How To Win Over
Customers: Lessons From
8 Rock-Star Brands
Paul O›Connor
The things that make us care about goods, services, and
brands are shifting. It used to be that a successful brand
conveyed authority and reliability (think General Motors or
IBM); now it’s all about empathy. Technology used to attract
us through specs and features; today it has to enable an
experience. Even our perception of what makes a product
valuable has shifted, to the point where a brand-new sound
system or a dress like the one on the magazine cover is
actually less desirable than something with a strong story
attached. That can take many forms: a revived speaker from
the ‘80s, a box of mystery items curated by a favorite brand,
or an outfit chosen with the help of a trusted expert. It’s these
stories--coupled with basic functionality that’s absolutely
dialed in--that win people over in the long run. Here, we
look at the innovation stories of eight key brands and reveal
what, exactly, they got right in 2013--and what you can learn
from them in 2014.
month throughout the year, and prompting Google to lay
down more than $3 billion to purchase the company outright.
Nest estimates that almost 1% of all U.S. homes have installed
one of their thermostats by now, and the company’s newer
but equally well-designed smoke detector is showing similar
numbers.
Uber
Next-wave taxi service Uber, once the domain of tech-savvy
San Franciscans, is now in nearly 70 cities, showing urbanites
everywhere that hailing a cab can be predictable, civil, and
comfortable. With global growth exceeding 20% per month,
FLAWLESS FUNCTION IS TOMORROW’S GREAT USER
EXPERIENCE
Sometimes the biggest upheavals come from the simplest
places, like fixing an experience that everyone knows is
broken. Even relatively small companies can manage to shake
up very large categories, not by introducing a completely
new product or service, but by optimizing what was already
there.
Nest
The outcome of using a Nest thermostat, the home-monitoring
device developed by a pair of former Apple engineers, isn’t
really any different g&