Gabor George Burt

Your quick guide to infatuating consumers

This week I have shared two examples highlighting the power of infatuation, first with an article on the airline industry followed by the article entitled “How much love for the Colonel is too much?” Here is why: When you think of yourself as being in the business of providing lifestyle enrichment  and strive to infatuate consumers you can stay continuously relevant to a broad audience.

What are the key takeaways?

1. In order to infatuate, strive to be the provider of your consumers’ favorite offering. Once you achieve that, you have a hold on their attention and affection and can widen your offering palette across market spaces and industries through a brand tied to your central offering.

2. Consumers have a capacity to form only a limited number of close, emotional associations with brands and offerings from among all those they come into contact with. You want to make sure that yours is one of them.

3. Being relevant is more important than being best or being biggest. Counterintuitive to such managerial concepts as relative market share or operational excellence, it is not enough to have an efficient organization or to be the biggest or best within a traditional market segment. Instead, you need to continuously scan the horizon and shift course to stay relevant. In fact, being biggest or best may be a hindrance, because it impedes your ability and inclination to adapt quickly.

4. In order to stay relevant in a fast and continuously changing environment, you need to be market driving rather than market driven. Market driven, no matter how responsive, is a reactionary stance. In contrast, market driving is proactive, creating spaces of lifestyle enrichment that did not exist before.

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How much love for the Colonel is too much?

In my last post, using the example of American Airlines, I wrote that there is no such thing as a perfectly and continuously satisfied consumer. However, there IS such a thing as an infatuated consumer. As with personal relationships, infatuation occurs when consumers first come in contact with a product or a service that deeply resonates with them. Consequently they become temporarily blinded by any shortcomings or possible defects, and are in a trance of positive affiliation. Think of your favorite gadget or car or restaurant. How elated you first felt, and how that sense of blinding elation gradually wore off with time.

But what happens when one’s infatuation goes overboard and tips towards fanaticism? A recent story about highly sought-after Kentucky Fried Chicken gives us some insight.

Via the Washington Post:

Kentucky Fried Chicken is something of a revolutionary symbol in the Middle East, as the Post’s Max Fisher described in this post on Libya’s “Uncle Kentaki” chicken earlier this week.

Now the Gaza Strip is getting in on the action: Enterprising Palestinians have begun smuggling fried chicken 35 miles from Egypt.

[Image via The Telegraph.]

Rewarding light flyers

There’s no such thing as a perfectly and continuously satisfied consumer. No matter how much you are able to infatuate your customers at first, there will come a time when it will wear off. Which is why you always have innovate, try new things and try to delight all over again.

Ah, the airline industry, awash in red oceans, has infinite ‘leg room’ for innovation and customer infatuation. It’s an industry and theme I enjoy posting about, for example in Pay by weight, not per seat and Cuddle your way across vast blue oceans. In fact, in my book Slingshot I discuss an idea of how airline loyalty programs could easily create infatuation for both airlines and customers alike. So in light of this, I was particularly interested to learn about a recent move by American Airlines to infatuate flyers by rewarding those who pack light.

Via The Economist:

EVER since American carriers began introducing fees for checked bags, overhead bin space, especially on short flights, has been at a premium. Cost-conscious travellers try to squeeze as much as possible into the largest possible carry-on bags, often causing chaos when boarding. In response, some airlines have occasionally allowed travellers without large bags to board flights first, rewarding those who pack light.

Last week, American Airlines announced that it would formalise the practice, and its new boarding guidelines put customers without overhead luggage ahead of boarding groups two, three and four. (Elite frequent flyers, uniformed members of the armed forces, and first- and business-class passengers still get on before the light packers.)

[Original image from Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.]

Fast Track to re-engaging your childhood creativity

“To be successful we must live from our imaginations, not from our memories.”
—Stephen Covey, author and leadership expert

This week I have shared two examples highlighting the power of re-imagining and defying conventional wisdom, first with an article on the Invisible Helmet followed by the article entitled “Do you know too much for your own good?” It is this very ability to think in a counterintuitive manner that can enable businesses to be market driving, to deliver lifestyle enrichment and to repeatedly infatuate its customers.

What are the key takeaways?

1.) We all had a wide capacity for inventiveness when we were children. By re-engaging our childhood creativity, we can recover the foundation for strategic thinking that defies conventional wisdom and elevates us to the realm of market driving.

2.) Unconventional wisdom has been a critical driving force for great accomplishments during the course of human history. Inspiration is all around you; you just need to open your eyes and mind.

3.) In a hazardous and unpredictable environment, the role of unconventional thinking is especially critical as a basis of business strategy. Especially when market conditions are unprecedented, traditional ways of operation cannot apply. Instead of a strategy for mere survival that may simply accelerate your company’s decline, you should recalibrate your perspective in order to see the environment as full of new, exceptional opportunities.

4.) As in your childhood, aim to have a broad inquisitiveness and have this curiosity permeate every facet of your life. Some of the most momentous unconventional ideas for your business will come to you via observations in settings far removed from it.

5.) No matter what your market position is, whether you are an established market leader or a newcomer, it is to your strategic advantage to continuously challenge and redefine market standards.

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Do you know too much for your own good?

When we re-ignite our sense of exploration, imagination, and curiosity that we had as children we suddenly find ourselves able to overcome even the most challenging of limitations.

It’s the premise for my book, Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life, and the topic of a thoughtful article by Mark McNeilly over at Fast Company entitled “How Your Own Expertise Is Holding You Back” that advocates challenging assumptions, getting an outside perspective and taking a Blue Ocean Strategy-like approach.

