We’re in the business of The Total Value Proposition – the whole of the experience a customer has from all of the interactions with a business (for business also read any organisation). This includes the actual product or service and all interactions before the sale, during the sale and after the sale. So this made [...]

May 10, 2012 by Cindy Barnes

Guess what? It would seem that companies are starting to consider once again the idea that people like having a positive value experience when they go shopping – especially having the ability to ask questions of a member of staff when they’re shopping. In the vanguard of this value experience ‘revolution’ we find the corporate [...]

April 25, 2012 by Helen Blake

Consider your last rail journey.  Where did actual journey time fall in your list of priorities? (Unless, of course, the train was badly delayed or cancelled.)  Would the saving of 20 minutes to the journey time have come above getting a seat? Or a clean environment?  If you are anything like me I suspect not. [...]

November 25, 2010 by Helen Blake

Surprise, surprise! Customers are human beings with distinct personalities, needs and wants. Yet for largely commercial and expediency reasons most companies send exactly the same piece of communication to every customer. Some undertake a degree of customer segmentation which may result in a different offer or subtly changed wording in the communication. It may even [...]

November 16, 2010 by Helen Blake

The next time you tell someone that you love Social Media this might be a much truer statement than you realise. Oxytocin is the so called ‘cuddle hormone’ credited with forming the unshakable bond between mother and daughter and in stimulating empathy, trust and generosity. A recent nine year study by Paul Zak, Professor at [...]

August 3, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Do customers view the quality of customer service as a key factor in deciding whether to do business with you?   The answer may surprise you. Too many businesses still view customer service as a cost of doing business rather than as an opportunity to do more business. Consequently they outsource their customer service call centres [...]

August 3, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Today’s Times newspaper shows a great example of what happens when you come up with a great idea, even ‘The Big Idea’, internally but fail to ask and test it with your customers, in this case UK voters.  A salutary lesson for all those internally made-up value propositions.  As we repeatedly say, you MUST engage [...]

May 8, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

“If Bill Gates had been British he’d be running the largest software company in Guildford by now.” A former Design Council chair once remarked. We seem to be great in the UK at innovation but not so good at bringing ideas to market and making a profit.  Why are we so bad at commercialising innovation? [...]

February 8, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

What is a sales person’s value proposition? This very interesting question was posed recently on LinkedIn.  The questioner asked: Is it Product Knowledge? Is It Customer Relationship? Is it Negotiation or Communications Skills? In this era of Web 2.0 – where buyers are better informed and demanding and have direct access to vendors and in [...]

January 17, 2010 by Cindy Barnes

Laid up in bed before Christmas with the inevitable holiday flu, I was watching re-runs of QI, a very funny and clever British quiz show hosted by the wonderful Stephen Fry.  They were talking about Paris Syndrome which is the extreme culture shock experienced by Japanese tourists upon visiting Paris.  Apparently the difference in Latin [...]

January 5, 2010 by Cindy Barnes