SRM and why it matters to growth and customer experience - Interview with Ryan Hamilton

0:00So welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. With me today, I have Ryan Hamilton. And Ryan is an associate professor of marketing at Emory University within the Goizueta Business School. I think I got that right. But he's also... We'll give you full credit. Thank you very much. But he's also a podcaster, a longtime podcaster with Colin Shaw on the Intuitive Customer Podcast. So that's how many people may have heard of you. But Ryan, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? uh thank you adrian it's such a delight to be here i appreciate it you're very welcome now i always ask ryan i'm a guest on the podcast to give me i mean i can read our bio and all that sort of stuff but i always like to hear things from the horse's mouth so can you give me a bit of a thumbnail sketch on you and the work that you do i appreciate that because if you read my bio you're you're stuck with the facts but if you open it up to me i can just lie shamelessly i'm a i'm an astronaut no um he's also a woodworker as well i am well after i said that I was going to lie shamelessly.

1:00Nobody's going to believe you. I'm a marketing professor, is my day job. And I am a consumer psychologist by training. So I'm research faculty, which means I spend about a third of my time teaching and about two thirds of my time trying to figure out how people make decisions, how they're influenced by brands and by prices. In the rest of my life, I do some woodworking on the weekends. I have a large family, a lot of kids. That takes up a lot of my time. And I got interested in customer experience through Colin. So I bring kind of the academic behavioral science side, and then Colin's got a lot of great experience on CX.

1:48And so I've learned a lot of what I know about CX through osmosis, just conversations with Colin, which has been great. Nice. and so um the reason why we wanted to to have a job arrange this challenge because you recently co-authored a book with a colleague annie wilson it's called the growth dilemma managing your brand when different customers want different things which has been published by harvard business press now first of all congratulations on publishing the book i know how kind of hard it is to kind of to to pull one of those things together and it becomes sometimes a bit of a labor of love or a run for your own back or all of the above um so yes congratulations on on that but what i wondered if you could tell me at a whole like a high level like yeah how the book came about what's the main thesis and who's it for sure so the the book came about when annie and i um so we we co-develop a lot of teaching materials and um and research together and we were looking into this problem, when I teach the core marketing class, like the introductory marketing class, it's a little bit like when you take physics in high school, where there's a lot of simplifying assumptions that are laid down.

2:59So we're dealing with like a frictionless table and a massless pulley. And that's how we're going to teach you the basics of physics. We do some of that in business school too, where in economics classes, we're going to assume that market's clear. In marketing classes, I tell my students, we're going to deal with one target customer. So if you can figure out how to make this one segment of customers happy through your positioning, through your branding, then we can expand that later to multiple segments. Annie and I, in talking this through, realized that nobody was actually teaching people how to manage multiple segments.

3:33And so we started digging into the problem. It turns out it's complex and it's really important. So the basic thesis of the book is that as you grow and add more customer segments that you need to have a relationship with, you need to now also start worrying about managing the relationships between those segments, that those customers can influence the experience of other customers just by being there and also buying from the brand. So that's kind of the big idea. How do we think about relationships between customers? How do we manage those together? other i mean i guess if you think about it if you back away from me and go and let's take the brand and customers out of it it's it's sort of like a micro cosmic view on communities and yes towns and villages and and and societies sort of thing it's like going there's different there's different groups that exist in these like spaces and you've got to think about well if how do they interact with each other that's exactly right so we wrote this from a kind of a marketing perspective and a business strategy perspective, because that's, you know, we're business people.

4:38And, you know, the primary target for this, you asked who this was for. I mean, it's mostly going to be kind of brand managers, people who are thinking about business strategy. But you're absolutely right that this is just human interaction. And so it can absolutely, I've already talked to political strategists about how some of these ideas apply to political parties. I had a conversation with a pastor recently talking about managing a congregation and how you have different kind of factions within a congregation and some may be more progressive and some more conservative and you're absolutely right like this is you can think about managing employees within a large firm it all boils down to different groups of people who want different things and how do you manage them within some kind of organizational structure whether it's a brand or whether it's something else.

