The consumer is no longer navigating the map—they are the map.
Welcome to the era of the Blue Dot Consumer: always centered, always scrolling, and always expecting the world to orbit around them. What does that mean for your brand? Everything. From the rise of instant gratification to the evolution of seven—yes, seven—active generations, the customer experience game has changed forever.
Today’s guest is Ken Hughes, also known as The King of CX—is a consumer behavioralist, futurist, and one of the world’s leading authorities on customer experience. He’s here to break down how digital evolution, generational shifts, and consumer expectations are reshaping the rules of engagement for brands of all sizes.
About Ken Hughes
Ken Hughes is one of the World’s Leading CX Strategists and Consumer Behavioralists in Customer Experience, Marketing, Branding, Innovation and AI. Known internationally as The King of Customer Experience.
Author of the marketing blog ‘The Blue Dot Consumer’, with tens of thousands of readers exploring his content on consumer values, marketing, branding and customer experience every month.
His research and work is utilized by global brands, industry associations and universities across all six continents. His client list is a who’s who of global brands, from Google, Starbucks, the NFL, and TikTok, to Walmart, Coca-Cola, IKEA and PayPal) to understand the changing nature of the brand connection across the consumer generations, and prepare for the future.
He describes himself as a social science Frankenstein – his interests are part sociology, part anthropology, part consumer psychology and part cyber behaviouralism.
Previously CEO of an insight agency, a TED speaker, a university lecturer and actor
Resources
Ken Hughes, King of CX: https://www.kenhughes.info/
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
The consumer is no longer navigating the map. They are the map. Welcome to the era of the blue dot consumer, always centered, always scrolling and always expecting the world to orbit around them. What does that mean for your brand though? It means everything from the rise of instant gratification to the evolution of seven, yes, seven active generations. The customer experience game has changed forever. Today’s guest is Ken Hughes, also known as the King of CX. He’s a consumer behavioralist, futurist, and one of the world’s leading authorities on customer experience. He’s here to break down how digital evolution, generational shifts, and consumer expectations are reshaping the rules of engagement for brands of all sizes. Ken, welcome to the show.
Ken Hughes (01:32)
Thank you very much, delighted to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:34)
Yeah, looking forward to diving in here. And yeah, I caught you at the Qualtrics X4 show and thought you did a great job there and looking forward to having this conversation and sharing it. But before we dive in too much to the topic, why don’t you start by giving us a little background on yourself and how you became known as the king of CX.
Ken Hughes (01:53)
Yeah, sure. I’m a social scientist. I often describe myself as a Frankenstein. I’m kind of part anthropologist, part psychologist, part sociologist, part cyber behaviorist, fascinated by the science and psychology of the human mind. been in marketing and branding all my life. The King of Customer Experience came about. I was introduced to that at a conference a few years ago, and a couple of delegates kind of tweeted it afterwards. thought, oh, I like that. Makes me sound like Michael Jackson. And so it kind of stuck. I’m passionate about what is customer experience and what it isn’t. A lot of people, the data science, the tech stack, it’s all amazing stuff. But unless we’re making people feel, unless we’re actually engaging emotion, driving with meaning and purpose, that’s what loyalty is. People mistake, I think, transactional loyalty for emotional loyalty. Buy nine cups of coffee, get a 10th coffee free. If that was dating, it would be like, does this hanky smell like chloroform to you?
It’s kind of customer retention acquisition, even the words we use, they’re weird. so a lot of my work involves just helping people lean into customer experience, marketing and branding from an emotional point of view. all the behavioral stuff.
Greg Kihlstrom (02:55)
Great, great. So yeah, let’s dive in here. I introduced a term in the intro. So let’s talk about the blue dot consumer. And you’ve said we’ve gone from reading maps to being the map. Can you explain what that means and how that mindset has shifted that relationship?
