Do you create "bragging rights" for your customers?

Lunch break reading today - the Sept. 26th issue of Advertising Age, and a story about auto branding at the German auto show in Frankfurt. Feeling good about the grapefruit I'm eating, my eye catches the subhead: HELPING CUSTOMERS BOND WITH THE BRAND.

If you get the chance to pick up this issue, the story on Audi's "Ring" at the show (and the $14M they spent on it) is worth a lunchtime read.

Beyond that though, it made me think about what we do in the community development and real estate business everyday. Buying a home is the most emotionally charged and likely the most expensive thing you will ever buy. A close second may be a new car.

The car business has figured out how to help customers bond with the brand. The Audi example of an indoor test drive track around the Audi Ring (nod to their logo) did it. Think of the memories, the photos, the G-force their shoppers experienced?! The space is open for smart developers and builders to offer a memorable, relevant home shopping experience to do the same thing. We are on that quest as I write.

How can we create bragging rights for our customers so they leave our discovery centers and model homes and tell their friends, "Here's this great community I just visited, and the story I've attached to it." Back to work ...

Look outside your industry ... how do you stack up?

Spent some time today on a call with our team in Tampa, working on the customer experience we want to deliver in our new community, planned to open in mid-2012. We tossed around the usual notions of how to encourage customers to sign up with us, online and in person, so we can learn more about their home and community preferences. Not to hard sell them. Not to spam or e-blast the you know what out of them. But to help us keep learning about what matters to them, so we can continue to create communities that are relevant to changing buyers' needs, and help our customers along the exhausting and challenging home shopping journey.

Should we use tablets?
Should we use tech at all?
How can we make it simple, real time and best of all fun?
How can we integrate online and in-person among the community developer (us) and our builder partners?

As we created the amazing variety of journies our customers will take with us, trying to create a simple and easy approach became more and more complex. We are all customers too, so we inevitably referred back to those iconic customer service experiences held up as gold standards - the "blue shirts" in the Apple store, the seamless airline check-in experience, even some new examples from the automotive world. The discussion was great, and it reminded me of a few simple truths:

• Customers compare you to their last best customer service experience, regardless of the industry. If you are comparing yourself within an industry, just remember... your customers aren't.



• Every front of house opportunity has its share of back of house problems ... and they are all worth working through.



• The kind of thinking needed to do this should make your brain hurt. If it doesn't, you likely aren't thinking hard enough.

Embrace your "back of house" and create memorable experiences

On weekends when I am batching it alone, one of the things I often do is get take-out from either a favorite Thai place (yellow curry), or a great Italian place. You see, Pam doesn't do curry, and gluten in the pasta doesn't much like her either, so curry and a great pasta dish are things I don't often enjoy, reserved for the weekends she's in Canada with family.

Tonight my to go of choice was Italian, from the best little crazy Italian place, a few miles from my house and right near the beach, Trattoria I Trulli.

I have never been to Tuscany, but I imagine this place is what a real Tuscan villa would be like. Tables crammed close together. Waiters rushing back and forth, turning sideways in the tight space to avoid crashing into each other or their guests. It's loud. It's always busy. There are never enough tables, even when they spill out onto the sidewalk.

Tonight as I sipped my glass of pinot noir at the bar while waiting for my dinner I marveled at how they use their "back of house" to create a sensory front of house experience that explodes with textures, sounds, and color. The bartender handles to go orders, in addition to opening wine, mixing drinks, and preparing after dinner "two decaf cappuccinos" ordered up in passing as a waiter drops of the plates from a meal just finished and seconds later re-appears with four wine glasses, a basket of bread and dip, and wisks a bottle of red off the edge of the bar.

Waiters come and go, through the bar, seen here in this quick photo, from the kitchen to the restaurant. In my short 15-minute wait I witnessed numerous near collisions, and yet never did the pace, the energy, or the passion for what they do slow.

I love this place. It makes me think about how many other "back of house" opportunities could be embraced as part of the front of house effect to create more memorable experiences, not just in dining, but in other businesses too.