Today we’re going to talk about the art of creating forever customers with Michael Mallett, Vice President, Product – CX Solutions Strategy at Medallia. We’ll explore strategies for enhancing customer visibility, prioritizing impactful improvements, and fostering continuous improvement within organizations.
I’m also excited about the upcoming CX Day webinar from Medallia coming up on Tuesday, October 1, where I’ll be moderating a panel including some amazing customer experience experts. We’re going to give a sneak preview of some of the topics to be discussed then, and we’ll include the link in the show notes.
Resources
Medallia website: https://www.medallia.com
Register for the Medallia CX Day webinar: Building Loyalty: How Top Brands Create Forever Customers with CX – https://bit.ly/3M7dkQM
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don’t miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
Today, we’re going to talk about the art of creating forever customers with Michael Mallett, Vice President Product CX Solution Strategy at Medallia. We’ll explore strategies for enhancing customer visibility, prioritizing impactful improvements, and fostering continuous improvement within organizations. I’m also excited about the upcoming CX Day webinar from Medallia coming up Tuesday, October 1, where I’ll be moderating a panel including some amazing customer experience experts. We’re going to give a sneak peek of some of the topics that we’re going to be discussing then, and we’ll include a link to register for the webinar in the show notes. Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Mallett: Thank you, Greg, for having me. It’s great to be on.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you share a little bit about your journey to your current role at Medallia?
Michael Mallett: Sure, I’m happy to do that. I probably took a very untraditional path to where I am now, which might be interesting to some out there. I actually got my start, believe it or not, in 2009 in the recession. by applying to a job on Craigslist of all places for a market research analyst. So I got my start in customer experience, really kind of running survey programs as they were just starting to evolve to more programmatic with customers like a Home Depot, Walmart. Dunkin’ Donuts, and I really kind of cut my teeth learning what it takes to create those kinds of measurement and strategy programs, which led to actually working at a small sales and marketing consultancy out in Seattle. I moved cross country where I worked a little bit more with a brand. I think we all know Microsoft at this point, and I know that that company’s evolved significantly, but Microsoft and Starbucks, I found myself then Working on more technology involved projects, I made nothing of it at the time, but everything connected later on when I ended up finding myself being called by Medallia, which gave me the opportunity to take what I knew of market research and customer experience and pair it with a platform that helps make that actually operationally happen, which at that time I thought was a dream. It’s not, it’s real. And believe it or not, I started in sales, which was something I had not done before. I was more research and consulting. I ended up in sales and solution consulting or engineering. So it gave me an opportunity to do some designing directly with clients to create those technology programs. What ended up happening next is I found an opportunity in a specific product area that we weren’t covering as a business, digital experience management at the time. Believe it or not, we didn’t have. a product in that area. So I was very fortunate to help create that business from scratch in 2016. And I like to joke, you do something long enough, you become an expert. So I ended up becoming an expert in sales on that subject matter. At one point, I did a stint in our strategy team because of that. I moved away from sales. Then back to sales. And then I like to joke, well, when you work with product long enough to help, you know, try to shape how to deliver and create solutions to map to those needs, all you might actually end up becoming product. So my last year and change has actually been in the product organization, uh, where I’ve been fortunate to lead different practices around digital journey orchestration. Some different marketing technologies like around our Adobe Alliance, as well as leading our initial foray into generative AI, which crosses into a lot of digital technologies. So very pleased now to be our overall solutions leader across all customer experience facing applications. So my responsibility is to keep making sure, just as I started my career, where we map customer experience problems to solutions. and helping to create a program to make that happen. I do my best to try to make sure we do that across all of our product lines at Medallia. So, probably a very untraditional path, and I did not anticipate this at all, but maybe when I tell it to you, Greg, it kind of sort of makes sense.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, that’s no, that’s, that’s great. And the starting on Craigslist, you know, that’s, it’s, it’s amazing how, how things start, right? So it’s, it’s, that’s, that’s amazing. Well, yeah, no, looking, looking forward to talking about this with you. So yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna look at a few different aspects of this idea of customer loyalty and building that that forever customer today, I want to start with, this idea of enhancing visibility and CX and just the importance of that. And so, you know, CX becomes increasingly complex as we’re talking multiple channels, even omni-channel. So, you know, from your perspective and experience, how can organizations eliminate some of these blind spots that occur in this multi-channel environment and, you know, identify some of the friction points?
