"What do your customers feel after engaging with you that they didn't feel before?"
The reason I like this question is it induces a subtle change in perspective.
Instead of thinking about what you deliver, you start to think about what value you create.
Your impact rather than your output. Emotional states rather than demographics.
And therefore the relationship with your customers or community changes from transactional to transformational.
Lots of businesses might offer similar products or services, but the feeling you create can be entirely yours. The way you make people feel is harder to copy than what you sell.
And once you know the feeling you do or want to create, you can work to emphasise it.
You can promise it.
You can build everything you do around it.
Organisations with strong brands have clarity. They understand the before state and the after state and have a clearly mapped customer journey.
And because they do, they can deliver it consistently.
They can choose to hire people who help create that feeling.
They can design experiences that help produce it.
It becomes the core of their brand.
People are famously illogical. Even when we think we’re being rational, we’re usually making emotional decisions.
Every great brand started because someone intuited and understood a feeling.
Someone saw people struggling, frustrated, confused, and imagined them feeling capable, confident, and empowered.
So have you considered what people feel after engaging with you? And what is it you want them to feel?
When you get clarity on this, decision making becomes a whole lot easier, because if you’re not creating more of that feeling, you're probably making the wrong decision.
