Comparing Differentiation to Point of View

Chapter 1: What is Experience Strategy?

In my last post, I compared target markets to situational markets. And I shared this table. I described how companies will grow.

Let’s keep going!

The next question to address is what makes a business model compelling.

Comparing Differentiation to Point of View

For many years, I’ve helped companies create brand strategies. I was always startled when I would conduct workshops on image, personality, benefits, and brand purpose to hear people say these words: “When I think about what our company stands for, the three words that come to mind are ‘trustworthy,’ ‘innovative,’ and ‘obsessed with the customer.’ Perhaps you’ve been in similar sessions. While brand strategy is meant to describe who you are, it is also meant to describe who you are in a way that is unique and compelling to the customer. Great brand strategists understand this and probe to go deeper into the heart of the customer and the soul of the company: where those two stories overlap is the place to build a brand strategy.

Differentiation is the key to marketing strategy and brand strategy. And for a company to build a successful brand, the whole enterprise needs to ‘live’ the unique and compelling attributes of the brand. The objective of differentiation is to create a value proposition that customers relate to and want to embrace, and to do it in a way that no other company can match.

The key assumption made by brand strategy is that a business builds value by being unique and compelling. Per Peter Drucker, differentiation attracts new customers and keeps current customers. What compels customers is when they identify with a company in a way they cannot with any other company.

Experience strategy approaches building a compelling business model from an entirely different place. The customer wants new and compelling experiences that evolve and get better over time, not to be delivered the same stories and tactics everyone else is using. The company must anticipate what the customer will want in the future and chart a course that marshals company resources toward that end. To chart the course, the company needs insights into the customer that will help them ‘see’ what the opportunity is and how to build solutions that will deliver on the insights that help them anticipate future needs. For example, instead of just seeing a company call center as the place where customers get answers to their questions, experience strategy provides a point of view on near future needs and involves the call center resources in a plan to learn from every interaction and move the company toward new and compelling solutions.

The point of view is a forward-thinking analysis of a customer’s future needs. Not what they wanted last year or what they want now, but what they want in the future. It is built around a future-focused insight on the customer that can be fulfilled by the company because A) only the company knows about it or B) the company knows how to execute against it in a compelling way. Or both.

Elon Musk always has a point of view about where the companies he leads need to go. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has a point of view on privacy. The company understands it and creates experiences that manifest that point of view. Facebook has a different point of view about privacy, and the differences between the two drive very different capabilities.  All successful entrepreneurs have a point of view on the near future needs of customers.

The point of view helps the company to make faster decisions about how to deploy resources, what channels and tools to build, and how to innovate. The point of view looks far enough forward that the company has time to adapt and adjust. It is not a ‘responsive’ strategy element—like customer experience metrics are—rather, it is a powerful element that calls upon the company to continually innovate toward a common vision of what the customer should experience. As the company grows, the point of view evolves, and keeps the company ahead of its competition. As customers become used to the new solutions generated, the company updates the point of view. And of course, the point of view informs the value proposition of the company heavily.

In chapter three, I will describe in detail how to create a point of view. For now, I guess you will have to suffice with an outline.

1. Introduction

   1. Marketers see people as segments. Experience strategists see people as individuals.

   2. To compel a large population of individuals to choose a solution, the company needs more than differentiation. It needs a point of view.

2. Tesla isn’t Differentiated. They have a Point of View

   1. Differentiation isn’t enough for today’s markets. You must provide a direction on where demand and behavior will be heading

   2. The point of view must be able to explain the direction of the overall experience.

   3. What drives loyalty today is personal performance, not brand identity

   4. Was T-Mobile a ‘challenger’ brand or did they have a point of view?

3. What is a Point of View?

   1. The part of your strategy that provides direction on what new and compelling experiences you should be creating

   2. Grounded in a real insight about people’s behavior and needs

   3. Description of what the company can do going forward

   4. Shows the impact on the business

   5. Principles of the strategy that can apply across the company

4. How a Point of View Shapes a Business Model

   1. Having a framework

   2. Impact on key elements of the business model

            i.     Job to be Done

            ii.     Channels

           iii.     Revenue streams

             iv.     Customer relations

             v.     Key resources

             vi.     Partnerships

             vii.     Cost structure

5. Finding the Insight about the Near Future Needs

   1. Ethnography

   2. Situational analytics

   3. Trend mapping

   4. Scenario planning

6. Articulating the Point of View for Internal Audiences

   1. Declarative statement

   2. Insight statement

   3. Theme

   4. Comparison

   5. Story

7. New Strategy Skill: Aligning Business Silos Around a Point of View

   1. Silos are the bane of business

   2. Experience strategists can break down silos through POV work

   3. Strategists provide CEOs with the formulation for a company-wide POV.

   4. How the POV can do more than a persona.

8. Closing

9. Reflection Activity

Click here for book outline with links to posts