Articles

The article focuses on the importance of innovation in delivering a customer service experience that builds loyalty. DIY chain Home Depot invested in more employees, revitalized store environments, and created an employee reward program to improve their customers' experience. Computer company Dell is investing in an improvement strategy that includes product, service, and support initiatives to enhance the customer experience. General Electric has initiated its CENCOR (calibrate, explore, create, organize, realize) initiative. Companies must constantly work to ensure customer loyalty.

Seemingly high-potential opportunities flop. Soaring products suddenly face the specter of commoditization. And booming brands lose their luster. Many marketers attribute these disappointing outcomes to the inherent randomness of innovation. Yet there is a way out of the morass. Companies that use the jobs-to-be-done model can master the innovation life cycle —detecting valuable prospects, enhancing existing products, and infusing energy into even the most inert categories.

In this article, the authors introduce the concept that people’s earliest and defining product memories can be used as a projective tool to help managers more fully understand consumers’ relationships to their products. The authors use a study on three generations of automobile consumers to illustrate how these memories symbolize the consumer–brand relationship and how they can be used to gain insights into brand meaning.

Combining quantitative data with the deeper insights from a qualitative approach, Synovate surveyed over 13,000 consumers in 20 Hotspots markets around the world to gain a better understanding of their relationships with brands and their brand preferences across a range of product categories.