Extraordinary thinking

The recent Enigma Roundtable, led by DAV managing director, Charlie Mayes and chief operating officer Andrew Moore featured representatives from Enigma co-sponsoring companies Use Your Noggin, and Adept 4 plus representatives from Cranfield School of Management, Prime Business Services, the Imaginist Company, Honda, Siemens Water Technologies and Euro RSCG.

After an energetic debate, the consensus was that understanding how to deliver on the customer experience is a complex subject with no easy answers. It depends on the theatres in which it is applied. Nevertheless, at the heart of the subject are two key elements: trust, because people buy from people, and innovation, the need to excite people to buy.

Many products fail because they do not excite customers and fail to reach the sales or market share goals set by the companies that developed them. Indeed 90 percent of those new products that make it to the supermarket shelves will be history within 3 months. Only Apple is regularly cited as a company whose products continually set the pulse racing, with the iPhone continuing to capture the consumer's imagination.

What is clear is that old-style mass-marketing techniques have passed their sell-by date and the new, winning approaches come from social science, based on understanding what people talk about and studying what they do. For example, as Clarks Shoes found, examining the tongue of a walking boot as a precursor to trying them on.

At the same time, it is important to make a distinction between those buying a commodity item as a consumer on the Web, and those buying for business, or purchasing major items, when only a face-to-face transaction, with all the necessary human communication dynamics, will do if winning trust between the parties is going to be engendered.

For many organisations, whether it is house-builders providing customisation for home-buyers or Internet entrepreneurs creating a new hot Web channel, success will depend on matching the front-end promise with the back-end delivery, creating excitement through marketing, delivering innovation that is aspirational and exciting, and ensuring that the core product is so good in the first place that you don't need to artificially 'wrap' service around it. 'Have a nice day. I've tried to sell you a bad service,' is unlikely to generate repeat business.

To read the complete 'Extraordinary Thinking' Roundtable report, please click on the adjacent link.

The Enigma Group has been developed by DAV and its partners to extend the collective knowledge of our teams and help more organisations solve the riddle of complex business transformation programmes, faster. The next Enigma event, on 10th September 2009, will discuss the importance of leadership in a challenging economic climate. Winning companies will be the ones that can attract, develop and inspire quality, committed employees while creating and maintaining an effective culture and community - and leadership underpins each and every one of these aspects. It will be held at Conran's Bluebird Restaurant, in Chelsea.