Get Tuesday! - August 20, 2024
Thanks for all the outpouring of love and support after I announced last week that my position with ChenMed was recently eliminated. Click here to read that if you didn’t get a chance last week.
As I said last week, I’m super optimistic of what’s to come.
But this week’s ‘Get Tuesday’ newsletter is getting out late. Let me explain:
Today is the first day of school for all three of our kids
My wife started her new job at the same school
We’re living in disorder in our house, after a flooding event that took place last month. Insurance, renovations, fun!
To say it’s a bit chaotic here is an understatement.. Thanks for the patience, and thanks for reading!
Now, a few things from this week:
Ratings fatigue
Do you ever feel like you get flooded with survey requests after any interaction with a brand?
The “how likely are you to recommend” question is asked endlessly after customer experiences, large and small — and used to calculate the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The metric that this question generates is now tracked by two-thirds of the Fortune 1000.
The result of all these customer experience surveys, in aggregate, can actually detract from customer experience.
The definition of ‘Brand’
I love Seth’s definition of brand. He says, “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.
A brand’s value is merely the sum total of how much extra people will pay, or how often they choose, the expectations, memories, stories and relationships of one brand over the alternatives.
A brand used to be something else. It used to be a logo or a design or a wrapper. Today, that’s a shadow of the brand, something that might mark the brand’s existence. But just as it takes more than a hat to be a cowboy, it takes more than a designer prattling on about texture to make a brand. If you’ve never heard of it, if you wouldn’t choose it, if you don’t recommend it, then there is no brand, at least not for you.
If you hear a designer say this (believe it or not, I didn’t make this quote up), “A TCHO Chocolate bar, with its algorithmic guilloche patterns, looks like a modern form of currency. “Modern” was always part of the brand brief — no faux traditionalism, but resolutely forward-looking for a new generation of chocolate enthusiasts…” then I wonder if there’s a vocabulary disconnect.
Design is essential but design is not brand.”
Courage
The most important virtue all great leaders possess is courage. As Nassim Taleb says, courage is the only virtue you can’t fake.
Purpose-driven approach to content
As consumers, the experiences crafted by digital content inform our overall perception of a brand—whether it’s an informational post, a white paper, or a product page. This broader brand perception is why it’s imperative to take a purpose-driven approach to content development, crafting every individual touchpoint for a specific goal.
Purchasing decisions (yes, even B2B ones) are made by humans, humans make decisions based on logic and feelings, and feelings are formed by our experiences.
