creating delight...

Sometime back, an old friend who today is confined to being a count in my friends list in FB wrote about creating customer delight, and gave an example of Apple, something about Apple have a big glowing Apple on one of its store to mimic the glowing Apple symbol on the front lid of its macbooks. 

Customer delight, as one of my favorite marketing profs, Chandan Chatterjee, had explained long time back is the top tier of customer satisfaction...give value which was not only expected, but not imagined either. Something the product or service did for you surprised you, shocked you even. "How can a product do this for me, why would it do this for me, what is the catch" are the things which come into you mind. 

and as you find out that it was just done to please you, you like the product / service, and you start adoring it and thats how obsessions like Apple are born. 

but lets take a step back, what is it in for the company marketing the product / service. They might or might now be loosing money on it, most of these features are innocuous little things, which don't cost a lot, but leave a lot of impact. But the main investment is in the creative part of it. Coming up with something that the customer might not even have imagined takes a lot of thinking or...

or maybe it just takes a love for the customer and the product. Yep, if you love what you are doing, if you are passionate about what you are building, then making sure that you customers also love your product becomes a bigger motivation then just selling the product, and thats kick in a natural cycle of creativity. you love the product, and you are so passionate about it that you want everyone else to love it, and so you put in those small litter additions which make people love it. 

btw as i write this, another thought, there are two levels of customer delights, one is a product which every time you use, makes you feel good, makes you feel like 'wow, this is a work of art' or 'this has made life so much easier' and the other is the surprise kinds, 'wow, i can do this as well' or 'how good of them'. An example of the first of course is the iPhone, and locally Airtel's service. The second would be Google's Pacman thingy. 

Another thought, why is the second kind so rare, well first is not seen too much either but second is just rare and so, why??  well me thinks people in large corporations don't love their products, they might love their companies, but they are not passionate about the individual ideas, individual products. and thats why most of the customer delight today comes from startups, or companies which run like startups or a bunch of startups...thats where google and apple come in.

agreed, some products are so old, its difficult to surprise the customers, like there are few things you can do with a car today, but then think again.