Delivering the Velvet Touch

In the age of convenience, instant gratification, apps and online shopping carts, standing out from the crowd takes more than just a competitive price tag, techy gimmick or polite employees. Consumers today crave authentic interactions and exceptional experiences.  That is where White Glove service comes in. This term, evoking images of meticulous care and personalized attention, goes beyond smiles, on-time delivery of products or services and general satisfaction.  It’s about exceeding expectations and creating lasting positive memories.

Millennials and Zellennials are all in search of the next billion-dollar idea.  Entrepreneurs want to build the next ‘better mousetrap.’  With the rise of AI, the search is on for the next “Big Idea.”  The next Unicorn. The next App.  There is a race to make a product or deliver a service faster, easier, smarter, cheaper, etc. But what if the next “Big Thing” is just the same old thing but with much better service?  Here is the truth that no one wants to talk about… there is a customer service leak and it has spread to all industries.  Hospitality.  Aviation.  Insurance.  Healthcare.  Property Management.  Banking.  Law.  Accounting.  No industry is exempt.

It’s the start of 2024.  You made a list of resolutions.  You wrote out personal, professional and/or business goals.  You sketched out a plan of action.  And determined company leaders have set out to tackle a big hairy audacious goal.   Also known as a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal is a term referring to a clear and compelling target that an organization tries to reach.  It was coined in Jim Collins and Jerry Poras’ book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.  Like many resolutions and best laid plans, ‘Big Goals’ are ambitious and in the back of your mind, perhaps even thought to be unrealistic and unachievable.  However, as the Bannister Effect demonstrates, often the biggest limiting factor in achieving a Big Goal is thinking that it can’t be done.  So, what is the Bannister Effect and what does it teach about setting and achieving goals?

It’s January and the pressure to make and keep resolutions is strong.  People resolve to tackle big dreams and even bigger ideas.  But success is typically predicated on execution.  A plan is useless without follow through.  Ideas are cheap but execution is expensive.  Talk is plentiful but action is scarce.  There is often a painful execution gap.   It haunts every ambitious entrepreneur and driven professional. While brimming with ideas and bursting with potential, the chasm between conception and completion stretches wide. Brilliant plans gather dust.  Promising projects linger in limbo.  The fruits of ambition rot on the vine of inaction.

For the last two weeks, we’ve been strolling through a land more bizarre and nonsensical than Alice traveling through Wonderland.  It is the land of marketing delusions.  These are notions that business leaders and marketers believe part and parcel as truth but are actually fantastic nonsense.  These included such falsehoods as “All I need is a big marketing budget to succeed” and “More content is always better.”  And let’s not forget such fantasies as “The brand story you tell in your marketing is true and people believe it” and “Great marketing comes from the “Collective Wisdom” of groups.: But even after refuting ten common marketing delusions, we’ve only uncovered the tip of the iceberg.  The list of marketing delusions is long because the number of products, services, software programs and mediums promising explosive growth, bountiful lead generation and booming sales are too many to count and multiplying daily. 

So what’s a business leader to do?  Read on.  Identifying a delusion is the fastest way to drain it of its power to deceive or mislead.  Let’s look at some marketing delusions that have a big impact on the bottom line.

In the competitive landscape of business, marketing holds the key to success and survival. However, amidst the dizzying array of strategies and tactics, it’s easy for business owners to fall prey to marketing delusions: false beliefs about what works and what doesn’t. These delusions can lead to wasted resources, missed opportunities, and ultimately, hinder the growth of the business. 

Last week, we looked at seven common marketing delusions that business leaders believe and we dispelled each with the truth.  But those were just the tip of the iceberg of misconceptions that plague business marketing.  And some delusions are worse than others.  Some can be really damaging.  Here are three more widely-believed but utterly false marketing delusions to avoid in order to do marketing right in 2024 and beyond.  

In the competitive world of business, marketing plays a crucial role in driving brand awareness, generating leads, and ultimately, achieving success. However, many business owners and leaders fall prey to “marketing delusions”.  These delusions often lead to wasted resources, ineffective campaigns, and missed opportunities for growth.  As 2023 draws to a close and leadership teams plan their sales and marketing efforts for 2024, it is important to understand what marketing delusions are, what causes them, and how to not fall prey to them.  

People like cast-iron certainty and steadfastness.  We expect decisive action by our leaders in government, work, medical care and place of worship.  But this culture of performative certainty is especially prevalent in business.  Organizations applaud those who are not just confident… but overconfident.  We hire and promote those who are bullish and brazenly certain of every step while those who are modestly unsure, vague or hesitant are seen as weak and incapable.  However, this demand for societal and organizational certitude is a problem because it is in moments of ambiguity and stillness that we often find clarity and direction.  It is from indecision and inaction that epiphanies and breakthroughs emerge.

In his blog, Morgan Housel — a partner at the venture capital firm, The Collaborative Fund, and author of “The Psychology of Money” and “Same as Ever:  A Guide to What Never Changes” — points out that most endeavors fall into one of two kinds of actions:  fields of precision vs. fields of uncertainty.  For example, Astrophysics is a field of precision.  NASA’s forecasts are typically highly accurate, such as their projection of when the New Horizon’s spacecraft would pass Pluto.  It was one minute less than predicted, which means it was 99.99998% accurate.  But the field of Meteorology is less accurate.  A weather forecast of more than 10 days into the future is only about 50% accurate.  And Entertainment is even less accurate.  Although AI is thought to be improving the ability to predict which programs or movies will be “a box office hit”, it is still a highly inaccurate field, especially at the preproduction phase which is when it is decided whether to make a movie. 

Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning

AI is on the cusp of changing the world.  While it will one day revolutionize how we work in every way, today it is already transforming how proactive businesses perform certain tasks.  For example, Deep Learning — a subset of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to learn from data – is having a big impact on how companies use data.  Neural networks are inspired by the structure and function of the human brain.  Like humans, deep learning algorithms can spot complex patterns from data only better. Deep learning has been used to achieve state-of-the-art results in a wide range of tasks.   

While there are countless areas where deep learning can be used in business today, let’s look at just a few ways deep learning is being used for business:  speech recognition, recognition systems and anomaly detection.