Michael Mallett: Well, a couple of things come to mind. One that is very popular to discuss at the moment is, I’ll characterize it as making sense of stories from your customers in data that you already have that you might not be currently using. So for example, when you’re on a website and you’re navigating across different pages, we could say the same for a mobile application. You are sending out certain behavioral signals that convey if you are frustrated, if you’re able to find what you’re looking for, if you’re experiencing a technical issue that is really ruining the entire experience. overall for you. That’s just one of many different examples of the customer is telling you a story. They don’t realize that they’re actually telling you how they think and feel, but you can smartly infer how they think and feel in that channel and across that journey. So one of the key things is just making sure you’re in tune with data that is already there. Most organizations already have it. Sure, there are technologies that help them collect it if they don’t, but you most likely have information there and just trying to make sense of the ones and zeros and something that helps you understand that customer might need a little bit more or that customer is very happy. Maybe there’s an opportunity there. And, uh, you mentioned it as well. If we, we talk about connected systems, it’s an old, but still very relevant point to break down silos in an organization. I think in the past we would talk about how feedback systems are disconnected from customer relationship management solutions. I think we’re way beyond that point now. Those are very well connected, which is great. But we still need to discuss how customer experience solutions are disconnected from marketing technology stacks. So you can see a little bit about my personal experience here. But when you still look at the data now in 2024, the marketing teams themselves are talking about how they still don’t really have the holistic profile, as well as the connected systems that lets them kind of automatically take some action based on some pain that might be happening in real time. whether it’s online or offline. So I think, you know, making sense of data that’s already there and connecting systems that are still disconnected or partially connected are two of the areas that I’d, I’d certainly start with.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. I mean, to your point, it’s like, I often say it, I think we’re, we’re swimming in data. The problem is not, not having the data. I think you’re saying something similar. It’s access, it’s availability, and it’s to what you were saying, it’s being able to tell a story with the data that actually solves a problem versus, you know, nice looking dashboards and things like that. And to that end, it’s like there’s organizational silos, and then there’s data silos. And sometimes those are the same, you know, they’re one and the same. And sometimes they’re multiple issues from an internal alignment perspective. Sometimes you can just kind of look at things and be like, OK, this doesn’t make sense from a from an infrastructure standpoint. But a lot of times organizations need to find ways to align internal teams using data. So, you know, how how might you recommend that using CX Insights to, you know, build some of this alignment? And really, at the end of the day, it’s about keeping customers perspective at the at the forefront of decision making. How would you recommend that organizations start thinking along those lines?
Michael Mallett: Well, in addition to, of course, making you very clear and transparent, you know, what are the objectives of your customer experience initiatives at your organization and why they’ve been created, why they exist? I think there’s also a very helpful teaching mechanic that we sometimes hear being missed at different organizations, which is just sharing the potential for impact if everyone actually acts together cross-functionally or across business units. You know, for example, we’ll just keep it, you know, a very classic and simple example. If you’re getting feedback of people having difficulty when they are buying certain products, whether they’re in person or online, what tends to happen is there’s actually multiple reasons for that. There’s sometimes content confusion. Sometimes the campaign that was sent to them around why they’re buying and what they’re buying. was not fully comprehensive, or perhaps the offer wasn’t applicable to them, or perhaps the exact product that they wanted wasn’t in stock, so they chose something else. But that is still an operational finding, a commerce finding that could be addressed. And then, of course, they might receive the product, which may or may not go well. And so that’s a fulfillment conversation, a product management conversation. And this is a big virtuous circle on whether this customer will ever buy again. We have customers that This is one kinds of opportunity to measure, one kind of journey, if you will. And actually just talking about what different kinds of insights come from just looking at from that one experience, what actions could be taken. And if I’m an organization, I’d share a very practical example on how, how it’s been done before and what’s happened next. When someone actually drove change from that because what normally happens next if an organization were to really take one data point and send it to five or ten places and all act together what’s going to happen is. you know, increased satisfaction from customers, likely increased buying tendencies, maybe more frequency of purchase, maybe higher average sales prices, and certainly some different loyalty outcomes, perhaps even some referral outcomes. So that’s something where, of course, we need to talk about saving money from an operation and product management standpoint. So I think teaching, talking about the potential for impact, And then sharing a very real example of something that’s been done in the past can help make sure people continue to align to what are the priorities and projects that are relevant at the current time.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, well, and I think I think what you’re also touching on is like, what perpetuates, let’s call it the psychological part of the of the silos is this idea of misaligned incentives. So you know, this team is, is graded on this scale. And this team over here is graded on something completely you know, if your job day in day out is sending emails, you want the highest open rate and click through rate. And sure, making a sale is nice, but like if you’re only graded on open rate and click through rate, like who cares what the social media team is doing? You know, so it’s like, it’s this mismatched incentive. So what you’re saying, yes, I mean, email needs to perform just like social and website and all the, you know, all the channels need to perform individually, but the goal is really getting everybody to say, okay, well, when one team wins, you know, we all win or when, you know, when we’re all aligned to the same goal, is that is that kind of what you’re saying?