Ken Hughes (03:11)
Absolutely. Absolutely. I have one here. So we use these to navigate the world. This is the map of France. And so these cause many a divorce. And so old tech meant that you had to know where you are first. Then you had to know where you were going, like the exact geolocation of it. And then, of course, between those two points, there was hundreds of potential routes. You had to choose the route yourself. You had to keep
checking the map as you went. And so all the work really was on you. You grew up in a huge world, and you understood as a consumer that you were a small part of, but kind of an inconsequential part of it, maybe. And so the onus was on you to do the work, and you were the customer making their way through the customer journey. And that was the old way. And today, as you said, when we pick up our phones, we’re at the center at all times. And so this metaphor I wrote a few years ago about the Blue Dot consumer.
The consumer does expect to be at the center of everything. If they take a step left, they expect your brand, your business, your proposition to move left with them. So they’re at the middle. And I love the metaphor because not only does it work from a kind of an instant one click one swipe world that we live in, it also gives a nod to personalization. Like you wouldn’t follow someone else’s blue dot around, you know, because you’re going to end up at their destination, not yours. When you ask for Google Maps for restaurant, it doesn’t show you restaurants 20 kilometers away. It shows them on the street that you’re at because it’s contextual.
And so all those modern values come to the surface really quickly with that metaphor. We have to be contextual with our customers. We have to be highly personal. We have to be seamless and frictionless and instant. And so a lot of companies talk about customer centricity. Oh, yeah, I put our customer at the center. But as a philosophy, very few are actually there. And so it’s a challenge to look at how you distribute, how you market, how you converse to customers and put them truly at the center.
Greg Kihlstrom (04:41)
Yeah, yeah. And so, know, from from some of the work that I do more on the the Martech space, you know, there is this there was this notion of journey orchestration. I mean, still is, you know, still a term, but it was really predicated on this idea of we’re going to guide the customer from this step to this step to this step. So, you know, I love what you’re saying here about this blue dot, because that’s that’s really how.
Customers see themselves. They don’t see themselves as moving through a funnel or moving from, you know, one step in a journey to another. They’re there where they are. Right. So does that does that ring true?
Ken Hughes (05:14)
I mean, the customer journey work is amazing, often customer brands feel that the customer is the end point, like the terminus. You know, that’s the last thing you need to think about. And so the priority for the brand becomes branding, marketing, logos, retail, distribution, operations, all those things, not the actual moment that matters. The customers purchase the product, the customers experience of the product, what they talk about in terms of their peer network, about the product. That’s the power. The most powerful marketing asset we still have today is the conversations customers have around our product with their peers.
And so understanding that and can re calibrate in the entire organization. And some industries have this worst and others like financial services, health care. These are fully product and policy centered industries that really the customer is some kind of inconvenient truth. In fact, if you think about your own hospital stay ever, you the moment the plastic band snapped on the wrist, you became a series of numbers. In fact, know, data birth, they don’t even use your name. And so you enter this process driven experience as opposed to what would healthcare look like if it was fully customer centred? would French services look like if it was fully customer centred, not product focused? And so these are the big challenges. we’re in a race for relevance with the next generation of customers. As you alluded to, seven different generations of consumers now, everyone from traditionalist boomers, know, Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and now Gen Beta. There are some industries that are simply not fit for purpose for the Gen Alpha consumer coming their way. Those consumers are 12 and 15 now.
So only in another five or 10 years, they’ll be entering the workplace. They’ll be entering as major consumers for everything from credit cards to travel. And I don’t think industries are really ready for that sleeping giant of, want it. I want it now. I want it all around me. I want hyper-personalization. I’ve grown up in a world of AI and robotics. Why doesn’t everything work seamlessly and frictionlessly? And for marketing, there’s a huge challenge there. And that’s why there’s so much work going on in customer experience at the moment, because they realize that that relationship is everything.
There’s going to be a huge commoditization of product delivery and service delivery and even customer experience delivery at the high level. Everything’s going to be perfectly personal and everything’s going to be amazing through the tech stack. So to actually differentiate yourself, you’re going to have to have depth of connection. And that’s what really the work I do on keynote stages all over the world, but also with brands to help them understand as we scale, how do we hold on to that authentic, genuine depth of connection with customers.