….the expert faces the challenge of knowing too much. She knows what works and what doesn't. He knows what's been tried and why it didn't work. Unfortunately, by accepting these things as givens, they cannot see what is possible. Only someone who views things with a "beginner's mind" can imagine what could be if the assumptions are challenged.

Let me give you an example; Peter Gruber, the director of the popular movie, Gorillas in the Mist, couldn't figure out how to get the gorillas to do what he wanted them to do. They weren't following the script, so to speak. So he held a meeting.

In the meeting an intern said, "Why don't you let the gorillas write the story?" Everyone laughed at her but later she was asked what she meant. She said, "What if you sent a really good cinematographer into the jungle with a ton of film to shoot the gorillas? Then write a story around what they do on film." So that's what Gruber did. As he said, "This woman's 'inexperience' enabled her to see opportunities where we saw only boundaries."

Read the entire article over at Fast Company.

[Image via LetsGraph.]

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Re-imagining bicycle safety: the invisible helmet

Today I share with you the inspiring story of two women who are re-imagining bicycle safety by creating an “Invisible Helmet.” Their work touches on three primary innovation principles that I write about in my book, Slingshot. Let’s take a closer look how.

1) Stretching the definition of your business to its broadest extent in order to discover new market spaces of expanded relevance. The Invisible Helmet expands the relevance of the traditional helmet from an oftentimes cumbersome instrument for safety into a fashionable  accessory with increased utility and safety for the wearer.

2.) Learning to identify consumer ‘pain points’ and to turn them into ‘points of infatuation.’ The Invisible Helmet eliminates many of the drawbacks most often associated with wearing bicycle helmets such as uncomfortable and cumbersome to wear, lack of style and often lack of proper protection.

3) Embracing the shortcut to meaningful innovation: Instead of outright invention, you need to simply unlock powerful combinations of existing components. Air bag technology is not new and neither are scarves or accessories worn around the neck, yet no one has previously thought to combine these two existing components into one for the purpose of improving bicycle safety.

[Video via YouTube.]

How much are your customers willing to take?

Over time, customers acquire certain perceptions which influence their emotional response to new offerings. By recognizing such perceptions, you can position your offering so as to have the best likelihood of infatuating customers.

In my weekly series of short, comic anecdotes in partnership with WOBI (World of Business Ideas), I look at the world of strategy and innovation through humorous inquisitiveness. After all, having such a perspective is fuel for our creativity and imagination.

In this next installment “How Much Are Your Customers Willing to Take?” I talk about consumer perception that the quality of a car's entertainment system closely reflects its overall quality and driving performance. Be sure to check out other great content available in English, Spanish and Italian on the WOBI site.

[Image from Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.]

 

Do you know where your Satisfaction Frontier is?

A new report via Bloomberg reveals that we can never be too rich, consistent with a central tenet of my Slingshot Framework: As consumers our satisfaction frontier is always just beyond our grasp. But why beyond our grasp; why so elusive?

Any highly successful and well-received offering that you put on the market transitions from an Infatuation Interval to the Entitlement Period, barring those that create a permanent infatuation. During the Infatuation Interval, consumers are fixated on the offering’s novelty, seduced by its perceived benefits, and blinded to its potential shortcomings.

However, as this veil of infatuation wears off, consumers gradually take ownership of the offering, that is to say, they will no longer consider themselves privileged but rather fully entitled to it. The perception of ownership passes from provider to consumer. Consumers feel that they now possess full rights of ownership for the offering. This is the start of the Entitlement Period, in which consumers will take notice of and express all the things that could make the offering even better for them. And you have to be careful here: if you let your consumers linger too long in the Entitlement Period without heeding their suggestions or demands, they will at some point turn away from your offering altogether. That is the danger of stopping to innovate, especially in today’s environment of accelerated life cycles, market convergence, and relentless inundation of consumers by an overabundance of offerings — all of which puts immense pressure on your offering to retain the attention of consumers.

[Original image from Slingshot: Re-Imagine Your Business, Re-Imagine Your Life.]

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Tablet market headed towards red ocean

There are several driving forces behind the need for businesses to create blue oceans, including increasing price wars and shrinking profit margins. For major product and service categories, the accelerated pace of commoditization means that differentiating brands becomes harder in both economic upturns and downturns. And as brands become more similar, customers increasingly make their purchasing decision based on price — propagating a vicious, bloody tide of red oceans.

Could it be the case that the tablet industry is changing into a bloody, red ocean? A recent interview with BlackBerry’s CEO points to the growing commoditization of this popular industry and reinforces the notion that there are no permanently great industries.  

Via QZ:

In other words, the tablet market is now identical to the PC market of the late 1990s, after Steve Jobs returned to Apple and during a time when Macintosh computers were significantly more expensive than PCs running Windows. Consumers have a choice: Save themselves some coin on a more open, flexible platform that isn’t as heavily designed, or go for the safety of Apple’s walled garden, which they may be locked into already, thanks to a heavy investment in apps for their iPhone and previous iPads.

[Image via Smart Movie Making.]

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Life Lessons from Dr. Seuss

Are you also a fan of Dr. Seuss, the incomparable author of childrens’ books? His invented characters have such deep insight about human nature and business that I often refer to them throughout my book and on this blog.

So it was a delight to see this collection of Dr. Seuss’ Life Lessons recently. And as you look toward the weekend, I invite you to enjoy and contemplate.

[Image via Mamiverse.]