Michael Mallett: Yes, I think the collective goal is really key and you’re actually teaching the potential impact that comes out of all uniting towards achieving that common objective. Because to your point, yes, we’ll always have separate measurements and separate objectives to accomplish. But at the end of the day, it is one experience and one company and brand that that customer interacts with. So there should always be one central north star, it’s not always going to be one number or one metric, but there should be a midpoint that everyone feels like they understand and can contribute to.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, I’ve talked a lot on this show about, you know, agile, iterative approaches in my consulting work. I work with some, some very large organizations and, you know, as in your experience as well, nothing at a fortune 500 happens overnight, or almost nothing happens overnight. But you know, I wanted to get your thoughts on, you know, we’re, again, we’re living in this multi channel omni channel world. So you know, the customer experience doesn’t just happen on a single channel, as we’ve already talked about. Organizations, they move at different paces. But again, nothing is instantaneous. Can this be done channel by channel? Does it need to start? holistically, like how does a how does a big organization move in the right direction knowing that, you know, we’re not going to just flip a switch and everything change at once? Like, how do you think about incremental change there?
Michael Mallett: Yes, everything is along a maturity curve. Honestly, I’m of the opinion of no matter where you are, there’s always a way to evolve from that point. And I know historically, because of how the industry got created, you would start in a channel by channel approach. It was easier. We’d focus on specific outcomes and by business unit typically. And also there was that much need to drive change that there, there was that much opportunity for improvement and growth by taking a channel by channel approach that that was okay at the time. And I would imagine there are still some places where that is okay. But I do think you’ll plateau from an organizational standpoint and how much transformational impact you can have inside and outside of the company. without eventually pivoting to the holistic journey approach or if you can start that way, starting that way. And it’s not boiling in the ocean in terms of all journeys to measure across or all channels to stitch across and certainly all customer segments, but it’s focusing on the high activity one or the high opportunistic one or the one that is the most painful at the time. in agreeing to align around that from a project-oriented standpoint. And then starting that way, you’re repeating that a few times. And the reason why, if you can pivot to that or start that way, the advantage is that you’ll see even more exponential outcomes because things are happening across as a norm. Even years ago, I remember a retail customer of ours who has a very strong online and offline presence and primarily their business model is you’re in person for their business model. Even they would say, you know, the website is great, we want to support that, but 50% of our revenue is assisted from online sales, the sales we actually track happen offline. And over 80% of journeys start online from a research standpoint. That’s actually a key point of friction that we might miss if we fail to succeed in a research phase, there won’t be a purchase, buying, or subscribe phase. So it’s a long-winded way of saying, if you can stitch across that and think about those life cycle phases, and how each channel can play a part to that, or at least how they are playing a part to it now, giving visibility into that, it’ll help the organization make the best, most impactful, next best experience move from there.
Greg Kihlstrom: So I think that’s a great segue to the next topic that I wanted to talk about, and that is prioritization. And that’s certainly something, it’s a topic near and dear to me. I wrote a book called Priorities Action, which came out a little while ago, and I actually have a new book coming out October 1, same day as the webinar that we mentioned, with a foreword written by Simonetta Turek, Chief Product Officer at Medallia. called priority is prediction and really talking about prioritization based on data driven decisions. And so I want to talk a little bit about, you know, you were talking about this, you know, this, this incremental approach and planning and, you know, totally agree with how you describe that approach. And we wanted to talk about, you know, how do we make better decisions about what we do and what we prioritize. So when thinking about that, I know you touched on this a little bit, but, you know, from a leader perspective, how should they be looking at making sure that their teams are prioritizing improvements that will make a significant impact to it? You know, it’s got to impact the customers, but it’s also got to have a positive impact on the business. How do they how should they be looking at that?
