Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 23, 2023

Every time I turn my television on, I regret it. Is it the programming? Is productivity wasted? Wistful feelings of stardom never pursued? No. I regret buying my Sony TV. The menu system is not very intuitive. It’s slow. The settings seem to change without warning. This bloody thing drives me around the bend. Watch Colin talking about this on YouTube: Subscribe to our YouTube channel here to see all the latest videos!

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Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

We British look at the world as if the glass is half empty. By contrast, Americans look at the world as if the glass is half full. So, when I share some statistics I read regarding customer satisfaction and leveraging behavioral economics, some of which I felt very glass-half-empty about, I hope a few of you, with your half-glass-full dispositions, will help me see the bright side.

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Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

Stanford Professor Itamar Simonson is very clever. He brought snacks to class for his students. However, he wasn’t just being cool; he used them for research. Professor Simonson learned that sometimes, we don’t want to make a choice or at least not a new one. Once we settle on an option, we stick with it if we must make the same one again.

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Beyond Philosophy

OCTOBER 7, 2023

For many of us, planning can be an area of opportunity. We underestimate how much time something will take and how much time we will have available for something, particularly regarding project completion. However, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky explained why we do this, and we will tell you what we can do about it. Kahneman and Tversky call this phenomenon the Planning Fallacy.

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Beyond Philosophy

SEPTEMBER 16, 2023

A podcast listener is in a pickle! Catherine wants to establish that her firm is known for low prices. However, she wants their reputation to avoid seeming cheap or low quality. Cheap and low quality is brand promise few firms want to make. However, many brands want to have a reputation for low prices and high quality. Unfortunately, this brand promise is challenging to get right.

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Beyond Philosophy

AUGUST 31, 2023

Sometimes your customers have to wait. You would rather that wasn’t necessary, but it is reality. So, rather than ignoring this fact, I wanted to discuss how you can make waiting less terrible for your customers. Waiting is not ideal. But given that customers are waiting, what strategies can you deploy to make that waiting feel less terrible? Watch Colin talking about this on YouTube: Subscribe to our YouTube channel here to see all the latest videos!

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Beyond Philosophy

JULY 22, 2023

At first glance, authenticity appears straightforward. To be authentic, one simply needs to be genuine in their thoughts and actions. However, as is often the case with our discussions in the podcast, the subject becomes complex under scrutiny. Our motivation to discuss authenticity stems from a podcast listener’s request. They find themselves grappling with authenticity in their experience and want to know how to improve and leverage it to generate growth with their customers.

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Beyond Philosophy

JULY 20, 2023

I was at a drugstore standing before the vitamin shelves the other day. There are hundreds of bloody vitamin options. It got me thinking about how these various vitamin companies differentiate themselves and how that applies to non-vitamin-providing organizations, too. (To be fair, one vitamin bottle caught my attention. In large text, it read “Chillax.” But I will get back to that in a minute.

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Beyond Philosophy

JULY 6, 2023

The Magic Castle Hotel made the top ten of all Los Angeles hotels on Trip Advisor. The reason why would probably surprise you, but it’s one of those little secrets about why customers buy that they don’t tell you. You would not be impressed if I showed you pictures of this hotel. It looks to me like an old apartment complex that was painted yellow and converted into a hotel.

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Beyond Philosophy

JUNE 17, 2023

You probably don’t say no to people enough, especially if it’s to your boss. Like most of us, you are conditioned to cooperate with others, which means we usually say yes to most requests to avoid conflict. However, learning to say no in the right way, might also avoid conflict while simultaneously giving you back control over your life.

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Beyond Philosophy

JUNE 3, 2023

Getting your new program initiatives accepted requires overcoming a lot. So, to help you get that done—and impress your boss doing it—you need to have a winning strategy. The corporate budget is a funny thing. Getting approval on a budget in the corporate world doesn’t mean you get to spend it. Quite the contrary. You often have to get the budget approved for what you might spend and then when you want to spend it, you get approval again.

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Beyond Philosophy

MAY 20, 2023

Journey Maps can be useless exercises. That’s right…we said it. However, these often-used tools don’t have to be as useless as they usually are. Journey Maps are only useless if you don’t include the customer’s emotional journey in them. Emotional journeys are the “squishy stuff” associated with why customers buy from you.

