FNAC wants to reinvent the relationship with the customers
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Enriching discussions can also take place online and I was very positively surprised by a discussion I had on Linkedin. If you are familiar with this website you may know that there are groups to which you can get affiliated…
MyStarbucksIdea: a great failure ?
« Great » and « failure » may be two words you wouldn’t associate at first. Yet, it’s the impression which I got whe I recently received the Starbucks newsletter proudly announcing that 150 ideas from the MyStarbucksIdea platform had been implemented. 150 ideas…
Relationship marketing again and again
Being on holiday has also some negative aspects. I'm reading more than usual and the more I read the more I'm getting fed up with relationship marketing. Customers relationships here, customers relationships there; it sounds like if those two words…
Guerlain: customer experience in the historic store on Paris’ Champs Elysées
Guerlain just opened a pop-up store on the Champs-Elysées avenue (number 68), next to its historic store. I’ll deal with the pop-up store in a separate post but for the time being let’s see what’s up in the “old” store.…
The Belgian Post wants to rejuvenate postcards
The Belgian post, who recently was renamed BPost, just launched an original app for smartphone. This app aims at sending a postcard; a real one actually. We’ve been used to virtual postcards for years and with this app BPost offers…
An outstanding customer experience in an incredible store in Brussels
By Pierre-Nicolas Schwab •
Sometimes it's not necessary to travel thousands of miles to find unique stores and enjoy incredible customer experiences.Although I've been living in Brussels for 10 years, I must admit I seldom go downtown and actually never shopped in the Rue…
The clichés of Lavazza’s advertisement
Look at this advertisement for Lavazza; it's full of clichés about Italy: the macho man with his tee-short, the dominated woman. What I prefer however are the clothes on the clothes line in the background. It's well worth a coffee,…
How to manage customers’ expectations
Customer satisfaction depends, in part, on the gap between a customer's expectations and the actual performance. A good tactics, seldom used, to increase satisfaction is to shape customers' expectations. The Belgian Post gives us an easy example. The most annoying…
The example of a well-managed customer experience by Blancpain
When Jean-Claude Biver took over Blancpain to revamp it, one of the first things he did was to launch the 6 masterpieces, a range of 6 watches (from the most simple to the most complicated) housed in the same case.…
What is the marketing positionning of Blancpain (Swatch group)
Blancpain is a famous watch brand owned by the Swatch group which, in my opinion, deserves attention for several reasons. Blancpain is first of all a brand with history; not only an historical tradition of watchmaking that goes back to…
A call to reinvent the codes of the luxury sector
It’s too much. I was reading last week an article about Sushi Shop in a monthly French economic magazine. The author explained that Sushi Shop just let redesign its packaging by Kenzo, the famous clothing design who has diversified into…
McCafé … Starbucks’ bane
Starbucks’ success has attracted the attention of many potential competitors and McDonald’s attempt to “retaliate” with the McCafés is certainly one of the most serious threats for Starbucks. I visited a McCafé in Paris last week and wanted to benchmark…
An original slogan is all what you need …
A business' success is sometimes (not always) associated with an impacting slogan ... here's one I saw last winter in New-York: "ridiculously healthy"
Bad practices: mind the little details
Service quality is one of the major antecedents of customer satisfaction. Sometimes it may be impacted by little details which can ruin all your efforts. Vanden Borre, which I mentioned in an earlier post, has done a major mistake when…
Customer satisfaction best practices
This complicated sketch represents the first step of my tentative to sum up the different flows of academic research around customer satisfaction. I started reviewing literature in an attempt to define more precisely which best practices had been defined in…
The Vandenborre experience
Vandenborre is part of the French retailer "Darty" which became famous thanks to its excellent slogan (and promise) "A contract of confidence" (le contrat de confiance). What Darty realized well in advance was that consumers shopping for electronics and home…
Decrypting Abercrombie & Fitch stores
Abercrombie & Fitch is trendy and each store opening generates a lot of buzz. Look for instance on YouTube the videos that we taken when the brand opened its store in Milan. A&F flagship store on 5th Avenue in NY…
What is not an experience today?
With each trend comes a drawback; even in marketing. Look at the customer experience for instance. This concept does make a lot of sense and I firmly believe it is a source of success for all companies, whatever the business,…
Customer experience: CEO’s passion is essential
I'm just back from a week in New York where I followed a workshop on the management of Customer Experience at the Columbia Business School. From the work sessions with my colleagues we found out that the CEO plays an…
Next speak at Solvay Business School about Value co-creation
The course is mandatory for MBA students of the Solvay Business School but is also opened to everyone. You can register vua Eventbrite : http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1084117625/efblike Teaser bvs dec 2010 value co creation from pnschwab View more presentations from pnschwab.
Real-estate agencies in Brussels: the results of a study to evaluate professionalism
A few weeks ago I announced on this blog that I started a small-scale study on real estate agencies in Brussels. One week after the launch the results were already catastrophic, the response rate being very low. The method of…
Michel & Augustin: the reality behind the scene
For a long time already I had been eager to know more about Michel & Augustin, a brand which enjoyed a lasting buzz on social media networks. I had met Augustin at SIAL 2010 in October and wanted to see…
Interview with Marc Alagem, CEO of Freedelity
Freedelity is a company established in Brussels and which got pretty much press coverage this summer. Freedelity launched a service based on the electronic ID card used in Belgium; namely, Freedelity proposes to use the ID card as a loyalty…
Crédit Agricole: why I don’t understand their communication on Facebook
After I published my post on Crédit Agricole, I got several comments (one of them from the Crédit Agricole itself) which call for a more detailed argumentation. Here are the main points of concerns I was dealing with in my…
Invent an identity: the case of Breguet’s watches
At the heart of any success story is a great product ... and a great marketing. Forget about being successful if you have a less-than-average product. I keep reminding this to my clients. You won't make a successful brand if…
Cocreation lesson #5 : customer experience
My review of 40 years of literature has shown that the word “experience” is used by many authors to illustrate co-creation processes. Prahalad & Ramaswamy (2000) called for «personalized experiences with the customers». Vargo and Lusch (2004) suggest that «experience…
How does Air France – KLM deal with customer’s satisfaction?
After I blogged last week about Accor and the way they deal with satisfaction in their annual report, I thought it might be interesting to do the same exercise for another company. Researches based on the analysis of annual reports have…
The effects of word-of-mouth over time
In this article, I propose to take a look at word-of-mouth, its effects, but also what causes it. You will also find an interview we conducted with one of the world's leading specialists in customer satisfaction. The effects of word-of-mouth…
And what if Ryanair was a model of customer experience management?
And what if Ryanair was a model of customer experience management? This is the somewhat provocative opinion developed by Bruce Temkin on his blog "customer experience matters". His conclusion resonates as a meaningful message: "A bad customer experience does not…
Loyalty and customer satisfaction in online commerce
A study by Taiwanese researchers recently caught my attention. It is studying the link between the online interface (that is, the website) and customer loyalty. Researchers have pointed out that while the satisfaction factor is considered one of the most…
An increadible experience: visit to the Blancpain manufacture
Today's post will be slightly different and longer than usual to provide watch lovers less interested in marketing aspects with more technical information.
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