Michael Mallett: It’s a multi pronged approach. So you have to be able to do some data-driven decision-making. And one of the pieces that you have to have at your disposal is the customer-centric point of view on what is the true health of the experience from their perspective. Because I’ll just give you an example. If a thousand people say that what they need is improved pricing. And another thousand people say, it’s not about the pricing. It’s a, or it doesn’t matter what they say. They say something about the product isn’t what they want it to be. Well, okay. I have 2000 persons audience. What do I do? What’s most important? That’s an equal area. This happens all of the time, but what should help you make the decision is something that gets into not just who shouts the loudest or who says something the most times. It should be the sentiment around how they say it, or the activity-centric score of what happens when they’re also saying it, or better yet, what doesn’t happen? What don’t they buy? What aren’t they engaging with? What product are they not currently using? What signs of potential risk are they exhibiting? Thankfully, there’s a lot of artificial intelligence improvements that help create, train, and set these models free to summarize these insights for us than ever before. But I think it’s just really key to have that kind of holistic score that provides that customer-centric point of view so that we’re not making decisions based on just frequency. It has to be based on importance as directly and indirectly understood from the customer. That’s one angle. The other angle has to be that financial linkage to what happens to the business or what doesn’t happen to the business based on whether someone acts on what those customer experience findings are. And I think from a leadership standpoint, there’s a real opportunity to try to behave a little differently in an organizational environment. Often leaders don’t distribute or democratize that kind of a linkage. It’s hard to achieve, but it’s more achievable than ever before. They don’t always share the good news or bad news around that North Star being achieved or not, like we talked about before. And I think being transparent around that as much as appropriate in a often very public setting can go a long way to making sure that you are not only prioritizing the right things that drive outcomes for the customer, but for the business, that everyone understands that linkage. And the same, I think, Greg, can be said for employee experience. Because if you’re asking for employees to drive those improvements, You also want to make sure you’re balancing that the employees are enabled, feel productive, and are really happy being involved in that exercise. Because if you want to drive digital transformation or any kind of customer experience transformation, you actually need employees to do it. to either train that technology that you want to use to automate it, or there’s plenty of reasons why you need employees to directly enable those experiences. So I think that business visibility and linkage into customer experience, as well as just making sure you have that holistic score from the customer perspective, make sure that you balance out the customer and employee and business priorities altogether.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, I love that you brought the employee experience component into that because it’s definitely, definitely critical. Customer experience is not sustainable without that employee component as well. And, you know, I think to go back maybe a little bit to the data component, it’s like, again, having access to data and having the right data, there’s also this, you know, this idea of you know, data overload, you know, it’s like, I’m, I’m flooded with even, even if it’s great information, it’s too much. And, you know, it’s, it’s like the classic, you know, when there’s too many things to decide between, it’s impossible to make a decision. So how should leaders think about that? It’s like, yeah, it would be nice to see all of the information, but how do you focus them on seeing, like giving them enough, but not so much that it, you know, kind of leads to, you know, decision paralysis.
Michael Mallett: And that’s a that’s a challenging world that I think everyone faces because like you said before there’s just too much data now to interpret and We’re not all trained on digital data interpretation and most of the data has become digital centric, right? So, you know, on the one hand, you still have a place for operational dashboards, strategic dashboards, things that you’re consistently tracking for those customer employee and business set metrics that are evergreen, right? And so those are ones that you have to keep an eye on. But it’s how those are impacted, and that becomes more dynamic. So I think training and enabling people on tools that exist now, from a machine learning standpoint to classify what’s being said in text from customers, employees, or help you search across the data that is there that without the helping hand of say generative AI to help you find it and then summarize what it’s trying to tell you, it may not be easy for you to understand Even if you can find it today, it wouldn’t be easy for you to understand and act on. So generative AI as a tool, and in general, artificial intelligence as a tool, is now really ready. It’s been ready for a while, but it’s getting better every day to actually give that kind of employee assistance to understand what’s the right data and metrics, and what are the right ways to act on the data that’s physically there. But unfortunately, the tools are not enough. I know we all want the easy button. We’ve all seen those marketing campaigns from, from staples over the years, but that’s, that’s not a thing. Uh, and I, so I think a helpful guidance on. You know, what are the clear going back to the North star, the problems, the journey challenges and opportunities, just continuing to focus on what is the success criteria from the customer and business perspective is another very, very helpful check, even on generative AI. on whether you use the information given to you or you actually have to dig a little bit deeper into that information to understand how you’re getting that summary and whether it’s safe to act on or you need to consult a jury of your peers a little bit more.