It’s a fight for the emotional heart space. Come the 80s, 90s, even the 2000s was all around mind space. know, brands were hysterical of measuring mind space, measuring cut through, measuring tone of voice, share of voice. Whereas really today it’s all about what kind of heart space you have. Do customers feel that sense of tribal belonging to you as a brand? Do they feel that brand community? Again, do they share that brand story within their peer network? It’s like going back to a metaphor in Frankenstein earlier for myself, for brands it’s the same. The electricity that you jolt into your brand.
is that authenticity, that connection. Otherwise, it’s just pieces of various arms and legs stitched together, product commodity, and anyone can do that.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:01)
And so to kind of build on the generational thing that you mentioned. you know, again, we have seven generations from, you know, the traditionalist to Gen Beta, which I feel like is a very just unfortunate name for a general whole generation of people. But it is what it is. Maybe they’ll feel differently about it. So you touched on this a little bit, but it’s like CX professionals, marketers, often, whether it’s personas or segments or however they look at customers, they’re dividing them into different groups. Now we’ve got seven generations in addition to that. How do you look at values and expectations? Is it a generational thing or how should people be looking or brands be looking at?
Ken Hughes (08:43)
Yeah, I mean, the generational divide is quite crude, it is, to be fair. And we do it in 15 year blocks. Anyone who’s got a eight year old, a 12 year old and an 18 year old in their home right now can already see that even though those people might be of one generation, you can see the differences every three or four or five years now in terms of how they interact with tech, how their values are around seamless and purchasing and being a consumer. so it’s faster, the development is faster. There’s also an interesting commonality where you can talk to a boomer consumer.
And you can talk to a Gen Z consumer and they want the same thing, which is kind of a bit of a shock. The naturalization of the digital reality has happened across the generations much faster than we thought. And watching AI be adopted actually was really interesting case in point where, you know, the generations, you’re as likely to see a boomer, or a Gen X person playing with deep fake AI and content, then you are a Gen Z and Gen Alpha. so AI is going to be actually quite a technological leveler for us in a way.
And that’s to be fair back 2006 in terms of the tech interface that Steve Jobs gave us with the iPhone that also was an acceleration point for various generations to get involved in the digital immigration. So I think there’s actually more commonality than you would think. But certainly the influences that drive you, that set you up for life in terms of what your core values are. So a boomer growing up listening to vinyl and being exposed to the Vietnam War and all those economic political things is different to someone who’s growing up today.
I mean, the Genoafric kids grew up with the global pandemic and very much a different digital reality in terms of connection. so their ability to connect through text, not voice. And then they’re going to grow up inside that AI robotics. Where robotics is going is fascinating. And the line between, you that’s human versus tech is going to start to fade. So one of the pieces that I’m quite interested the moment is AI therapy. Because globally we have mental health therapist shortage. And so there are some things like depression, anxiety.
that are quite if then therapy discussions. so obviously I can do that very, very well. And when you come away from text and go on to deep fake versions, the average person can log on for half an hour a day and have a chat to their therapist. And that kind of really blurs the line, because if now you have a tech delivery, but making you genuinely feel quite listen to and you can feel the empathy, that’s the beginning of the end, if you like, of that tech versus human divide. And so our previous interactions with those kind of quite
crude chatbots and things and we’re all thinking, God, is this AI? is awful. You know, that would fade away. It’s 1.0. So imagine AI of 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 in five years time where we all have our agent AI running our life from a consumer’s point of view and in education, in healthcare, in therapy and all these touch points, we’re used to technology being the prominent connection maybe. And we have empathy with that. We have connection with that. And there’s bigger social concerns around that, course. If you’re familiar with the movie Wally, Pixar movie, you know, we could be going that way, but
I think there’s a lot more in terms of customer experience and interactive and empathy to come with the tech. We’re only at beginning. So it’s a very exciting time for the customer experience industry for marketing. If you told a 1950s marketeer that you could talk to everybody on an individual basis, hyper-personalized through a device in their pocket, and that was 10 years ago, they’d wet their trousers. But now we’re telling them not only can we do that, but we can get super personal, can use all their data, we can predict what they need, and they can have a phenomenally personal experience through our brand. That’s mind-blowing stuff.
