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Saturday Morning Reads: Is Your Customer’s Experience Authentically Real or Fake?

November 6th, 2010 | Author: Beth Harte

If you aren’t considering customer experience from a marketing and communications perspective yet, you have a long road ahead of you. Research has shown that corporations lose half their customers every five years. What causes this lack of loyalty? And is there anything marketers can do about it? As Joseph Pine explains in his TED Talk, products and services have been commoditized. So, what’s left? Experience.

Smart marketers will lead their organizations on the journey to understand what experiences their customers are currently having and how to improve them across the organization. The challenge is to avoid lip service (fake) and to truly view the experience from a customer viewpoint. There is much work to be done to turn around an organization’s customer experience, but it’s the only recourse available to providing an authentic customer experience.

TED Talks: Joseph Pine on What Consumers Want

“…with the experience economy, it’s about rendering authenticity. Rendering authenticity — and the keyword is “rendering.” Right? Rendering, because you have to get your consumers – as business people — to perceive your offerings as authentic.”

“There are two dimensions to authenticity: one, being true to yourself, which is very self-directed. Two, is other-directed: being what you say you are to others. And the other dimension is: are they what they say they are to others? If not, you have, “is not true to itself,” and “is not what it says it is,” yielding a two-by-two matrix. And of course, if you are both true to yourself, and are what you say you are, then you’re real real! The opposite, of course, is — fake fake. All right, now, there is value for fake. There will always be companies around to supply the fake, because there will always be desire for the fake. Fact is, there’s a general rule: if you don’t like it, it’s fake; if you do like it, it’s faux.”

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