5:29Perfect. Yeah, it's fascinating. So I was kind of like going through the book and I thought, well, it's a really interesting idea and a quite complex problem, actually. And that exists in very many domains, but particularly in the kind of the brand and customer segment domain. And I mean, I encourage people to go and check out the book, but to give them a bit of a flavor of it, there was, I wanted to dig into a few things in the book that stood out for me and um the first thing that i wanted to ask about because this might be a bit of a sacred cow who knows yeah it's like this idea that like um everybody's obsessed with growth right you can see it in in you know in stock market announcements analyst calls and all these different things and if people are going to miss miss hitting expectations then they're they they the stock generally trades down.

6:21And it's almost like growth and growth and growth and growth, and it has to be growth. But in the book, you actually start with this kind of premise which says an obsession with growth can be counterproductive. Yeah. And I wanted to understand a bit more about that from the lens of the book. Yeah, we have this quote from an HBR article where the authors of that article, and I'm going to miss the quote a little bit because they're not in front of me, but it's something to the effect of if you fail to grow your business, it's seen as something, some combination of a mental failing or a moral failing.

7:01Like there's something wrong with you as a business leader if you're not growing your company. And this obsession with growth, I think, look, there's nothing wrong with growing your business. That's great. But when it becomes kind of the sole measure of success, it leads to dysfunctional management decision making, right? Because if we need to grow, and that's the only thing that matters, then we start making risky decisions or decisions that don't fit in well with our strategy, or we start dividing our efforts. And that can lead to a growth that is not sustainable in that it's short term growth that is going to fall away pretty quickly.

7:41It can, in some cases, backfire where we do things in the effort of trying to grow that end up driving away some of our current customers and actually shrinking the company. We've got several examples of that in the book that we go through. So we're not planting a flag and saying the solution is don't grow. Instead, what we're trying to argue is that if you want to grow, you need to make sure that you're slowing down and growing in the right way. And to put it in a language that you're listeners will be familiar with, a big part of that is going to be centering the customer experience in this growth plan.

8:20So when we talk about these segment relationships working together, some of those segment relationships create better customer experiences for everybody, and some of them erode or destroy the experience that customers have with the brand. And that's kind of the core to sustainable growth. If you can keep growing by continuing to make all your current customers and all your new customers happy great keep growing you're right but if it's going to be this process of well we just we got to hit the numbers for next quarter that's really risky that's that risks long-term damage to the brand to the organization just by hyper focusing on growth yeah i mean i would say that it strikes me that the um the the interesting thing also i think which is worth just so challenging or at least planting a seed with is this idea that when we talk about growth we always think about more or bigger yeah and i was thinking about that and you think about that and there's two things i wanted to say on that one is that you go when we talk about personal growth we don't change in size or mass right we maybe just kind of like we learn a new skill or we think about things slightly differently but in and that but that can be kind of almost like quite a uh a metaphysical or intellectual or spiritual kind of thing right but then if you think about the physical world i always i mean i've used this example from time to time i think about the the japanese art of bonsai yeah where you've got bonsai masters where trees have been passed down and they're hundreds of years old right and yet they are tiny things now they still grow right they are still growing they're still living beings that are still growing perpetually but their growth is being kind of managed for beauty for structure for strength for whatever it might be um and it just challenges that that that nature of kind of growth just being always being bigger and therefore better and i think actually just making taking a pause on why are we growing and how are we growing and is this the right sort of growth might be some useful questions to ask ourselves i i love that you know could we grow a more loyal customer base because if we're looking at growth in terms of even just like bottom line profitability you know if you have a bonsai type company that has existed for decades and decades and decades and has a very loyal customer base, that's spinning off a lot of profit over time as opposed to breakneck short-term growth that is going to lead to collapse.

11:12Yeah. I mean, there's a great example of a company. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They're called Hyatt. And they make jeans. No. And their website is h-i-u-t, I think,.co.uk. It's Hyatt Denim. And that's all they do. they make jeans and they make the best jeans that you could possibly find they find the best materials they've regenerated a town in wales called cardigan that had a history of denim making but then it got decimated but all this production got offshored and so they're trying to bring all those skills back to the town and just make artisan led kind of jeans beautiful they're not cheap right yeah but they that's what they do and they do limited batches and they go when it's done it's done it's over but they just that's the way that they they're doing they do things with an intentionality um in terms of what they do and how they do it and i think they just they're people might say oh they're just a niche kind of business yeah there might be a niche kind of business but they're also a global brand whether they're they're their garments are sought after and worn by all sorts of kind of like people and so i think it's just it's there are examples of people and places and brands out there that are that are are doing things you sometimes just have to go look for them i love that yeah so yeah i i will argue for a more expansive look at growth and even if we're talking about you know just hard line numbers growth um there's a framework that i i love teaching my mba students um uh it's an old one it's known as the the and soft matrix and dates back to the mid fifties.

