set to his music, then sending a message to his 400 Facebook followers asking them to watch it. And watch it they did. Just four days after the video was posted, it hit 1 million views and attracted widespread attention in social and traditional media—giving United Airlines a major PR black eye that caused the company much pain for months. Some media reports even put the blame for a 10 percent dip in the company's market value on all the negative publicity.⁴

But Carroll—whose video was eventually viewed more than 20 million times—believes that his experience had an impact on more than just United Airlines. He explained:

“United Breaks Guitars” was an early sign that in this new digital world, one customer can affect the profitability of the world's biggest brands on a budget of, in my case, $150. Companies now are listening much more closely than they ever did before, consumers are feeling more empowered, and every customer can have a voice … even if he or she can't sing.⁵

When someone posts about their negative customer service experiences on social media, particularly someone who is an influencer with a large following (think the Kardashians, Cristiano Ronaldo, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, and so on), it has the potential to quickly turn into a feeding frenzy. It pokes the bear, and everybody who has had a similar experience weighs in with their own negative stories.

Let's be fair. We all have bad days, and so do companies and the people who work for and with them. But it's so easy now to reach so many people so quickly with a message that you did not approve and have no control over. You might think that you control the story, but the reality today is that you really don't. Traditional PR is nowhere near as effective as it once was, not in this new world of social media.

Again, it comes down to redressing the power imbalance by sharing power and focusing on the value exchange and the outcomes, not on the process. Remember to walk a mile in the customer's shoes (at all levels) and think like a shopkeeper, anticipating rather than trying to predict a customer's every move. But beyond that, it's building a sense of real community so that your customers know that you've got their backs. They feel that they have given you something—their loyalty, their trust, their dollars—now you need to give something back in return, over and above the norm. You need to constantly reach out to them and ask, “What else can I do for you?” or “This is where you could save some real money,” or “How can I help you today in a way that's meaningful?”

Ultimately, the problem solution is within the experience—spending time figuring out what the best customer experience should be end to end, no matter where that road leads you. Even if it leads you outside of marketing, even if it leads you beyond customer care, wherever it might take you. That's the game you need to play. Constantly ask yourself, “How do I deliver a better experience and what are the moments that matter for my customer? And if the moments that matter are not being delivered to our customers, how do we fix that?”

The ball is in your court. Confront this issue head on right now instead of waiting for it to be flagged in some quarterly or monthly report. If something's broken, you can't wait until you've already alienated 1,500 or 10,000 people or maybe more. Why wait? Why not figure out how to do this more elastically right now?

You can and you should.

The organizing principle is experience first—the value then comes out of that. What is the value of those experiences and how do I make sure that I prioritize the things that are going to drive the most value—first for my customer first, and also for us as an organization?

Next, how do I enable that—people, processes, technologies, and data? Each one of those key players has to be aligned in a way that you normally wouldn't do. You normally wouldn't say, “Here's the experience I want to produce and here are all the things I have to change in my organization to make that work.” But that's what I think truly long-lived and flexible companies are going to be doing more and more, because they're going to want to act like a nation of shopkeepers. It's going to be, “I didn't stock that jar of jam, but I'm going to get it for you—I'll have it here in the next 48 hours. I'll send you a message as soon as it's available.” That level of flexibility is currently missing, and the organizing principle around experience ferrets it out very quickly.

What Do Customers Really Want?

We're all customers, and we know what we want. So figuring out what customers want shouldn't be any great mystery. Right here right now, we have the ability to listen in to what our customers are telling us on a variety of different platforms, gathering intelligence all along the way. We can do this en masse, we can do this in small groups, we can do this at the local level. And it is because we have access to data and technology that can make these experiences a reality at scale that we are poised to ride the next great wave of invention and growth, if only we stop and realign to what is most important—people.

In my view, customer research should have long ago made the pivot to modern channels, but the good news is it's not too late. We can continuously look at these touchpoints and mine them in real time, using automation to help.

Customers, us included, are telling organizations what they want. Just 20 or 30 years ago, we might not have had a clue. You had to get people into a focus group in some darkened room with stale M&Ms someplace and ask them questions point blank. And even then, you had to extrapolate what they were really telling you because it was just a small sample.

Today, we're sitting on an almost infinite stack of behavioral data, quantitative and qualitative information, and unstructured conversations that provide us with a hint at consumer sentiment, that give us a hint at the trajectory of their demand before it arrives, and that give us a sense of what's going right and what's going wrong. I have to think that if we were all following this prescription, there would be a lot more organizations much more closely attuned to customer demand than there are today. It still seems like a black box for many organizations.

In previous chapters, I've talked about the power of knowing three things about your most valuable customers that your competitors do not know. If you could name those three things, your company would be healthy, because you'd be ahead of the game; you would build closer relationships with your customers, you would solve their problems and address their needs proactively, and you would retain them—like the community of loyal Craftsman tool fans that we built at Sears, possibly for life.