Greg Kihlstrom: But what do you think, Greg? Yeah, no, I mean, definitely. And I’ve seen some pretty compelling, you know, Medallia’s tool in particular, I’ve seen the Gen AI functions and just the ability to, ask a question, you know, I’m not a data scientist myself, but you know, to be able to ask a question, and get an answer in an easily understandable way, and a quick way. And, you know, I think to your other point, it’s, first of all, it doesn’t replace data scientists, it also doesn’t replace the rigorous processes of understanding the data, but it does solve some very real problems of, you know what, I need information to do my job. And I, Again, working in large organizations, I don’t have two weeks to wait to request a set of data to make a decision. I need it now. So being able to use real language, ask a question, I think it solves a critical point when it’s used in the right way. One other thing I want to, I guess the last topic I want to talk through and just kind of building on prioritization is, I think what often gets lost, and there’s a lot of talk about continuous improvement and innovation in organizations, but I think a lot of times what happens is we get so busy with our day-to-day job, and we’re incrementally improving the thing that we’re working on. that taking that time to take a step back and really look at, okay, are we improving our processes of doing this in the right way? Do we actually have feedback loops to make bigger improvements over time? I think that, again, talked about a lot, executed less frequently, What do you see as, you know, effective strategies to keep teams focused on this, but also, you know, giving them the time and the permission to do this when, you know, there’s a million competing priorities as we’ve already talked about, but, you know, taking the time to make a great feedback loop to improve, sometimes they call it the work about the work.
Michael Mallett: Well, one of the benefits of deploying generative AI that certainly will be realized, and I’m sure is being realized in pockets already, is the fact that this frees up time for more creative thinking, more complex handling, and more innovation opportunities. So I think leaning into the fact that you’re not just doing it to benefit the organization, of course, there are cost savings and revenue growth, but you’re also doing it to enable the employee experience as part of what’s about to happen next in terms of a transformation. I think is a great step into creating what can be that culture of ownership and autonomy around doing the right thing for customers. Keeping in mind, you know, what the business needs as well. I think very often, right, the world came up in a very hierarchical top-down ownership culture. And you know, you don’t always find the frontline or even mid-level tier is fully enabled. And there’s all sorts of different articles being written these days about the pressure on mid-level management. But there’s a way to think lean into that. as there’s an opportunity there. And one of the challenges is that they don’t always have the tools to succeed or just even the bandwidth from a policy and operational process that it’s okay to take a stab at driving change for that customer, taking a piloting a new process, thinking about a new way to respond to a customer issue that can be a pattern. And that’s something that’s affected multiple different people. So I think that that’s a technology way to open up that cultural angle. And I think another cultural thing that we should not forget, maybe two, is to reward and celebrate those who try. and to also be okay with trying and failing, as long as you are iterative and you continue to try. We should reward and celebrate those who succeed, but we should also reward and celebrate those who did all of this great work to plan and helped others to try, but it didn’t work out. But we should thank them and reward them for thinking very thoughtfully around that process and try to encourage them to make the very next experience successful in ways that their first experience was not. So I think that there’s a lot of cultural steps at the heart of this question, Greg.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. And I think any leader out there that thinks you are going to innovate and every experiment that you run is going to be perfect and never, you know, the F word fail, you know, then that’s not, that’s not how this works, you know, and, and anyone, I mean, I, I know I’ve learned over the years, like I learn way more from failing than I do from succeeding. And then you get towards success through failure. And I think that’s, you know, it’s something that, Certainly, that’s not a new concept. It’s been written about and documented, and I’m sure there’s plenty of TED Talks about it. And yet, to your point, like in organizations, it’s still kind of a taboo thing of like, can an employee not be perfect? You know, of course, of course, of course, they’re not perfect. So yeah, no, I think, you know, I think you’re right on that road to like, effective feedback loops, we need for one of those inputs to be, you know, if it’s a one or a zero, you know, a binary thing, we need to allow for those zeros, because otherwise we’re never going to get to the one. So yeah, no, I think that’s such a good thing to remember. And again, leaders need to fail as well, but they also need to give permission to their employees to do so. And I think The other part of this and you know, curious your thoughts on this part as well is, you know, I, I think there’s always exceptions to the rule or whatever. But like, I think most employees want to do a good job, you know, they they work long hours, hard, hard work, or whatever, they want to do a good job, right? They just sometimes to what you were saying earlier, they need better access, they need you know, they need permission to fail, but they also need access to the right tools and the right information at the right time. So I don’t know what what’s what have you seen that’s been effective to really kind of get through to leaders with with that and help them enable their their teams to have access to the right things?
