Transforming Legacy Organizations

CHAPTER 4WHAT DO CUSTOMERS WANT?

In 2016, I published the book The Fundamental 4s: How to Design Extraordinary Customer Experiences in an Exponential World with my partner Laila Pawlak. The book was the result of many years of customer analyses and research into human motivation, and how to create stronger customer experiences through a deeper understanding of people's basic driving forces. What do customers really want? Most organizations spend a lot of energy trying to understand this. More and more organizations incorporate customer centricity in their value set and make ‘customer first’ the focal point of their strategies. But often, there isn't enough of a basic understanding of what is most important to the customer. An understanding that is a fundamental tool for creating valuable customer-oriented initiatives, and an understanding that can simultaneously be turned inward and used internally within the organization to motivate employees. Because customers and employees share the fact that they are people, and the things that fundamentally motivate us as customers are the same things that motivate us as human beings. So let's look at the motivations that drive us as human beings, which we have called The Fundamental 4s, because they are fundamental and there are four of them.¹

As shown in Model 1, we have named the four core motivations BE, DO, FEEL, and LOOK with the common denominator ‘better’, because all of our core motivations share the fact that they are part of ...