Greg Kihlstrom (11:51)
Well, and along those lines, mean, you know, already, you know, the stats are out there as far as, you know, consumers expect they don’t they don’t just like personalization. They expect it. So, you know, already there’s this expectation there. But, you know, extrapolate a couple of years from now, you know, what does such prominent usage of A.I. not only on the personal level, but from the brand level? What does that mean for, you know, expectations? You know, how how do brands need to get ready for the expectations of consumers in a few years.
Ken Hughes (12:20)
think they need to do it now, unless you’re investing in AI and making people feel special right now, you’re missing the point. Again, people get excited about data and systems, but unless you’re outputting a feeling at the other side of it, it’s pointless. Let me tell you a really simple story from Octopus Energy in the UK, a sustainability utilities company. sell gas, electricity. It’s quite a commodity product. It’s hard to make that a successful brand story, isn’t it? And so they decided to go after customer experiences, big differentiator.
During the pandemic, obviously they had problems with staffing, working from home. They had a huge amount of inbound calls as people were furloughed and working from home and trying to pay bills. And so they had this extended call waiting time, which they didn’t like because it’s a customer experience centric organization. So they thought, well, what can we do? We can’t hire more staff because we just can’t get them right now. We can’t slow down the inbound calls. We’ve got to make people feel a little bit better while they’re waiting. No one likes waiting on call to call broadband. my God. 30 seconds in and you’re like listening to either bland music or you’re listening to their campaign song from their recent ad.
trying to be upsell some other package and so So one of their executives had been reading an article a few weeks prior about nostalgia. And it had said in the article that the most nostalgic music you can ever hear as a human is the track that was the summer hit when you were 14. So age 14, that big long hot summer you spent smoking sneaky cigarettes behind the bike shed full of hormones. that summer is quite a coming of age summer. And whatever music backdrop was to that summer will have quite a powerful, positive feeling on you as a human. And so they thought, well,
Why don’t we do this? And really simply, such a simple implementing of technology. know, the inbound call would have to harvest your number and link it to your account. That’s normal for any customer inbound customer center, really. But then they went one step further. Once we have your account details on screen, we just pull your date of birth. And then from the jukebox of 60 songs, we play you the song that was the song that hit when you were 14. So every single caller, no matter what the age you were, getting the unique song that was the song that me. So then what happens when you’re listening now waiting.
It’s not just a standard product you’re getting. It’s personal. Just for you, based on a small piece of data, makes you feel good. And often when people actually did pick up the call, they were told, no, I was listening to that. And so this is a really good metaphorical example for anyone listening here to say, what data can we use in the company right now with the technology we have right now? It doesn’t have to be sophisticated, but certainly going forward, it’s going to get better that we can make the customer feel something. Because if you’re not making the customer feel seen, heard, valued, belong, again, you’re just another product that
that they bought today. What we want is brands that get invited into their lives. That’s an expression I love. Every time someone buys your product, they’ve invited you in to their life. it’s an invitation that we need to respect a little bit more. And if we want customer lifetime value, this word that gets thrown around boardrooms, then we have to invest in the relationship. That’s how relationship works. You invest, you have a desire to invest, not a return on investment ideology, where you’re thinking about what to make it back. No, you have to have a desire to invest in relationship. That’s a human relationships work and brand customer ones are no different.
Greg Kihlstrom (15:01)
Yeah, how I totally agree with that. I think often it’s it’s difficult to convince those that are very short term ROI driven to do that, you know, because what you’re talking about is longer term and definitely lifetime value, I think is critical to look at from from a number of even employee lifetime value and all of those things as well. How do you reach the skeptics that are like, yeah, that sounds nice, but
Instead of, you know, investing in the birthdays, you know, or in the year of birth song or whatever, you know, let’s do this other thing where we can get tangible results and through, how do you kind of convince the skeptics?
Ken Hughes (15:38)
Yeah, I think I always tilted back to human relationship again. So if you kept a ledger, a really weird ledger of everything your partner said nice to you, and then you only did nice things back to them based on what they did to you, that would be a very toxic relationship. Especially when your partner found the ledger under your bed. And so that’s what we do in branding and business. If that’s the approach you’re taking, you’re saying, well, we don’t invest where we get a return. Our focus is revenue and profit and scale. But the realization that without the customer, you don’t have any business at all. And so really, I bring people always back to the core human relationship aspects of trust, integrity, authenticity. And it is a long game, 100%. Like any relationship is, you get back what you put in. And so I think for too long, corporate and consumer brand relationships have been one sided. If you look at the word marketing communication, we use that as a subject. teach it in MBAs and business degrees all over the world. No one wants to be communicated at. Conversation is fine, but most brands have a megaphone in their hand.
