Column: Strategy Matters

Recently, over drinks, an old friend and I reminisced about our high school days as suburban, punk-rocker wannabees. Back then, getting your hands on punk or alternative music wasn’t easy. Mainstream department and record stores didn’t carry much, if any, punk music. So, for New Jersey kids like us to get our hands on rare albums from punk bands—especially the coveted vinyl punk imports—we usually had to head to New York City and go to places like Bleecker Bob’s in Greenwich Village to get the good stuff.

One of my favorite bands at the time was the Dead Kennedys, a legendary San Francisco punk band famous for their frenetic hardcore sound and satirical, socio-political lyrics. To whit, they named their 1987 compilation album “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death” as their commentary on the excessive American consumerism at the time. I owned that album and listened to it extensively, so for a bit of nostalgia, I decided to look for an image of the album cover online. Read More

When I talk to companies, customers, and colleagues about UX strategy and the importance of understanding the end-to-end customer experience, I often tell stories about seemingly trivial parts of an experience with a brand that can have huge impacts. Small things can have significant impacts on customer acquisition and loyalty—and companies often overlook or under-prioritize them. For example:

• The process of exchanging a pair of shoes to get the right size may be so cumbersome that you don’t even want to bother with it.
• A meal that you have at a restaurant leaves a bad taste in your mouth—not because it wasn’t delicious, but because the server was inattentive and rude.
• Navigating a company’s interactive voice response (IVR) system to speak to a real person on the phone becomes a test of rage restraint, because it’s so abundantly clear that they want to make it as hard as possible.

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Recently, during an early scoping effort for a project with a new client who needed our help transforming their retail experience, we proposed their considering a journey-mapping exercise. Their response:

“Please! I do not want to see another journey map.”

Were we surprised? Meh. It was only a matter of time.

This response—or perhaps lament might be a better word—came from the client executive who is responsible for leading the effort. I was not at that meeting, but was curious about where this comment came from, so I probed for more detail about the context. There wasn’t much more to learn, but it was clear that this person had experienced a few journey-mapping efforts in the past and failed to see their value. And it confirmed what a lot of us have been expecting. Read More