A New Approach to Marketing…Building a Delight Machine
A colleague recently pointed out an interesting article that appeared in Adweek. The piece describes a dramatic shift underway in world branding. More specifically, the article says that big, overpowering brands are losing favor to brands that consistently deliver ongoing “daily delights.” The emerging brands build their presence by creating a “delight machine” that offers consumers new, innovative and unique experiences – keeping them guessing as to how they’ll interact and experience the brand next.
They call it a “What have you done for me lately?” mentality and the article goes on to outline the 7 rules that support this branding philosophy:
- Keep the good idea Geiger counter dialed up to 10, all the time. Listen for the ticks on the meter.
- Try things. Fail better.
- Never let some notion of mission statement or brand standards kill a good idea. Instead, make the brand fit the brilliance.
- Have an objective, but any way that gets you there is good. Consider the Lands’ End corporate motto, long before it had been acquired by anyone, that declared, “Any employee of the company is empowered to say yes to any customer — only the CEO can say no.”
- Great ideas cannot hurt your brand, or alienate any customers you would want to have. They can only help it.
- Your customers have a radar turned to 10 looking for delight-inducing ideas and so should you.
- Remember what Peter Drucker said: “The only results for your company come from outside the company — anything inside the company is a cost.” The fastest and best way to build those results is to sling delight.
Read the complete article here.