And it’s not market communication. It’s supposed to be a two way thing, but for most brands it’s not. Even the new channels that we’ve been gifted, social media, where you can have a conversational economy, know, 99 % of brands are still using those channels as broadcast channels. It’s just look at me, look at my product, look what I’m doing. They try and dress up in funny ways. They might use whatever the current thing is. Oh, let’s use Stitches, great. But actually it’s still about me, me, me, me, me. So moving things from a me to a we economy is really important in authenticity of connection. And the brands that do that well build huge tribal fandoms and belongings.
And that’s evident in brands like Harley-Davidson talk about the hundreds and thousands of sales reps they have on the road every weekend, because every single person riding a Harley is a sales rep for the brand. Red Bull is the same. Every snowboarder, every X Games guy with the tattoo of Red Bull on their shoulder. It’s not about the products in the can. It’s about the community, the tribe. And so for every brand wanting to build that tribe, you think, well, how do we start? When you start with authentic connections, connection is everything. So how do we connect with people? How do we make them?
How do we invite them into the brand? How do we invite the brand into their lives? How do we blur that line between us and them? How do we go into a of a collaborative consumer space as opposed to an us and them divide? These are all really great discussions that are happening in the CX strategy meetings.
Greg Kihlstrom (17:35)
And so how do you see this within an organization? this a top-down leadership has to be on board with this? Is this a bottom-up? it all of the above? How does this work best?
Ken Hughes (17:47)
I think top down first of if I have to choose one, absolutely. The organizations that do well on this are the ones that live and breathe it from the very beginning. It’s very difficult for an employee who isn’t empowered, who doesn’t feel this at their core to actually deliver amazing customer service. Let me tell you a really simple story from Virgin Atlantic. This family emigrating from the UK to the US, mum, dad, little age old boy, they’re checking in at the airport. And the lady checking in starts to laugh because behind the parents, the little boy is holding his goldfish in a plastic bag.
And she thinks, you can’t bring that, put a liquid on board a plane and then the fish don’t get to emigrate to America in their pets and it doesn’t work like that. So she starts laughing and tells them they can’t bring the fish on board and the boy starts roaring, crying in the airport. Of course he does, emigrating, he’s leaving his friends and his family and his school, his hobbies, know, snot and tears. And quick as a flash, she butts in and goes, no, no, honey, honey, what I mean is you, you can’t bring him on board. I got to bring him on board myself. You got to him to me, honey. And he’s going to go with all the other VIP goldfish that are flying today to Atlanta.
And so little boy wipes his tears and hands his fish proudly over to go to the VIP special tank on the plane. so the parents get the boarding card. They wink at the lady and think, thank you, thank you. And they usher the kid through security thinking, my God, isn’t that virginity wonderful? She going to dissolve the pain point. He’ll forget about the fish on the way. And what those parents don’t know is that when they went through security, that lady at the desk took out her phone, took a few pictures of the fish, sent those pictures on WhatsApp to her colleague in Atlanta who left her workstation, drove to the local pet stock.
bought an identical looking goldfish and ten hours later when that boy’s little airplane touched down, she was standing at the top of the ramp and he took his fish proudly to America. Now what’s wonderful about that story, not only does it bring the Virgin brand to life, is it a peer to peer driven story that brings the brand to mind. All those things are true. But what’s interesting to your point, neither of those ladies had to call Sir Richard Branson and say, do you mind if I take an hour off to buy a fish? Because they live inside an organization. They’ve been trained. They’ve been empowered to say, if you see a moment in
customer journey where you think you can make a difference, where you can bring the brand to life for these customers beyond their expectation, then you do that. You do that without management approval. You do that at their core. And it’s an organization that runs that way because of who Sir Richard Branson is. And there are so many organizations that bring me in to help them change that philosophy. But unless it comes from the top, unless the board, unless the CEO, unless every level at the top truly believe this is the way to go, all you get is motivational rah rah. And then ultimately the thing breaks down at some point. everyone on the frontline can activate this, but they have to feel empowered at every level of the organization to do it.