12:54So it's been around, but it, it, it talks about the different ways to grow and you can grow by serving your current customers better by getting them to buy more of your current stuff or by adding new customers or by adding new product lines. What we're going to talk about in the growth dilemma is not even all growth. It's the growth that comes from adding new customers where you need to. And so we're not like painting the universe with this. But it's a common problem and it's one that comes up a lot. But I also want to narrowly make sure that it is within the domain that we're talking about. So this isn't going to solve all your problems.

13:30If you've got bad breath, you're going to need to talk to a doctor about that. But within this domain of adding more customers, let's not do it recklessly. Adding more customers is wonderful. Let's just do it right. Yeah. And I think you need to be in the right sort of environment to be able to do that sort of thing. If somebody's come around here, you're like we need 20 growth by the end of next quarter you're like going yeah this might not be the approach the approach for you you might need to go and do try and try something else exactly but this is about like we said this is about relationships between different segments and but and you go on in the book and you introduce this what you kind of call like a a new discipline and it's called srm i'm like well i'm like okay we've we've got uh we've had we have had we have CRM and then we had was it Doc Searles talked about kind of VRM uh back in the day now we've got SRM and I thought ah we need an RM don't we so what's SRM yes so so we do have CRM customer relationship management we're not abandoning that that's still very important uh but we think about CRM as your relationship as a brand to a segment of customers and you need to manage that relationship and make sure it's healthy and make sure they're happy.

14:39CSRM or SRM is where we're managing the relationships between customer segments, right? And so that's the discipline we hope to introduce as a part of managing growth. So when you want to say, well, here's an opportunity in the marketplace, here's a segment that's not being served, we're gonna go in and meet them. At some point in that decision-making process, we should stop and say, well, what's that segment going to do to our current segments? Are they going to get along? Is there going to be like multiplicative growth? Is that going to be like a really great additive thing? Or is it going to cause a lot of conflict and problems?

15:14And so thinking about those relationships between customers is the new discipline that we're going to argue for. Yeah. I mean, I think that makes sense because, yeah, you can understand if there's going to be conflict, there's going to be displacement, there's going to be all these other things. And I guess you have to kind of like role play all that out in terms of thinking about kind of like what is the impact? because you don't want to go, oh, we sell it to these people and then these people go like, oh, I don't want it anymore because those people are buying it. That's exactly it. And the evidence from the marketplace, I wasn't in these boardroom meetings, but the evidence from the marketplace suggests that a lot of times firms are not even asking the question.

15:50They're not even thinking about it. They'll see some segment that is attractive to them and they will make changes to the company, changes to the brand, changes to the offering to pursue that new segment. and it doesn't even appear they're even thinking about what that's going to do to their current customers well maybe their current customers liked the way things are and don't want them to change and so you end up driving away some current customers in the pursuit of new customers and it happens so often i'm just not sure that people are even thinking about it yeah and you can imagine somebody's you know there's been a brand that's pursued a new segment and they might have been successful in that pursuit of that new segment and then they end up the next quarter in the board meeting is sort of like scratching their head a bit like laurel hardy sort of thing i'm wondering like why is we've seen a negative growth here and a negative impact exactly here we've like we've offset our growth in one segment new segment with the decline in uh you know share with this existing segment that we thought we had already captured and so i know that in the book that you kind of the you've got a framework that you propose that will help kind of brands think about this it's called the segment compatibility framework um and so i wanted to understand a bit more about that and how a marketer might best use it or best use it to assess if segments are connected or not or might have an influence whether on each other whether that's negative or positive or whatever perfect yeah so so we defined four different types of relationships that can exist between segments um and the goal here was to again give people a language give people a framework for thinking through how would adding a segment then affect our existing customer base?

17:27Can we identify whether it would be one or more of these different relationship types? So I'll just go through them pretty quickly. So one of the relationship types is what we call separate communities. And the idea there is we've got one group of segments, some segments of customers. We're going to have another group of customers in a different segment. And they all kind of get along with each other to the extent that they're mostly indifferent to each other. So the best example that I can give of this is historically Nike has been brilliant at maintaining separate communities under the Nike brand.

