Forget the Technology, Focus On The Customer
We often remind our clients not to worry about the competition, just focus on your customers. We’ve held that belief for a long time, and loved it when Jack Ma brought the idea to the world.
So we were very interested to read a Marketing Land interview of John Scully, The ex-CEO/Chairman of Apple and President/CEO of Pepsi, where he applied the same thought to technology. This is another facet of the same concept. It’s not a response to a competitor or the tools a company uses that creates a valuable brand experience for customers. It’s the people serving them and the company culture they co-create that define the brand experience.
Skully says that it's all about emphasizing the customer experience. And if you do it right, customers will tell other customers. He talks about how this is more powerful than the brand telling customers what to think. He advises that it’s all about “the customer plan,” and less about the business plan, a point he emphasizes in his 2014 book, “Moonshot: Game-Changing Strategies to Build Billion Dollar Businesses.”