Greg Kihlstrom (20:03)
Yeah, yeah, I love that story. And I mean, yeah, it definitely brings brings to life that idea. It’s a, you know, it’s a it’s a simple thing. It doesn’t it didn’t involve, you know, databases and, you know, complex integrations and AI agents and, so on and so forth. It involved just someone thinking about, okay, you know, what, can I how can I improve this?
Ken Hughes (20:23)
And the humanity of that’s quite interesting. Back to your point, no investment. The return on investment is off the charts in terms of the amount of times that story’s been told. And then what I challenge people after I share that story on stages is, well, what are your goldfish moments? Like if you haven’t created a goldfish moment today for customers, then why should they tell your story? And if you’re not creating goldfish moments at every touch point at every opportunity, then you just wasted the connective moment that you had with the customer. And it does send people away to think, okay, every day, every day I need to do.
I need to bring my goldfish moment to life. The most common question I get asked afterwards in Q &A, by the way, you do a 45 minute hour keynote and you’re expecting amazing questions. There’s always one smart person in the room that puts out their hand and thinks, what happened to the first goldfish? Well, I’d like to think that the lady took him home and he lived a long and happy life in her house. He probably went down the toilet at Gatwick airport. But they made a movie called Nemo about that afterwards. So was all good.
Greg Kihlstrom (21:12)
Right, right. It could have ended well. So, you know, as, as we look out ahead, you know, we’ve got quantum computing, metaverse, humanoid robots. We’ve got all this stuff. I mean, you know, how soon it comes to fruition, you know, it’s as hard to tell at the moment, but you know, how does, how does a brand stay kind of grounded in emotion when there’s also this, you know, even with AI, you know, there’s so much pressure to adopt it show return on it and all that. How do you recommend that a brand stays balanced?
Ken Hughes (21:45)
Yeah, I think there’s two things. Definitely invest in technology as it emerges and keeping up with what AI can do is terrifying. I think everyone shares this fear as executives that I don’t know enough and I should know more. And so look, it’s evolving at a fast pace. What’s interesting is the consumers are actually pulling it through faster than we’re able to give it to them. So it’s one of those texts that the consumer is actually ready for it more than we are. So it’s really a place that we have to be playing quite quickly. So throw more to the wall, test the system, see what you can do. Again, going back to the octopus energy example, you don’t have to be overly tech driven, you just need to be smart. So for me, it’s about the creativity of your people. It’s about, you know, looking at all these data lakes and tech stacks that we have right now and saying, well, what can we do better with this stuff we already have? It’s not necessarily about, this amazing robotic piece coming down the line. We can change all the way our kitchens work. Yeah, that’ll all happen. It will revolutionize industries. It’s not one industry that won’t be revolutionized by robotics and customer experience and marketing is no different. I the most terrifying thing for marketers listening to this is, suppose for thousands of years,
And certainly for the hundreds that we’ve had marketing as a social science, we’ve been able to influence customers. That’s the point. So we, we tell you what you need to buy. If you go back to 1950s, mad men type stuff, you know, we say, here’s a product, but let’s dress it up in a different way. And then let’s press the buttons. Let’s use guilt and emotion and so on. And you know, that’s the science of marketing in a way. But now what’s going to happen with agent AI is that the consumer for the first time steps out of the consumer decision-making process. I’m going to trust my agent AI to do, to book my holiday. Cause it knows the kind of places they like to go. It’ll show me the hotels.
