Category: entrepreneurship

Loyalty programs are generally based on how much money someone spends. Spend a fortune with a brand over a long period of time and they might throw you a freebie or two.

What if companies set out to be loyal to customers instead? What if from the very first interaction they aimed to be loyal to the ‘unproven trust’ you’ve given them? They might start making a better product. They might just get talked about. They might end up with more than just loyalty… maybe even an entire entourage of brand evangelists.

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‘Go with you gut instinct.’

We’ve all said it,done it, advised someone to do it, and sometimes ignored it. It’s a much maligned concept, especially by large organisations which like to believe they operate in a world beyond chance and opinion – which incidentally is very untrue.

But here’s the thing, it’s not your gut. It’s actually your brain. It’s the accumulation of your human experience, stored meta data of similar situations, and the interpretation of these. When your brain tells you things don’t add up, it sends signals to your stomach. It might even make you literally feel sick about things. This is where the ‘gut’ parlance comes from. A big part of it being attributed to the gut, is that it’s a mashed up world of memories. A world which can’t be easily explained. It’s hard to digest, or narrowly frame in words or some company spreadsheet. It’s small pieces life experience painting a picture of the potential situation – a warning of sorts.The gut is good. It works with the brain – and the reason you should trust it is that it’s a lot smarter than you think.

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In the developed world many people have far more than they need. Sometimes  living in a world of abundance, how it’s made and where it comes from is more important than the product itself. In fact, it becomes the USP. (Unique Selling Proposition)

Eggs are like that. 

Once upon a time it was the size of the egg that counted. The yellow of the yolk, and maybe even the taste. Now, it’s where the chicken resides that really matters. So much so that some smart marketers have live webcams of the egg farm so we can see the chicks happily frolicking around. Just scan the QR code and have a look for yourself, in the supermarket, on your phone.

For me, it’s a reason to buy. But I’ve never actually bothered to check if it’s real, until I wrote this blog post. Seems pretty real…. but let’s face it, we mostly buy on perception. And there price? Well the cheapest caged eggs sell for $0.40c per 100g, while free range eggs sell for more than $4.00 per 100g. That’s a 10 fold price increase! An unheard of revenue bump for most innovations. Proof that people will pay for the ‘how’ as much as the ‘what’ – it just takes a culture shift, courage and reframing in the mind to what is possible. I imagine the free range program started small at first and scaled upon success.

This is something a lot of industries, brands and foods could do – take us behind the scenes to see what’s really happening. And maybe even improve their margins at the same time. The cost of such an innovation is minuscule – a few hundred dollars for a webcam and some wifi. In an age of transparency think we’ll see this emerge in many forms. To see how things are made, what goes into the process and maybe even how some companies treat their employees. We might even end up asking companies who aren’t prepared to share it what they’ve got top hide?

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