Michael Mallett: Well, some of the most mature customers I’m fortunate to learn and work with They create special forums where of safe ideation and sharing ideas. So we could think about it as a voice of the customer from the employee or even voice of the employee centric areas. So, you know, I, a lot of this happens in location management, operational heavy cultures. So it could be in stores, could be in financial institutions. So it just. actually making that okay and actually setting up a different forum for those kinds of ideas and discussions. Because one of the things we haven’t hit on yet is actually healthy disagreements or debates, the best ideas come from that. There’s not always a right and wrong. Most often there isn’t. So I think that creating that kind of a forum where that kind of discussion can be had, and of course, having the tools to capture those ideas, as well as the communication loop internally about the documentation, exploration of that idea, and either the choosing to pursue that going forward or not. actually keeping people in that loop internally and again rewarding them for being a part of that process whether it was their idea or not. I think those all really combine as barriers as why this doesn’t necessarily happen more and I think it also requires a little bit of a top-down bold strategy to say that it’s okay. I mean I’ve been at Medallia for example for 10 years and we’ve always innovated in one way or another. But I, you know, with Simonetta and this team’s leadership, I’ve seen just in recent history, there’s a lot new types of forums being created, different advisory boards that we create with our own customers, as well as I’m fortunate to be on the council of our AI moderation council as well to think about bigger practices and trends of how do you innovate, but balance transparency and fairness and how you deploy AI. And I just think that creating those forums and that’s not going to happen unless the organization top down says that that is okay. Sometimes it takes even C-level executives to say that this is now a part of who we are. So it’s a combination of a process, a tool, as well as just executive alignment and communication in my experience.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah, love it. Well, love talking about this stuff with you. I could talk all day about it. But just to wrap up here, and thanks again for joining. From what we’ve talked about, I know it’s a pretty broad ranging set of topics here, but When we look at creating that forever customer, that loyal customer that we’re all kind of striving to create, what would you say is one key thing that helps a brand to do that, that everybody listening should remember?
Michael Mallett: Well, you know, I think it’s helpful to segment this too by the type of customer you’re trying to reach, Greg. Yeah. Whether they are you know, a little bit older or younger. I think I’m in the millennial generation. I’ll classify myself. I have no problem with that. I think for us and for others, we still resonate with something that is special or really delightful, something that touches an emotional core with us, that you understand the customer. You are giving me something that is surprisingly delightful as a feature on my phone. This magical experience. I just came back from my honeymoon. You’re giving me this magical honeymoon experience of this kinds of champagne bottle in my room. These are types of moments that I will take with me for the rest of my life and I will associate that with a brand. So these little tiny moments actually have significant meaning and they do impact someone’s overall relationship and spending habits as well as referral habits with that brand. I think special, legendary and delightful is there for, it still resonates, it’s still tried and true. But I think if we’re talking about the generative Z, and younger demographic, it’s not that that will also work a little bit for them. This is just in general though, a generation that loves fast, immediacy, convenience, digital first. And so doing that same type of thing, but in channels and forums where they will be, which is probably very uncomfortable for brands and knowing what they’re doing there, in addition to other signals they’re giving you, you have to be digital first and you have to be real time. because it’s an immediate culture and it’s also, there’s both an opportunity and a risk if you don’t pick up what they’re trying to tell you without them having to tell you directly. So some of the indirect and digital first behaviors are critical for the younger demographic.