And the more more I use it, of course, the more the learning program kicks in. After six months, knows me so well that it doesn’t even ask me anymore what brands I want because it knows the brands I want and it’ll either take something as commodity as utilities again. I don’t particularly care which electricity company delivers electricity to my home. So it’ll just broker that business every month. And so it’ll be a race to the bottom on some industries for price, for quality, for delivery times. But ultimately, if you take a customer or the customer decision making process, every marketeer listening to this should be terrified.
because you can’t really influence a machine the way we can influence. having spent my whole career in behavioral sciences, that’s the field of wonder marketing, clever, creative, can get people thinking, get people curious and off you go, machines don’t get curious. so business to machine. So we have B2B, B2C, B2M is a very exciting development. And so this is again the power of investing now in customer experience and brand, because the brands that are genuinely part of your life and that own a huge part of your heart, you’re not going to get let your agent AI
buy you anything else, but the command you give is buy me this one because this is where I belong. so belonging is so important. I have a book later on coming out in the year about Taylor Swift, and I find her fascinating because, again, not as an artist, even though she’s a very talented producer, director, writer, all those things, as a savvy entrepreneur, she is someone who truly understands customer action. And for 20 years, she’s been investing in the customer experience. She’s been investing in vulnerability, authenticity, intimacy through social media. She was one of the first artists to use social media to kind of
allow fans to choose the next single from the album. she, she understood collaboration, the power of digital collaboration. And to this day, even though she’s a super idol at this point, she still will interface with fans, invite them into her home, step into their lives. She understands tearing away the line between us and them as I spoke earlier on. so as a brand, her success isn’t necessarily just about music. Her brand is about, you know, she has the biggest tribal fandom, one of the biggest tribal fandoms in the world in her Swifty army. And, know, where is the army of Lady Gaga and Pink and, know, they’re all popular artists, but they don’t have an army.
because she invested in the customer connection. She understood that it’s more about the music. The music is the product, but branding is more about that. Branding is about connection. And every single person in a 70,000 person arena has a parasocial relationship with Taylor Swift on stage thinking that she’s my best friend. She’s the girl next door. She’s not Beyonce kind of inaccessible. Taylor Swift is wholly accessible. And that’s an illusion. She’s not. But you you think that she is because of the intimacy that she’s built and the authenticity that she’s built into the brand.
And so I spend my life with large brands all over the world. doesn’t matter whether it’s Starbucks or NFL or wherever. Teaching them, you can have the scale, but you can also hold on to the intimacy. That’s the magic. The magic of customer experience and investing in the right things and the right connective points is that you can have depth and scale. for AI, that’s what AI gives us for the first time ever. We’ve always kind of had a balance there. We could have depth of scale. You could have the goldfish moments, the lady, you know, doing the one interaction with anything. Oh, how can we make all our staff like that? So we sacrifice that then for scale. So we have a system, but it’s only kind of very blunt.
Whereas with AI now, you’ve got depth and scale potential. You’ve got both things. And that’s going to be a magnificent opportunity for customer experience.
Greg Kihlstrom (25:54)
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, yeah, and definitely looking forward to catching your new book as well. Well, Ken, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up here. I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Ken Hughes (26:08)
Well, I spend my life, I’m a professional motivational speaker. So I spend my life touring the world at conferences everywhere. And people always ask me, you know, where do you get your ideas? And I have a very unique and lucky role, I guess, because I can be at a healthcare conference on a Monday, financial services on a Wednesday, branding and retail on Friday. I can go from Dubai to New York to Sydney. And so I’m continuously jumping markets and jumping industries. And I’m exposed to the same challenges in one way and hearing how all the different industries and brands are dealing with those. And often then,
exposed to different technologies and different. And so in terms of how I stay agile, I find that actually by exposing yourself to new ideas on a continuous basis, you learn after a few months and years of that and to always kind of look for the next thing and look for the next idea. And so I suppose all the downtime that I’m playing in between all those places, I’m continuously weaving a kind of a fabric of of what’s happening and who said what and what the challenges are. And actually, if you let time just to steal that for you, you end up thinking like, yeah, my mind’s always kind of curious about where we are and where we’re going.
So you have just exposure to all those conversations is great. We just white podcasts at this are great. And so anyone listening who take anyone who takes the time out of their day to consciously decide to listen to something else. That to me is the secret of agility because you’re you’re you’re choosing to either learn something new or maybe challenge what you already know. You’re choosing to put something else into the top of the funnel. So everyone listen to this right now. You’ve made the right choice.
