Welcome to Focused Light

Welcome.

Customers experience companies like your friends experience you. It’s personal.

Your friends’ brand experience of you is the accumulation of feelings, thoughts, memories, and experiences about you. The same is true for customers’ relationships to organizational brands. Personal and organizational brand experiences stem from one-on-one connections through social media, phone calls, emails, the written word– and a sea of visual experiences. Your most loyal customers see you as a personal friend.

Loyal customers spend more money. They recommend you to their friends.

I love surfacing what customers love about brands—and why they leave them. While it’s hard work, it’s also fun to develop strategies that build on strengths and mitigate what customers won’t accept.

In Focused Light, I’ll tell stories and reveal the science behind winning brand strategies. I’ll write about research, consumer experience, marketing, sales, communications, management, and culture – all as they relate to brands. Plan on reading about how your brand and other brands’ employees, operations, and communications contribute to customer loyalty or defection.

Today, Apple moved my satisfaction score from a 9 to an I’m-in-love. Their website allowed me to easily view and consider a large selection of travel cases for my new 13” MacBook Pro. After I mistakenly ordered iWorks along with a new case, I easily found a telephone number on Apple’s website to correct my misstep. Ansley answered within a minute. She not only fixed my order, but thanked me via her personal email, and shared her telephone extension. I have a personal shopping concierge at Apple.

According to Exact Target, 41% of customers choose the telephone as their first choice in solving customer service issues (just like me!), 33% relying on the website and 20% choosing email.

I hope you will join me in the dialogue.