18:04So each sport within Nike feels like its own community. So Nike runners historically felt like they were really taken care of as runners and Nike basketball players. And even sneakerheads, these collectors also felt. And Nike had different apps for them and they had different divisions that served them and different communications and different products. And so they were all under Nike, all under the umbrella. But they created kind of a gated community for each group of customers so that they felt cared for. They felt like they were getting a unique experience from them. I kept using the word historically there because Nike got a new CEO a few years ago, a consultant, former consultant, who looked at what Nike had created and said, you know what, we're an apparel company, so why are we wasting all this time and resources on these different sporting divisions?

18:58We need a men's wear division, a women's wear division, and a kids' division because that's the way apparel is sold. And so he knocked down a lot of these walls, and he did a lot of other things too before he was ousted. So I don't want to chalk this entirely up to that decision. But, you know, I think you can see there. So their stock price dipped. They saw sales declining. And I think at least part of that was because they destroyed these gated communities. The runners no longer felt as much like they were being cared for, like they were a focus of the company. And it's interesting that you saw the rise of a lot of these other running shoe brands around the same time.

19:37O.N. took off and Hoka and a lot of these other running brands that probably wouldn't have had oxygen to grow the way that they did had Nike continued to run its company traditionally the way it had. Interestingly, under the new CEO, they've brought back the sports, the individual sports focus and are starting to try to rebuild those walls. nice um and what i mean i think the other thing because i mean the the the compatibility framework i think is fascinating because it makes you really think about kind of things in a very very different kind of like level rather than just about oh penetration and wallet share and all these different things you think about well actually it takes it up a level and go well does does this impact kind of people?

20:24And, but there's also examples of brands that you share in the book that serve incompatible segments. Yeah. But also do so quite successfully. Yeah. And that's kind of weird. And I wondered, well, one, can you give me an example of how that works and kind of like sort of why it works too? Yes. So one thing about these relationship types is that they're not a state of nature. So they don't just exist by the fact that you're targeting certain segments or other. A lot of times they are there because they're managed there, right? So another segment in this matrix is incompatible segments. This is where you're serving customers that just have different beliefs, different preferences, and they naturally fall into conflict.

21:16To your point, firms can still serve those segments that naturally have conflicting views or that just want something different. But if they're managed well, you can create these barriers between them and separate them out enough that they can move into separate communities. Or say it another way, and maybe the Nike is an example of this, you can have separate communities, but when they're not managed well, they can fall into conflict. Yeah. So to your question about like what are firms that serve kind of naturally incompatible segments cleverly, I think Starbucks has done this remarkably well.

21:56So Starbucks has such a large footprint. They serve all kinds of different segments of coffee customers. Let me highlight two. So one segment of customers is one that we call the third placers. So these are people who go to Starbucks based on that kind of historical mission of being that third place that you can unwind and have a conversation and read a newspaper. They have another segment, because they're so ubiquitous, of people who want their coffee on the go. So they're on their way to something else. And because the Starbucks is everywhere, they can pop in. together those are segments who want different things out of the coffee experience one is slow like a relaxed environment the other one is a little bit more harried they want things fast and personal it's hard to serve both of those customer segments in the same physical retail space because they just they want different things and the presence of one segment is going to impede the the ability of the other to get what they want so those are incompatible segments to that to that degree.

23:01Starbucks has done a good job of trying to manage that through different retail formats. So if you've got a kiosk, that's not a place to hang out. You're not going to attract a lot of third placers there. A drive-through that can separate out some of those on-the-go segments so they're not in the store. I've seen Starbucks that have multiple levels where the upper level is kind of more of a lounge. And then the first level is where the hectic coffee buying is happening so we can try to physically separate them that way so there are things that you can do to manage the experiences of these segments that might naturally fall into conflict by trying to separate them out we call that building building walls or building fences where we can kind of separate those out a little bit there are some segments that are so incompatible where that's just not going to work yeah but there are many for which we can turn down the heat of conflict a little bit i mean i think there's also good other ones that occur to me um particularly in the i feel like the apparel industry and one that kind of the one that ones that come to mind i mean there's like uh let's pick carhartt as a traditional kind of brand which is carhartt originated like some other kind of brands like your timberlands like your kind of dickies yep in that hardcore workwear so like you want to you're you're you're building kind of like tough durable sort of like stuff that's kind of like for the working man and woman that they can go out and do their job so it's not going to be flimsy so you can get knocked about and it's going to last so it's built to last as it were but then particularly the things that kind of carhartt they were then adopted by over time and i don't think it was this wasn't done intentionally by the brand this is people adopting it and creating their own segment and then the brand followed them um and so car hard was adopted by people like artists and skaters and then they became this urban fashion sort of like kind of thing and then i think the brand followed them and then then actually kind of like manages them very very separately um and so that i think that's a really interesting example of it and there's examples all over the place about that sort of stuff.