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Beyond Philosophy

APRIL 29, 2023

If you have been listening to us for a while now, you probably know about our “I’m in a Pickle” podcasts and the “5 Rules” series. If so, and you’re a fan, today is your lucky day because this podcast is a mash-up of both series. Not only that, but we also added in 5 more bonus rules for 100% more rules. It seems that quite a few people in our audience have a pickle.

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Beyond Philosophy

APRIL 27, 2023

One of our podcast listeners has a pickle, which, for those unfamiliar with it, is our term for a business problem. Our listener did their research, which gave them projected sales that made them proceed with their product launch. However, the sales after the launch haven’t been what the study predicted. Understandably, they want to know why. So, I figured we would also discuss our thoughts here since some of you had a similar problem.

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Beyond Philosophy

APRIL 13, 2023

FOMO, or fear of missing out, is a powerful marketing tool. The acronym denotes how we do things because we are worried about regretting not doing them later. In addition to being the subject of several research projects in psychology, it’s also a powerful marketing tool—if you know how to leverage it. I witnessed the ubiquity of FOMO while watching the latest Avatar movie.

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Beyond Philosophy

MARCH 30, 2023

A sure way to fail in your efforts to reach your target customers is not to understand how things work where they are. Some hilarious examples are in this article, “ 11 of the Biggest Brand Blunders. ” This lack of understanding can occur domestically or globally, in different age groups or different cultures. If you don’t know about what is important to your prospects and what they value, you are sure to fail.

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Beyond Philosophy

MARCH 25, 2023

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. This podcast is full of bad advice. If you do follow the five rules we present, we guarantee you will fail. We realize this might be different than our usual Five Rules episode content.

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Beyond Philosophy

MARCH 23, 2023

You must focus on your employees if you want a great experience that delivers service excellence. Unfortunately, that isn’t my concept. I got it from a book I read twenty-five years ago called The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value by James L. Heskett, Earl Sasser, Jr., and Leonard Schlesinger.

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Beyond Philosophy

MARCH 4, 2023

One of our listeners, Clive Hearst has a bit of pickle he needs our help with today. He wants to know whether he should invest the time and money in getting his MBA. He wants to know what the true value is of an MBA, and whether it is a must-have for his career. The answer depends on a few things. It might surprise you to know I don’t have an MBA.

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Beyond Philosophy

JANUARY 21, 2023

It’s a new year so we decided we needed an update. A few years ago, we gave you some rules for gaining growth. But times have changed, and so the rules need to change, too. Therefore, we took another pass at the questions that can help your organization gain growth in 2023. In some ways, these are more like provocations than questions. However, we aren’t picking a fight.

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Beyond Philosophy

JANUARY 5, 2023

What do leadership and rabbits have to do with each other? Usually, not much. However, in the context of leading a team that needs to put the customer at the center of everything they do, I have a story that explains how they are. It turns out that a customer strategy that puts the customer at the center of everything you do requires letting your employees get comfortable outside the hutch.

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Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 31, 2022

A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. Bad leadership leads to bad Customer Experience. To have a great Customer Experience, you have to have great leadership. It reminds me of rabbits.

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Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 29, 2022

As 2022 draws to a close, I like to reflect on the year and what I have learned. I shared them on a recent podcast and thought I would share them here with you, too. Lesson #1: You can never go back to the way things were. You can only progress into something new. We have been waiting for things to return to normal for the past couple of years. First, there was COVID and the lockdown, then came the supply chain issues (predicated by said lockdown), labor issues, a war, rising inflation rates, a

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Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 8, 2022

People tend to be less sensitive to improvement the more things improve. 9Diminishing sensitivity is why what exceeded customers’ expectations and delighted them in your experience on its introduction becomes what customers expect and appreciate—but don’t celebrate—upon return. So, let’s look at what diminishing sensitivity today means to your experiences, the implications of it in your customer evaluations, and what you can do about it.

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Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 5, 2022

There is plenty of bad news to be had about a recession. However, if you think about it, there are some silver linings, too. With that in mind, we are going to explore some of these surprising advantages to manage how we respond to the looming threat of recession that we all are doing business under today. Before we get into that, I would like to start with our younger listeners by explaining that recessions are part of a normal economic cycle.

