You should think / write / experience everything from your customer’s perspective.

Don’t write on your website ‘We are an advertising agency’. That is focused on your self. Instead try ‘helping you to get more bang for your advertising dollar’.

Your customer focus needs to be right back at the roots of your company – in your mission /vision / brand.

This is a great post by Jay Ehret about a case study.

Here is the original focus in the case study  :

Mission: To provide our customers a great value with our lines of furniture and to provide tailored furniture and services to meet their needs, striving for 100% customer satisfaction.

Vision: To be the number one destination point for furniture in the region.

Brand Promise: To provide tailored (customized) furniture and services to meet your needs.

Can you recognize above – how its inward focused ? how it’s talking about you and your company ?

Does that sound like your own mission/vision statements ?

And here is the updated version – adapted from Jay’s work:

Mission: To deliver furniture that tells stories. To alter competition from price to experience.

Vision: delivering lifestyle to customers through furniture.

Brand Promise: Come home with pride.

We are now talking about customers and experience.

We’re taking the game from furniture to experience. Customer’s will enjoy the lifestyle benefits associated with our furniture. Customers will talk to other customers about the experience at our store.

Learn more about customer experience.

Imagine the word of mouth, from a proud owner of new ‘lifestyle furtiture’. When they next have guests over – you’ll be sure they mention your store.

Obviously much of this is just strong branding over a long period of time.

It also occured to me, you need to understand where the experience is in your industry. Then you need to go and own that experience.

I’ll reference ‘Circ de Soleil’ and the book Blue Ocean Strategy. BlueOcean talked about Circ-de-Soleil beat out circuses, by making the acts faceless, and removing the expensive actors (both animals and invididual stars). BlueOcean was able to control costs, focus on a better paying market charging a premium price. Less costs and premium prices – now that’s profit.

Here I am saying Circ-de-Soleil owned the experience. Its like running an art gallery perhaps, you dont want to be at the beck-and-call of the art industry, as to who will show in your gallery.

You need to own the experience – not the artists. You need to still make the same money, if you change artists, someone else signs your star. This also stops a star leveraging their value for more pay.

Another good example is say – ‘Kaos Comedy Restaurants’. Having the waiters be funny, tell jokes, and be rude – all part of the night. They owned the experience, and not the artists.

RedBubble seems to be generating lots of attention, and recently won a cool-company award. They own the platform and the community in which the art is shown. RedBubble aren’t in trouble if a single artist goes. You dont go to redbubble to get to just one artist.

I guess this is ultimately what will put Hoyts out of business. They don’t own the movies. No-one is loyal to Hoyts – we’ll go where the movies (the art) goes. OK – they still have some experience going to the cinema.

Hoyts whole ‘only at the movies’ campaign is rediculous. For the life of me – I cant understand why Hoyts dont market ‘better at the movies’ – ‘or more fun at the movies’, or do lifestyle marketing. The only edge/value they have left is the experience – yet they market about the movie itself.

I can even see a time, when a huge star disintermediates the whole movie industry, and sells direct over the web, DRM protected movies. Like the next star wars movie – ‘only on the web’. But that’s another story.

Don’t let your company be the next circus or the next Hoyts.