25:17It's brilliant, right? So let's talk about that example because I think that there's a lot to learn here. So one of the other segments on our two-by-two matrix is leader-follower segments. And the idea there is that you're going to have multiple segments where one segment is somewhat aspirational or they're seen as being cooler or more expert. And I think that the Carhartt story fits into that quadrant where they started off with this blue collar segment that still is a loyal customer segment of theirs. And because of the perceived authenticity, the kind of the realness of that segment, then you have these fashion, these urban streetwear and fashion.

26:00I was told that Carhartt became a fashion brand among the New York City punk scene in the 1970s. So there you go. you can tie into your your podcast there you go i mean i think i think i think the thing is that you talked about the kind of thing the authenticity and the durability now yes i think those are the things and i was i meant the reason i mentioned artists and skaters is that one artists kind of want this stuff that they can they can be in a workshop so they look for things that they can go ah i can i can rummage around all this stuff and i can kind of beat up and and it's it's going to last right yeah and you've got skaters that are going to go or urban bmxers or whatever it might be who are like going i'm going to fall off my board or my bike a lot right and i don't want something but if i go sliding along the pavement that that that my backside is going to fall out of my jeans because that's going to i don't want to be going to the shop every time i try a new trick kind of like i can have to pair a new pair of trousers i want something that's going to last and i think so this is really transposed these qualities into their own environment that's a thing that could work for me this is really interesting so the way that i would characterize that is i think that those would probably be separate communities yeah um they're all getting kind of the functional benefits of very durable clothing from it but i have a lot of college students that i teach who are now wearing carhartt t-shirts and baseball caps to school and i love my students but i don't know that they've ever worked on an engine at any point in their life and so in addition to those kind of uh functional segments all of those segments are also very cool in their own way right so blue collar is very authentic skaters and artists obviously are cool and so when this fashion segment came in carhart has been very careful to maintain um purity is probably the wrong word maintain loyalty to that those core segments who actually value the utility of the garment um and by doing that they've they've elevated them so we talked about building fences we also talk about building ladders where you can elevate one segment and then they're the leaders and these followers come along after them.

28:27Carhartt has a sub-brand that actually started in Europe, I believe, this work in progress sub-brand. And that's their fashion clothing. But they're very careful that this is not fast fashion. These are not throwaway garments. Their work in progress line, they claim, will hold up almost as well to a day in the oil field as their mainline garments. And by staying true to their leader's values, they're pulling in these followers who really value that. You can come up with a brand and claim, hey, we're very authentic and we're real and we're for the real people. And people may or may not believe you.

29:07But if they see that you have a segment of customers that is very loyal to you, who value it because it's authentic and because it's real, they communicate that value better to these other customers than anything you could say yourselves as a brand right and and i think that there's the things that that i think the you can always probably chart that evolution of it so like the like i was saying that the artists and the skaters and the bmxers would probably see the functional but and then they because they're trying to do they're on the edge of the leading edge of culture in many ways and then you end up getting to this thing where there's the principle of adjacency the idea where people have been they're they're leading the culture and they're like everybody's like wow they're cool and they're dressed like that like i'm not gonna i'm a bit of a fear to cat and i'm not gonna jump on a board or on a bike and do all that sort of like stuff and i can't paint for a lick but i'm gonna try and dress like them right and then it moves on from there coolness to bleed over onto me yeah and then it drives from there and i think the dynamics and all that is kind of uh is is fascinating but i think the thing for me about you step back and think about that it's like there's different segments and compatibility is like a two-way street it can be customer led and they create their own segment and it's got nothing to do with you and you end up having followed like you said the leader follower or there's the brand leads into a space but then you've got to assess the kind of the compatibility um beyond that and so i think it's just it's a it's a fascinating way to think about it and i was thinking about but i was thinking about it and going well intellectually that's fascinating but i'm like going blimey that sounds like a lot of work if you're a hard-pressed marketeer yeah to start folding this into the work whether then they're talking about kind of like campaigns and retention and loyalty and spend and all these different sort of like kind of things i mean so where should they start i mean apart from buying the book and digesting it obviously right what should they be doing what should be thinking about and researching in order to try and fold this in Yeah, I mean, we have some frameworks to help with that a little bit.

