atkinson advisor

Indispensable: How to Become the Company That Your Customers Can’t Live Without by Joe Calloway

Indispensable examines how successful companies have made their products or services indispensable to their customers and recommends strategies for businesses that want to achieve the same success.

Using case studies and personal experience, Calloway pinpoints the five drivers in indispensable businesses that lead to a 90 percent success rate in the marketplace.

• Create and sustain momentum. Indispensable companies constantly look for new ideas that will appeal to target audiences. The environmentally conscious grocery store Wild Oats Natural Marketplace took its environmental focus farther by offering new containers made from corn. This seemingly small innovation made Wild Oats huge in the eyes of the environmentally conscious grocery shopper.
• Develop habitual dependability. Consistency of performance and dependability are hallmarks of indispensable companies. Calloway uses a cashier from his local Publix store to illustrate this point. The cashier is consistent (even if many of his coworkers aren’t), personable, helpful, and professional — all of which have turned Publix into Calloway’s grocery store of choice. 
• Maintain a continuous connection. Indispensable companies maintain contact with customers on an ongoing basis to strengthen relationships without ever taking clients for granted. Calloway’s car dealer provided this continuous connection through the service department and all of the free maintenance work they did on both of his cars. As a result, the dealership is his favorite. 
• Have big picture outcomes. Indispensable services focus on the overall customer experience and are aligned to customer’s goals. Pinnacle Financial Partners provides client accessibility to all executive management and offers a courier deposit pick-up system to help clients fulfill their financial needs in a timely manner.
• Engage, enchant, and enthrall. Customers have so many choices that indispensable companies understand that they must engage, enchant, and enthrall the customers in order to keep them in competitive markets. Target has built a loyal following and separated itself from the pack by offering items that are hip and fashionable at competitive prices. Customers truly believe when the company says “Expect more. Pay less.”

Indispensable clearly demonstrates the importance of thinking of the customer every step of the way.

Jugglezine by Herman Miller

Herman Miller is a furniture pioneer. The company’s Aeron and Eames chairs are legendary for their comfort. The company is also on the cutting edge of customer communications thanks to Jugglezine, its website about balancing life and work. The site features topics on lifestyle, technology, time management, working from home, and more. We highly recommend two articles: “The Zen of Desktop Management” and “E-Talking Essentials.” Jugglezine is, in its own words, “pleasantly uncommercial” and, at the same time, a perfect extension of the Herman Miller brand.

The Power of We: Succeeding Through Partnerships by Jonathan Tisch

In The Power of We: Succeeding Through Partnerships, Jonathan Tisch, chairman and chief executive officer of Loews Hotels, throws out The Apprentice/dog-eat-dog business philosophies and extols the business virtues of the Golden Rule.

Tisch demonstrates how this philosophy results in dramatic bottom-line benefits through a series of colorful stories relating his own experience with partnerships and those of other pioneering companies.

Tisch identifies six types of partnerships in entertaining, informative, and sometimes enlightening chapters:

1. The Employee Comes First — Emphasizes investing in employee growth to yield employee loyalty, commitment, and dedication
2. Turning Customers Into Partners — Focuses on maximizing the customer experience by linking with customer communities
3. Being a Good Neighbor — Discusses finding partnerships that can improve the long-term social and economic health of the community
4. E Pluribus Plenty — Identifies three types of business-to-business partnerships that can strengthen consumer appeal
5. Beyond the Ballot Box — Underscores how corporate citizens can shape government policies for the good of industries and communities
6. What’s in It for the Owners? — Explains how successfully managing employee, customer, community, business, and government partnerships makes owners happy by creating long-term profit

The Power of We clearly demonstrates how bringing people together around common goals can make business much more pleasurable and emotionally rewarding.

Tom Peters hit on it long ago. Excellence is a huge advantage in today’s competitive business climate. In fact, now is the time to think excellence over differentiation when defining your company’s product or service.

Let’s look at how excellence compares to differentiation.

Excellence is the result of core values and hard work. Differentiation is the result of market research.

Customers define excellence. Marketing departments define differentiation.

You can celebrate excellence. You can only explain market differentiation.

The best part about excellence is that nobody can take it away from you — if you are excellent at something, then you are excellent at it. By contrast, a savvy, meaner competitor can steal differentiation in a heartbeat.

Finding your company’s area of excellence is not hard, but it takes a little time. You just have to go ask your customers three questions:

1. What are we doing that you like?
2. What are we doing that you don’t like?
3. What do you wish we were doing right that we are not?

The profound answers to these simple questions will astound you.

Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba

Word of mouth is vital to any successful marketing effort. Creating Customer Evangelists is a step-by-step approach for converting loyal clients to a volunteer sales force. McConnell and Huba lay out and provide examples of their six strategies:

1. Customer Plus-Delta: how to understand what motivates your customers 
2. Napsterizing Your Knowledge: building value for your knowledge by allowing widespread use 
3. Build That Buzz: identifying and capitalizing on opportunities to showcase your products and services 
4. Create Community: helping customers bond with you and each other 
5. Bite-Size Chunks: use small bits of your service to open the door and wet a prospect’s appetite 
6. Create A Cause: find a meaningful pursuit to impress others

The book contains great examples and case studies from Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Southwest Airlines, and IBM.

CEOs worthy of their title know the value of brand equity: satisfied customers who advocate the product or company to others. That level of loyalty is an elusive marketing formula.

In a recent study, The Conference Board identified four organizational support factors that are key to brand building:

• CEO leadership and support
• A distinctive corporate culture serving as a platform for the brand promise
• The ability to obtain support from all levels of employees
• The alignment of brand messages across functions

All four have a common theme in that they start in the executive suite. Let’s break them down and look at three good examples from Southwest Airlines and one poor example from United.

CEO leadership: The Southwest organization mimics CEO Herb Kelleher. It’s maverick, playful, personal, and, yet, serious. At the same time, this is not to say Southwest is a company of Kelleher wannabes and mini-mes. The company values each individual and gives employees opportunities to be themselves.

Distinctive culture: CEOs must define and then guardedly protect a culture that supports the brand. Southwest has a unique culture – low fares, entertaining flight attendants, no assigned seats, easy fare system, etc. – that personifies its brand as a people’s airlines. We once heard a branding executive say, “I feel like Southwest is my airline.”

Employee engagement: Southwest makes sure its employees personify the brand. At a branding conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., the Los Angeles area marketing manager summed up the company’s philosophy when she said, “Enthusiastic employees spread enthusiasm to customers. If your employees don’t ‘get it,’ neither will your customers.”

Align Messages: Now for a poor example. United Airlines designed its 1997 “Rising” campaign to communicate a new commitment to customer service. The campaign backfired immediately because executives failed to read the tea leaves. Just as United was announcing its new customer satisfaction philosophy, its flight attendants were threatening a labor action called CHAOS™, or “Creating Havoc Around Our System™”. CHAOS’ tagline: “No raises. No rising.”