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Leverage the Power of Story
Narrative structure is essential for businesses to connect with customers, as storytelling—embraced by all employees—clarifies the brand’s mission and fosters loyalty, making it crucial to regularly practice and refine the stories behind the company, its products, and its people.
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Build Immense Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is essential for competitive success, and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott emphasizes three best practices to achieve it: segment your marketplace, understand your competition, and treat customers with dignity and respect to build lasting goodwill.
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Use Pre-Suasion Tactics in an Honest Way
Robert Cialdini emphasizes the ethical use of persuasion and pre-suasion, warning that irresponsible practices can lead to high turnover and a culture of dishonesty, while encouraging businesses to prioritize customer interests and the genuine value of their offerings.
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The 6 Universal Principles of Influence
In “Influence: The Science of Persuasion,” Robert Cialdini identifies six principles—reciprocity, liking, authority, social proof, scarcity, and commitment/consistency—that enhance message acceptance and can be effectively utilized in “pre-suading” audiences before a project or pitch.
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The Art of Pre-Suasion
Thoughts, feelings, and actions are influenced by unconscious factors, and “pre-suasion” involves strategically preparing audiences to be receptive to a message by using imagery or cues that align with desired behaviors, enhancing the effectiveness of persuasion.
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How to Conduct a Sludge Audit
Professor Cass Sunstein highlights that “sludge,” or bureaucratic frictions like excessive paperwork and waiting times, hinders access to benefits, and suggests conducting a sludge audit to streamline workflows and improve quality of life by identifying and reducing these inefficiencies.
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Key Considerations for Designing Inclusive Services
Ethical companies should consider the cognitive burden their products impose, as limited bandwidth can hinder marginalized populations from navigating administrative barriers, leading to distributional unfairness and potential human rights violations, necessitating thoughtful design to ensure equitable access.
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Understand the Power of Choice Architecture—and Its Shadow Side
Professor Cass Sunstein discusses how companies use “sludge” to complicate unsubscribing, manipulating consumer behavior against their interests, while advocating for “choice architecture” that promotes beneficial defaults and simplifies decision-making while preserving user freedom.
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How Designers Can Work with—or Against—Consumer Biases
In a video lesson, professor Cass Sunstein discusses how inertia and various cognitive biases, such as present bias and status quo bias, affect consumer behavior, offering insights on how designers can structure products and services to better engage customers and highlight important features.
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What Kind of Designer Are You?
In a video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein discusses three types of designers—manipulative, naive, and human-centered—highlighting how the latter prioritizes user experience by minimizing “sludge” and fostering customer satisfaction.
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An Introduction to Sludge
In this video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein explores the concept of “sludge”—the bureaucratic obstacles that hinder access to essential services—using Kafka’s “The Trial” and a COVID-19 case study to illustrate how reducing these barriers can improve people’s lives.
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Getting Unstuck at Work
Professor Cass Sunstein defines “sludge” as the unnecessary bureaucracy and frictions, like long wait times and excessive paperwork, that hinder access to desired outcomes, suggesting organizations can improve experiences by minimizing these obstacles.
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How to Build a Successful Brand in the 21st Century
In a market flooded with over 100 bottled water brands, consumers increasingly favor those like Mananalu, which prioritize meaningful missions such as eliminating plastic waste, highlighting the importance of branding that resonates with modern values and social responsibility.
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Understanding the Customer Experience
James Cash Penney emphasized that courteous treatment leads to customer loyalty, but Tiffani Bova highlights that true customer experience (CX) involves creating added value through multiple metrics, ensuring elevated experiences that encourage recommendations and retention.
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Grow Your Business with the Experience Mindset
Tiffani Bova emphasizes that fostering employee satisfaction is crucial for enhancing customer experience, advocating for the integration of customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) to achieve predictable growth.
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Study a Worthy Rival
Leadership expert Simon Sinek emphasizes that worthy rivals inspire improvement through process-focused competition, a principle restaurateur Will Guidara applied at Eleven Madison Park, encouraging professionals to learn from competitors to foster innovation and enhance their own offerings.
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Four Steps for Personalizing Experiences at Scale
Theme parks like Disneyworld enhance guest experiences through pattern recognition and creative responses, such as personalizing interactions with buttons and alleviating wait times with entertainment, as explained by restaurateur Will Guidara in his video lesson on tailored hospitality.
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Prioritize the Consumer
In advertising, as in education, showing genuine care for your audience enhances engagement, and by leveraging consumer insights and social media feedback, marketers can create relevant content that addresses pain points and adds value to consumers’ lives.