Turn Logic into Magic (5)
By Dominique Trempont, Guest Author
Design an end-to-end customer experience.
Designers tend to favor right brain thinking.
People’s perception of a brand is also very much about right brain thinking.
That is where magic takes place (or not).
Like Howard Schultz, unless you get involved and believe in the crucial importance of designing a differentiated end-to-end customer experience, the design dimension will get destroyed. It will become a rational, business-like, non intuitive, non emotional, and non visual experience.
A strong brand is a catalyst for clear, crisp, simple, intriguing, informing and trusting dialog with customers, not just one-way advertising.
It can also be the worse nightmare for more commodity competitors who do not understand why Alessi’s highly designed products sell for 10 times their price.
MP3 players have a hard time competing against the iPod because Apple designed an end-to-end customer experience that they cannot viscerally match or position against. This is differentiation in people’s mind. The features and functions are all there. But Magic isn’t.
Hence the distinction between hot brands and dull brands.
Hot brands are viral in nature: they impact networks of people at digital speed.
Dull brands are expensive to position.
“Want” and “get” the magic: design your organizations so that right and left brains are adequately represented in the right roles and responsibilities.
Left brained nerds alone cannot create this kind of magic.
