Some well-known brands disappear from the marketplace altogether.  GM retired Oldsmobile and is set to do the same to Saturn and Pontiac.  Hummer will meet the same fate if a buyer isn’t found soon. Kodak eliminated Kodachrome film, which was synonymous with photography for many generations.

Well-known brands from Studebaker to Commodore (remember the “first” PC [...]

Brand extensions are are certainly less expensive than building a new brand from the scratch. If a brand has strong equity and an established customer franchise, the extensions may even have a ready-made market.  The problem arises when companies stretch brands in ways and directions that don’t make sense.
When Nike went from shoes to apparel [...]

Recently several brands have redesigned their “look”. Updating visual elements of a brand is often an attempt to keep the brand relevant and contemporary.  Among the brands that have undergone recent renovations are Pepsi and Xerox.
At Pepsi the brand update comes with a $1.2 billion price tag over the next 3 years.  According to Chairman-CEO [...]

The words “customer experience” don’t often pop-up in the same sentence as the words “vacuum cleaner.” It’s not a sexy category and it is a category where customer experience is often not satisfactory. I’ve had my share of unsatisfactory experiences with different brands over the years.
Dyson, which retails in Canada starting at about $500, [...]

Customer experience management (CEM) is not the domain of one functional area. Product developers, marketing, sales, operations and HR all have a role to play. In Part 2 of my introduction to customer experience, I’d like to present a framework which may be of use to those who plan to study, design, implement or [...]

Every time one reads about service excellence and superior customer experience the oft-cited examples include Starbucks, Google, Virgin Airlines, Lexus and Ritz-Carlton. A recent search on Google for “customer experience” returned over 1.4 million results and a search for “customer experience management” returned over 890,000 results! Clearly there is a great deal of [...]

Welcome to the new “thecxo.com”. We will blog here on current trends, issues and developments in customer experience.
We strongly subscribe to the view that customer experience is the route to building great brand and profitable customer relationships.
Those of you who have been to thecxo.com before may notice that some archived articles are missing and we [...]