31:11I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's hard. It is hard work. In terms of something you can do tomorrow, if you're not already doing it, make sure you've defined your segments in terms of what they want and what they need, rather than in terms of what they look like. It's shocking to me that even today, I could walk into a firm and ask them, who's your customer and how do you serve them? And they will give me this list of demographics. Oh, we're targeting Gen Z who want this or have this income. It is going to be really, really difficult for you to identify potential areas of conflict if you're thinking about your customers in that way.

31:56If you know that you are serving your customers who have this need to want to appear more mature and more put together and feel like they've arrived. And then you think about, well, what would happen if we were to add this other segment of customers who have a need to be flashy and want to stand out? Well, now we're getting to a point where we can identify, well, that might actually cause some conflict. These customer segments want something different. As opposed to if we'd said, well, we're currently serving millennials, but we think there's an opportunity to start targeting Gen Z. Well, millennials and Gen Zs aren't natural enemies to each other, except apparently where you part your hair.

32:38And so saying, well, let's add a Gen Z segment, that's not going to tell you anything. It's useful. So my biggest piece of advice is if you want to try to anticipate problems with adding new customer segments, if you want to try and anticipate what is in these danger zones, know what your customers want by segment, what they need, why they're choosing you, why they're not choosing you. That's the biggest thing. If you can do that, you are very far along this path to being able to manage those relationships well. Perfect. That's great advice. So hopefully that gives us or gives the listeners a bit of a flavor of some of the book and some of the big area that you're trying to tackle put and throw your arms around and trying to create this discipline which is kind of srm uh which is segment relationship kind of management and that actually is a thing which sets a meta a meta level above crm because it speaks to segments but hopefully we've done a decent job of that but i wanted to ask you before we can move on to some quick fire questions to wrap up is like is there anything else that you'd like to highlight or add from the book that we kind of missed out that you got i wish you'd emphasize that too so i we we talked about mostly that the positive error is for growth um which is appropriate and i'm glad that we did that uh when i was first telling colin about this idea he was like you need more good news in your book right because uh that is a big part of the book and we focus a lot on that but also a large part of the book is about conflict and conflict between customers we talk about the different types of conflict and the different ways we can address this conflict.

34:17And part of that is because I think it's an important topic. And part of it, though, is just it's fun to tell stories of failure. And so we do tell a lot of stories of conflict. But there's danger here and there's opportunity here. So there's ways that this can flame out horribly and incite lots of conflict of different kinds. But there are ways of getting growth and even more efficient growth. If you You understand, we talked about leader followers. If you can identify a leader segment out there, that makes you so much more efficient in your growth because now you can target one group of customers and make them happy.

34:52And they will kind of drag along this group, like you said, who want to be like the artists or the skateboarders or the blue collar workers or the fashion models or whoever it is that you are targeting as that leader segment. Think about how much more efficient that is if we can identify that relationship structure up front. So there's lots of good news here. there's lots of risk here as well if it's not done well and frankly i loved telling those stories so there's a lot of them in the book right i mean i want to say on that kind of one thing is just for the um the people that are um data nerds out there is there might be some clues in your data yeah there might be these little things you go like those people don't really fit our profile and keep an eye on those because actually you might want to kind of that might be the the sign or the signs that there's an emerging thing here that you might want to nurture or follow or look into.

