Starbucks is one of the most successful coffee companies nowadays. It started with coffee but expanded their product line into food. Today, Starbucks not only sells coffee or food, but also tea, coffee-related accessories and equipment in more than 37 different countries. Starbucks’ goal is to create brand awareness through the “Starbucks experience”. Starbucks does this by providing excellent service to the customer. These customers can truly enjoy their cup of coffee or tea in the Starbuck stores. Starbucks Continue reading The experience of Starbucks customers→
“Well, Apple is the most innovative company in the world and they don’t do market research and keep everything on lock down, so is involving customers really a good thing?” A lot of customers, including myself, could easily think this regarding customer involvement and customer research.
It is indeed a popular view among organisations. However it is not right. I read an article about this issue and I would like to share some views about this.
We are, undoubtedly, moving from the service economy to the experience economy, as more and more consumers desire experiences and more and more companies are responding by designing and promoting them. Vinopolis is one of the businesses which follows the experience model and meets some of the most important key experience-design principles. First of all, it has a very effective and concise theme about wine and all the design elements, such as the medieval architecture, are in that way, that captivate the customer. Vinopolis engages the majority of five senses, especially taste and smell, through the restaurants and the “taste events”, as it is mentioned at the website. Vinopolis offers a great experience to the customers who can, also, create their own special event Continue reading The new world of Experience Economy…→
In the above link you can view a very interesting article I found on the internet about the evolution of the social commerce. I chose to publish this article instead of one example because it explains very well the new trend of combining shopping with online social networks. In the article a lot of interesting examples are mentioned along with some statements from the people that have come up with innovative ideas and have created these new businesses. These new businesses seem very interesting to me. They are offering nice experiences of shopping,selling, socializing, recommending, even making a Continue reading Social Commerce: From Hi to Buy→
A few years ago the mexican company “Crown Import” hired the advertising agency Pereira O’Dell for the “Corona Light “Most Liked” on Facebook” campaign. Targeting young consumers the brand raised awareness through showing user submitted photos on a billboard on Times Square in New York. After liking Corona’s Facebook page users are allowed to upload their photo and afterwards the photo will be displayed on the billboard. It is a very smart way to involve your customers. Combining offline and online technics, the integrated markting campaign succeed to increase the fans of the Facebook page up to 6000% just for 2 months. This marketing activity creates value for the two parties – consumers take part into something excitement and “Corona Light” increases the brand awareness. Instead of designing expensive billboards with expensive endorsers for example, the company decided to promote their product with the faces of their customers and fans.
As many of you have discussed about, ease of use is very important for a toolkit. A nice reallife example for this comes from the games industry. Valve, creator of the very popular game Portal 2, released a toolkit that allows the players of this game to make their own maps and share them among their friends and in the community.
This toolkit is called a “map editor” in the games industry, and is far from a new concept. However, creating map editors for games starts getting more tricky as games get more complicated. This is why the programmers had to step in and create a nice tool that simplifies the whole experience and allows people to create an infinity of content. This keeps the game fun for a long time. Continue reading Simplicity is the magic word when it comes to consumer inputs?→
The way of doing business is changing. Customers have higher expectations and customer experience is very important nowadays.
And this is the way Apple works, they care a lot about the customer experience. This is the main reason why they have a very strong brand, everyone knows about Apple. Their goal is to let the customer feel better. As you can see in the video.
As we have been speaking a lot about customer experiences that are related with brand (like the Heineken experience) I started thinking about other similar examples where this happens in dutch society.
This video explains the new era, the next generation of customer services. What is the centre of your business? IT can be everything: sales , profit, media , Facebook, marketing, growth. Nowadays is the age of the customer, everything must be customer centric and oriented. The consumer has information, has a choice and a voice and the manager should be aware of that. The customer wants more, that more that he expects is “great customer service “. The next generation of customer service is “Customer Experience” from the beginning of the process until the end!!
This video is about a company, Custvox, that helps listen and understand the voice of the consumers as well as helps managing the quality of the offered experience. It is being explained that in nowadays, retaining the, already, existing customers is considered to be one of the most important things, since we are living in the “Experience Economy” . We are experiencing the “Customer Centric Culture”. An example is being described, explaining how a coffee bean can be interepreted as a commodity, as a good to compare in a super market, as a competing service, as a memorable event, or even as everything above, in total. It is being indicated that the level of differentiation from the offered corporate experience is a factor influencing the level of leadersip position. Finally, it is being mentioned that whatever is the industry, the most important competitive advantage is the high quality of the offered experience. “Let the customer drive.”
Consumer Value Creation 