// Click here to see part I //
What’s not going to change in 2018?
Here’s one thing that will not change: Folks will still think with their eyes. Design makes ideas/missions/business goals visible.
Design is also a thief: it steals attention. And then stashes it into our memory. The better designed your idea/mission/business is, the more folks will be primed to see it in a positive light.
Home is where the love is.
So many folks talk about driverless cars being the linchpin to our lives in the future.
They are all wrong.
Home is where the most important decisions in life are made. (Amazon gets this.)
Look for ways to connect with folks in their homes.
Listen, you don’t need to develop another Amazon Alexa to have an edge in your line of work.
Because most businesses are still purely transaction-minded, and the only thing they give their customers is a receipt.
Even having a simple loyalty program will likely make a big difference in your line of work.
Fair warning: In doing so, you’ll likely get pulled over by the ‘reasonable police.’ These are the good-meaning folks around you who will question the reasonableness of your investment. Hear them out, but don’t forget: an investment in a good experience is usually at least a bit unreasonable.
To be life-proof, be fun or uber useful.
For most of their needs, folks are mentally filing businesses into one of these two lists: Useful, or fun. (The same is, actually, often the case with the people in our lives, no?)
In life and in business, it’s a bonus to be on both lists.
It’s hard to pull it off, but it can be done. For example, Southwest Airlines (the consistently most profitable US airline), GEICO, and Dollar Shave Club (sold to Unilever for a billion dollars) are all on both lists.
And not because it’s a trendy thing to do, but because being fun and useful makes a lot of business sense (and cents).
Consider those funny in-flight safety announcements Southwest Airlines is famous for. (Even if you’re not living in the US, chances are there’s an exact copy of Southwest Airlines operating in your neck of the woods. In Canada, for example, it’s WestJet; in England, it’s EasyJet; etc.)
Have you ever wondered what the value of a funny in-flight safety announcement is for Southwest Airlines?
Believe it or not, but the folks at Southwest Airlines — which is not the only low-cost airline in the US — recently figured out that those funny in-flight safety announcements are worth approx. 140 million dollars per year to Southwest Airlines. (Send us an email if you want to know how they figured that out.)
So, please try to focus on being uber useful & fun.
(Stay tuned… part III coming soon…)