35:47I love that. So we tell the Bud Light story in the book, maybe one of the biggest marketing stories of the last 10 or 15 years. And everybody knows the story at this point. They hired a trans influencer and their more conservative customers really blow up about that. It cost a 20 % market share decline, knocked them off their purchase, is the number one beer in America for the for 20 years it's a big big thing over one post like one trans influencer posted something about Bud Light they should have seen that coming so they within within Bud Light you know you can read interviews with their marketing team and they thought well we need to we need to grow the brand by targeting younger customers who tend to be a little bit more progressive and so let's let's push the brand in that direction but to your point they had done they had inched in that direction earlier run some major campaigns which had a little bit more progressive flavor and they got significant pushback on that and they ignored the data they just they didn't consider what are our customers telling us and how are we going to respond to that they instead they had a vision they had a direction that they wanted to go in um so yeah dig into your data like there's a lot there and don't just focus on transactions although that that's one form of it focus on the stuff that will tell you what is important to your customers what are their needs what are their values even beyond the brand itself what the brand stands for that's where you'll be able to anticipate this and that makes me think about the thing is like i also realized that um as a marketeer you're not in control yes because customers will do whatever they want because i remember hearing a story once and this is about when it's about mobile phones and when they put cameras into mobile phones and people were like going why are you putting a camera into mobile phone people are one of the kind of still taking photographs with their kind of like little kind of cameras and stuff but we left to their own devices consumers were not really taking photographs on their phone because the phones weren't actually that they were the cameras and the phones weren't that good but cameras were terrible the memory was so small yeah i'll tell you what people found this is where some customers particularly in japan i think it was this was back in the ntt dokomo days like back in the day yeah they took pictures of bus timetables and train timetables because rather than looking it up they go i can just take a picture of that and i get enough resolution that i can look it up and on my kind of phone and they found utility in the functionality that was included in the phone and nobody could have guessed that.

38:26I love that. I love that story. We always need to remember we're not establishing anything. We're not forcing anything on our customers. It's all a negotiation with our customers. What your brand means, that's what you put out there and also what the customers decide. That means the way they're going to use your features, that is what you intend and also what they bring to the table. So yes, be listening, right? Be responsive and recognize you're providing at most half of this equation exactly so ryan that's great i mean so i've got a uh the final few well a few quickfire questions to to to end the podcast before we end rather and so i know we talked about a whole bunch of things and i always like to ask people to boil it down and i ask them to do that by completing this sentence and the sentence is if you want to improve your customer experience let's say ryan says do this over to you so uh from the perspective of the book that we've talked about.

39:23If you want to improve your customer experience, know what matters to your customers, right? Know what their value is, know what they need, know what is important to them. That's the most important thing. Do that at a segment level. Not all of your customers want the same thing. Perfect. And second question, what company or brand do you think takes a more punk approach to customer experience and why? Okay, so you're allowed to kick me off your podcast at this point, because I'm going to give you the least punk answer to that question. Okay. But as I thought about this, I kept coming around to it.

39:57This is the most basic answer. I took my family to Disney World, and I'm pretty cynical about all this stuff. It was magical. And there's a lot of talk about the tactical things that they do, and all that is true. But I am not aware of a company that embodies customer experience, experience management and delight more than Disney and especially with their parks. Just everything. I'm jaded. I've been running a customer experience podcast for a long time. I was not expecting to be swept off my feet. And I was. So that is the least punk rock answer to what is punk. But I think that fully embracing who you are and your value.

40:43I mean, we're seeing a lot of companies do surface level stuff and then immediately abandoning their their core values if there's pushback in it yeah disney owns who they are and are so relentless yeah in pursuing it so that's that's my completely non-punk answer to a punk question well i'll i'll save you a little bit not by gonna and because this is completely not punk but i tell you what what makes them slightly punk and and and is the relativity of it all is like and the one thing that that um that that punk was it was like it was just completely focused it knew exactly what it was about and what it wanted to do and disney has not really wavered from that no as you say they're relentless in terms of what the what they do so disney punk not punk who cares it's a good example so what if i put on like the disney ears but then put like earrings or studs in them yeah no that just that just looked wrong final question before we could wrap up um and uh you know the world is a it's a weird place right now there's a little there's all sorts of stuff going on and so what i've been kind of doing is asking people to tell me from their perspective or to share with me rather a a good news story so we can end on a good news story so tell me what's the most interesting positive or exciting thing that you've seen in the last week and it could be anything it could be business it could be kind of personal it could be anything um i'm glad you you gave me some warning on this one before we started recording because i'm i'm in a bleak place on a lot of what's going on in the world your listeners will know we record these uh podcasts well in advance of when they go out.

42:31So something that's happened recently for me is, as an educator, it's graduation season. And it was wonderful. It was really nice to get to see these students, most of whom I taught, just to be celebrated for their accomplishments, to look forward to the future. And kind of, you know, I'm getting to be a little older over time and being around 20 to 25-year-olds all the time can be rough in a lot of different ways. But the optimism, the energy, the hope they have for the future, it's infectious. And I'm very grateful to be able to be a part of that. And that was good news. It was heartening. Nice to see.