Be Different or be dead

June 14, 2012

Why a ‘high definition’ moment is critically important to your business

Source: Unsplash

Why a ‘high definition’ moment is critically important to tour business.

A high definition moment is an interaction between a customer an an organization that is jam-packed with emotion

HD moments either leave your customer breathless or pissed-off. Gasping or in pain. Dazzled or postal. They are vivid in terms of the feelings that are created between person and company.

They are of such high resolution that the picture of what you are experiencing is easy to describe and relate to others (both good and bad news depending on the outcome).

HD Moments are, as SAS CEO Jan Carlzon coined Moments of Truth when advocacy bonds are established with customers or enemies are created.

Or as Seth Godin proclaims, when sneezers who spread your good word to others are born for your organization or protestors scream how crummy you are.

High definition moments are strategic

Loyalty is either created or destroyed. Any organization must as a strategic imperative create HD moments for their fans if they are going to thrive and survive.

How do you create HD moments?

It’s about building a team that can create these kinds of feelings every time their organization touches their customers:

> HAPPY
> AMAZED
> WARM
> FUZZY
> DAZZLED
> BREATHLESS
> GASPING
> SURPRISED
> IMPRESSED
> MAGICAL
> SMITTEN
> HONORED
> IMPORTANT
> HEARD

How often have you felt this way when doing business with a company? How often have you felt warm and fuzzy when interacting with an automated voice response system? Never I suspect.

Consider the HD moment as the driving force in architecting customer interactions in your organization

Assign a senior person as The Chief High Definition Moments Officer to make it matter in your organization and establish a high priority for it.

Recruit people who are at ease with honouring others. Establish rules and policies that leave your fans breathless.

Engineer automated systems to surprise people.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.14.12 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 24, 2012

How a trauma can be a great teacher for marketing

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How a trauma can be a great teacher for marketing.

Riots. Horrific Accidents. Shootings. Natural Disasters. All of these events can have a damaging impact on a person. And in most cases, experts are brought in to counsel the victims and others that are touched in some dramatic way.

Trauma counselling operates on the simple premise that each person’s reaction to a cataclysmic event will be different.

And to effectively treat that person you need to first, understand their reality and second, design a remedy that reflects their specific needs.

If personalized treatment is a natural thing in trauma cases, why do organizations have difficulty doing the same thing for their customers as business as usual?

Why do they continue to push a single product solution to each of their customers?

Why do they create vanilla services they then try to market to everyone?

Why do they behave as if individual needs, wants and desires don’t exist and that everyone is the same?

Let’s take a page from trauma management and apply what they do to everyday business.

Trauma marketing principles:

▪️ Each person in your target market is unique in some way. Attitudes. Biases. Beliefs. Lifestyles. Discover their uniqueness. Define it precisely for each and every one of them;

▪️ Build the ‘remedy’ that fits their profile precisely. ONLY for her and no one else. Built for her. To reflect her character mould;

▪️ Treat them with care and sensitivity. Ask for feedback on your remedy. Adjust it to better fit her requirements;

▪️ Pretend you are entering a disaster scene and have to treat distraught people who may be scarred for life.

Look for their special needs and cater to them accordingly.

People are all different; personalize the solution and treat with care.

Interesting that we can look to other professions to see how they deal with humans and get insights into how our customers should be treated.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.24.12 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 21, 2012

5 easy ways to waste your time and blow your career

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5 easy ways to waste your time and blow your career.

Having a successful career requires that you make the best use of the time you have available.

But if you really want to be ineffective, and a time waster here are 5 things you can do:

Put a to do list together of at least 10 things to be done
This will show your intent to do a lot of things but will guarantee that you will make little progress in any of them despite the huge amount of time you spend on them. Brainstorming and then multitasking is a great way to look really busy and waste time.

Kiss up to your boss
Focus on what THEY want. Ignore the priorities of the organization and just look to your boss for a sense of what you should be doing. Devote your day to asking what you can do for them. Ignore your business plan.

Write activity reports on what you’ve been up to
Include every move note detail — meetings, who were there, conferences attended and so on.
Share your reports with everyone you can think of. Make sure people know you’re a busy bee.

Send emails when you have something to say
And make every message sound complicated because it communicates how important you are.
Never have face-to-face meetings with people even virtually. They can be upsetting sometimes and could force you to answer questions you’d rather avoid.

Stay late at the office
And make sure everyone knows you’re doing it. The more time you put in, the more activities you are engaged in. Therefore you get the most out of the time available. And be sure to include your hours in your activity reports along with a complicated sounding reason you decided to put in the extra time.

It’s not easy mismanaging your time, but if you follow these 5 actions you’d be surprised about how little you will accomplish.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.21.12 at 10:22 am by Roy Osing
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May 14, 2012

How do great leaders make incredibly fantastic teams?

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How do great leaders make incredibly fantastic teams?

A critical element of leadership is creating strong teams to get the right things done

Effective teams are effective because they have a leader who has figured out that delivering the right things is the objective. It’s all about execution.

Here are 5 tips to building a strong and effective team.

Create your business plan to standout from your competition — Engage your team in the process.
Let them play an active role in shaping their collective future. Shared visions are more likely to evoke the energy and commitment necessary to execute well.

Top- down direction-setting is required, but should be carefully orchestrated and focused to those areas where leadership must be in control. Shared accountability bonds people together and gives them permission to call on each other when things go off track.

Keep it alive — Teams flourish when they are winning the battle, so the leader’s job is to ‘win a battle every day’. Let everyone know. Share the victory with the team.

Bash internal barriers — Well-oiled teams have a leader who removes obstacles preventing people from getting things done.
Priority #1 is to eliminate the grunge that fosters inertia and stands in the way of advancement. Effective teams are effective only if they execute well.

Be the Chief Barrier Basher for your team.

Translate your strategy for all employees — Paint a picture of what it means to the team and each member of it. Effectiveness comes from every team member working in harmony and having a direct line of sight to the strategy of the organization. Everyone must be moving in the same direction.

The leader’s job is to define roles that eliminate the possibility of dysfunctional activity which gets in the way of progress.

Shout out the people and achievements that show that the strategy is being successfully implemented — Reinforcing the behaviours and people that stand for the new direction will build stronger teams with better performance.

Effective Teams = enlightened leadership = shared vision = flawless execution = shared accountability

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.14.12 at 10:09 am by Roy Osing
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