In business, we are all chasing delighting our customers. Delighted customers are loyal and tell others about your brand. They can be very profitable. The challenge is that the pressure in business is to be as big as possible so believe you should please everyone*. That requires finding the compromise.  People don’t really want the compromise. In designing winning brands, compromise is the enemy of delight. You have to stand for something clear and compelling, which means that someone doesn’t like you.  Recently I was discussing some research results with a client…everything was neutral.  My perspective was this was a worse result than having high negative responses.  Respondents did not care.  Neutral is disengaged, indifferent. Neutral doesn’t lead to delight. Neutral is the happy medium no one is happy about.

Cindy

*For me this widely held assumption was dispelled in research I did 17 years ago. While still at P&G, I discovered even our biggest brands were driven by a small % of delighted consumers. In fact, generally speaking 20-30% of customers drove 70-80% of the business. Once we understood this, it was not so frightening to become more specific in who we were designing for and to go for delighting them.

Take Action

Think about your business, does delight happen in the neutral space or when you differentiate and stand out for a specific group? How might you explore this to learn more about how to grow your business through delight?