Welcome to Andrew Davis, a super creative guy, he came out of media, spent time with the Muppets had a digital marketing agency that he sold. And now what he does is he is primarily a speaker, so he gets in front of audiences, inspires them and educates them, and entertains them. He's spoken to our CEO group before and a couple of our clients as well.

Andrew Davis:

My focus today is helping people challenge the conventional business and marketing wisdom by really rethinking some of the things that we've always been taught and traveling around the world and teaching those to people and writing books. I got my start in the media business. I worked in television right out of college I worked for the Jim Henson Company which is where I learned how marketing and business really work, because the truth is, at the Jim Henson company, they really don't make much money on selling media properties. Selling Sesame Street as a nonprofit doesn't make any money. What makes money is creating content that people fall in love with and characters that people can't get enough of so that they can license all of those characters.

It was a real education in the power of media to inspire people to buy things they didn't know they needed. And after that, I worked at a series of startups in the startup boom of the late 1990s. I started my own agency with a journalist friend of mine named Jim Costco in the early two thousands. Then we sold that in 2012. And since then, I've just been traveling the world and writing books, and kind of challenging myself to find out how things really work in the new world we live in.

Jim Schleckser:

Share with the audience what it means from your perspective to differentiate.

Andrew Davis:

We live in a world where being different is something that's really important and we tell people to be different all the time. We've got to look different. We've got to get people to notice us and get more awareness in the marketplace. But the truth is, in the last six years, I've spent a lot of time looking at what really differentiates you in the marketplace today. And looking and sounding different is great, but actually being different is the real true differentiator. So if you can create an experience that feels different for your clients that's where you can win over an industry. What happens is if you create a good client or customer experience, most of the brands that are successful in doing that start marketing that experience as the differentiator.

Many people spend all this time saying we need more leads; we need more customers. We need to raise awareness to get more people in the door or onto the website to buy the stuff. And the truth is, if you have a bad customer experience, you're just shoving people through a bad experience. I really truly believe the way, to start transforming your business is to start with the very next customer you get and really rethink the experience by differentiating it from everybody else in the marketplace.

Jim Schleckser:

I love the idea of becoming an attractive force versus pushing this big heavy rock up the hill all the time. How do you recommend we start?

Andrew Davis:

Let me give you two just quick concepts that you just have to embrace to understand how what I call the loyalty loop works. So you first need to understand the moment of inspiration. The moment of inspiration is an instant in time that sends you on a journey you never expected. For example - to buy anything, it could be a car. You get your lease-end notification. That lease end letter that Nissan sends you is an instant in time that's going to send you on a journey to buy a new vehicle. That's a moment of inspiration. A moment of commitment is the instant that you trade money, data, or time, for information to support a cause or to buy a product or a service. The big change in the moment of commitment today is that we need to understand that sale. The sale isn't the only moment of commitment. If you fill out an online form, if set up a calendar appointment with someone, if you ask for a quote from someone as a consumer, you are trading data for an experience, and that data is worth something. If you understand those two concepts, just the moment of inspiration and the moment of commitment, what you want to try to do is build a real experience.

For more examples and valuable insights into creating customer loyalty, listen to the full podcast.