In his book All Business is Still Show Business, customer engagement expert Scott McKain asks and answers a simple question:
"In this hyper-competitive, globally connected world, how do organizations and individual professionals stand out from the competition and engage their customers?”
It’s a question that has launched many a strategic marketing campaign in corporate America, but according to McKain, standing out from the competition and engaging your customers is less about marketing and more about establishing an emotional relationship.
Emotional? Relationship? Those two words might send the more technically-minded among us running for the hills, but if you’re thinking McKain’s book is a touchy-feely self-help fest, think again. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
All Business is Still Show Business, the follow-up to his 2002 book All Business is Show Business, is a concise, well-written must-read for any B2B or B2C business that is ready to make the paradigm shift away from "providing great customer service" to prioritizing what McKain calls UCE (“Ultimate Customer Experience”).
"What would it take,” McKain asks, “to move it beyond mere ordinary to extraordinary to ultimate?” The answer, according to the author, is emotion:
"All businesses ought to have a philosophy of show business, which means that we’re going to create an emotional connection with our customers…when I would go to regular business and say that they were in show business, their immediate response is, “No, we’re not. We’re not in laughter and song and dance.”
Using the film industry as a metaphor for business, McKain gives as an example the record-breaking success of the movie Titanic. Can you imagine being the producer whose job it was to talk investors into bankrolling a three-hour romantic tragedy where the audience already knows the ending? Investors apparently caught the emotion of James Cameron’s pitch—to the tune of $200 million—making Titanic the most expensive film ever made at the time. Movie goers (a.k.a. customers) returned again and again, bringing along friends and family members to re-experience their emotional connection to the characters on that ill-fated ship. Titanic was the first movie ever to gross over $1 billion at the box office and remains in the top five highest grossing films of all time.
The new frontier for customer acquisition and engagement, according to McKain, is one in which customers are bombarded with endless entertainment choices instantly available to them with a swipe on a screen. Today’s customer is not simply seeking the best widget at the lowest price. With the advent of social media and multiple content streaming services, your prospect is accustomed to being highly engaged with emotionally appealing content, and they are becoming increasingly harder to “wow” with last century’s marketing campaigns.
Along with providing valuable, actionable items to take away and implement, Scott McKain's book wisely warns,
"Customers do not become raving fans over mere service. It requires an extraordinary experience to generate the customer loyalty that every organization and customer desires.”
