April 15, 2020

The Post-Pandemic Business Era:
Part 3: How Brands Must Reimagine Themselves for the Future

Michael Sauer Customer & Market Insights, Customer Experience, Strategy

Welcome to part three of our three-article series on how brands must evolve and reimagine themselves in this new era of post-pandemic business. Recall, from part one of our series, that since 2000, we’ve experienced three major business disruptions—the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the financial crisis of 2008 and now the COVID-19 global pandemic. Part one of our analysis addressed brand opportunities for a contactless society in response to social distancing safety measures.

April 13, 2020

The Post-Pandemic Business Era:
Part 2: How Brands Must Reimagine Themselves for the Future

Michael Sauer Customer & Market Insights, Customer Experience, Strategy

In part one of our series, we noted that since the year 2000, we’ve experienced three major business disruptions—the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the financial crisis of 2008 and now the COVID-19 global pandemic. And while our first installment focused on brand opportunities in the resulting, contactless society, in part two of our series, we examine how organizations must rethink their product and service offerings to meet the new needs of consumers in the midst of this new business era.

April 10, 2020

The Post-Pandemic Business Era:
Part 1: How Brands Must Reimagine Themselves for the Future

Michael Sauer Customer & Market Insights, Customer Experience, Strategy

Since 2000, we’ve experienced three major business disruptions—the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the financial crisis of 2008 and now the COVID-19 global pandemic. As we look to the future, brands will once again have to reimagine their role and relevance in an altered marketplace if they hope to continue to grow and evolve.

October 28, 2019

Corporate Innovation: Breaking Through Organizational Barriers

Justin Daab Customer Experience, Innovation, User Experience Design, UX

I’m not sure who first promoted the idea that the greatest determiner of whether a corporation could successfully innovate is an ill-defined, immeasurable quality named “agility.” I am sure that the individual in question had a penchant for oversimplification. Just do a search for “agile business” books on Amazon, and the results are well over the 2,000 result threshold where Amazon stops counting. It’s not that a company shouldn’t have the qualities linked to the idea of agility. It’s just that agility is an emergent condition resulting from a number of more easily quantified and measurable behaviors.

October 2, 2019

Three signs of success that should make you want to innovate.

Justin Daab Customer Experience, Innovation, User Experience Design, UX

In business, we should always celebrate our successes. We should all find happiness and take comfort in classic, somewhat irrefutable, business metrics, like returning a healthy net profit, growing sales and customer loyalty, to name a few. But there are anecdotal success measures most people repeat that, while they directionally point to good things, should also have you start asking whether they actually are signs of a problem. Let’s look at three of the most common.

June 7, 2019

Who should own the digital customer experience? Marketing or I.T.?

Justin Daab Customer Experience, Strategy, UX

In a perfect world, every department within every company, and all of the incentive packages of everyone working in every department making up those companies would be aligned around delivering a seamless, amazing digital customer experience. But in our professional experience, there are frequent debates (some of them quite fierce) about what department or group “owns” it. That debate arises from a number of factors. The most common, as you may have guessed from reading the opening line of this post, is misalignment between budget authority, project accountability, and controls.