This week while attending PD+I, Steve Masterson from KISKA polled the audience, prior to his keynote, on what is more important to success: innovation, product design or brand.
This was the audience response:
And the right answer, in case you’re wondering, it’s your brand. It was fun, seeing a room full of product designers come to this conclusion in under 20 minutes.
Here are the results of the same poll after the keynote:
What is a brand?
Your brand is a promise. That’s all it is.
Your brand is the promise you make to your clients. If they believe your promise, then your brand is worth something.
Your products and services help you to live up to your promise.
When you break your promise in any way, no matter how small, your brand loses value.
Brands have lost me as a client because of broken promises.
For example, Netcabo (a Portuguese Telco company), lost me over 10 years ago. Although it has been absorbed by different companies in the last years, I still want nothing to do with them. Portugal Telecom (another Telco company) is going the same way.
So if you want to have happy clients, live up to your promises. Even when it’s hard. If you need some extra incentives to do the right thing, take a look at these statistics from Return on Behaviour magazine:
- A customer is 4 times more likely to defect to a competitor if the problem is service-related than price- or product-related – Bain & Company.
- The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% – Marketing Metrics.
- For every customer complaint there are 26 other unhappy customers who have remained silent –Lee Resource.
- A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10% – Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Emmet Murphy & Mark Murphy.
- 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain, however 91% of those will simply leave and never come back – 1Financial Training services.
- A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people. – White House Office of Consumer Affairs.
- Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell 4-6 people about their experience. – White House Office of Consumer Affairs.
- 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated – McKinsey.
- 55% of customers would pay extra to guarantee a better service – Defaqto research.
- Customers who rate you 5 on a scale from 1 to 5 are six times more likely to buy from you again, compared to ‘only’ giving you a score of 4.8. – TeleFaction data research.
- It takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience – “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner.
- It costs 6–7 times more to get a new customer than keep an existing one – Bain & Company.
- 68% of customers leave because they were upset with the treatment they received whilst speaking to customer services – US Chamber of Commerce
Take good care of your brand. I’ll be here to help you when you decide you need to develop new products for your clients!
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Posted by Damião Dias | d.dias@vangest.com
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