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Beyond Philosophy

DECEMBER 3, 2022

Customers are fickle. Or at least they appear to be. What once may have exceeded your customer’s expectations one day becomes ordinary the next. That’s because People become less sensitive to change as things improve. It’s called Diminishing Sensitivity, and it’s the reason that sometimes you have to work harder to “Wow!

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Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 3, 2022

Fear is a powerful motivator for what we do. It is also a powerful tool for marketing. So, with Halloween coming up, we decided we would dive deeper into why this is and why it works to get people to do things. Some of the reasons might, well, scare you. Okay, they probably won’t scare you but will surprise you. See, we were tricking you. Wasn’t that a treat?

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Beyond Philosophy

NOVEMBER 5, 2022

What if we told you that we know how you could develop a superpower? You can. We know you can because the method for it it was developed by a Yale’s assistant professor of marketing that was once a door-to-door salesperson and someone who has performed open-heart surgery on a pig. The superpower you can develop is influence and it is essential if you want to make changes in your organization.

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Beyond Philosophy

OCTOBER 22, 2022

This week on our podcast and Intuitive Customer YouTube channel , we address a listener’s “Pickle” with our “I’m in a Pickle” feature. You might remember that a Pickle is our term for a business problem that might be addressed with customer strategy and/or the behavioral sciences. We hadn’t featured one for a while, so we thought it was time to dig into a new one.

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Beyond Philosophy

OCTOBER 13, 2022

Why Video is the Untapped Jewel to Greatly Enhance Your Customers’ Experience. We created this newsletter in partnership with Streem. Have you ever used the word “doohickey” or “thingymajig” in a call with a contact center? I have. I didn’t know what the whatchamacallit was, but I knew it wasn’t working. Unfortunately, the expert at the contact center didn’t know what the doodad I described was either, so we were at an impasse.

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Beyond Philosophy

SEPTEMBER 17, 2022

Memory is crucial to customer strategy. Understanding customer behavior requires a fundamental understanding of how we access and use memories in our daily life and how it drives decision making in our actions and even who we decide to trust. In other words, understanding people requires understanding their memories. Further, it requires knowing what they remember and why, and also, what they don’t remember at all.

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Beyond Philosophy

AUGUST 27, 2022

Intuition is a concept that plays a major role in decision-making for all humans. Intuition is the way we can “know” things without using our reasoning. It is based on our instincts and experiences, and our need to find patterns for things in our lives. Unfortunately, intuition isn’t always right. Knowing when intuition could be correct and when it might not be is a critical skill for any of us, particularly in business.

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Beyond Philosophy

AUGUST 25, 2022

On the Apple phone the other day, it suggested widgets to me of apps I might want to use. The phone notices that I want to use the apps at a particular time of day, so it pushes them to me proactively. Providing proactive experiences is part of the future I see for Customer Experience , a side effect of Customer Science. For those who read this newsletter, you know that Customer Science is where we have a convergence of artificial intelligence (AI), data, and behavioral sciences.

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Beyond Philosophy

JULY 30, 2022

We hope you enjoy today’s show. If you do, could vote for us in the People’s Choice Podcast Award? It doesn’t take long to cast your vote and it would really mean a lot to both Ryan and I. Thanks very much. Cheers! To vote, please click here. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an incredible technology with potential to shape the future of humanity.

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Beyond Philosophy

JULY 9, 2022

When I was still a lad, around 10, I brought home a school report that read, “Colin is the class clown.” I am still proud of that report card to this day. Humor is an essential part of life and, surprisingly enough, business. There are numerous ways to use humor to your advantage in your customer strategy. You might have heard the phrase, “Laughter is the best medicine.” That’s because it is.

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Beyond Philosophy

JUNE 25, 2022

Breakthrough thinking: Why do we believe things that are not true? There was a car brand several decades ago in the UK called ŠKODA. It was a terrible car, much like Yugo was in the US. However, they have changed their image and today, my son wants to buy one. I told him the jokes we all used to have about ŠKODA and their low-quality construction (What do a ŠKODA and a baby have in common?

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Beyond Philosophy

JUNE 18, 2022

Podcast Summary. A lot of the behavioral sciences can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science. 5 Rules for Effective Customer Research That Make A Difference. Customer research is an essential part of any organization’s customer strategy.

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