Why You Should Break The Rules

CULTURESPARQ.COM | WE BUILD THE CULTURE

Are You A Rule Breaker Or A Conformer?

Breaking rules starts with you renewing the mindset of yourself and your people, it’s what we call Culture.  This allows you to begin building a strategy and execution that break the rules towards delivering a massive brand explosion.

Entrepreneurs are rule breakers, and business need to be too, but do so with a strategy and execution plan that aligns to people hearts and minds.  Knowing how to do this is also knowing your current market rules so you can break them.

As leaders, we don’t break rules for the fun of it. We break rules when we understand the systems that created those rules -- and then, with careful thought and relentless resolve, we can bend that system to our will. We learned the rules. We know what we’re doing. And that’s why, when the time is right, we don’t follow them.

Many businesses are great at conforming and are always trying to do what the market dictates or follow the most popular trend or business model — stop it — be authentic? 

Do you think all those great inventors, explorers, entrepreneurs- the people look up to-followed the rules?   No, they all have one thing in common…they gave the middle finger to rule and conforming. Some of the most successful people in the world didn’t even finish school! 

In this current landscape, you don’t get many opportunities to make a big impact, so make the most of it.

Here are 5 insights on why it pays to break the rules.

1. It increases how much we grow in both confidence and ability.

2. It can generate surprising results.

3. Our ideas are more innovative. Plus curiosity and innovation go hand in hand because the more curious we as leaders feel, the greater our productivity.

4. It changes how much respect we gain in the eyes of others. When you take charge by leading into uncharted territory—willing to get your hands dirty— you will create a reputation of a fearless and bold leader. People will follow you.

5. We can use our passion to avoid boredom, and choose novelty over what's familiar and comfortable.

REMEMBER 

By breaking rules, our ideas become more creative, our relationships become stronger and joy and excitement become common at work and in our lives. Though rebelling against the market rules may seem risky, it clearly pays off. We encourage leaders to BREAK THE RULES.

WE BUILD THE CULTURE!

3 Unstoppable Ways To CREATE Remarkable Customer Experiences

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Customers don't buy products or services, they buy experiences to give them a good feeling and a solution to their problems. Most customer needs are emotional rather than logical. So, the more you know your customers, the better you become at anticipating their needs and connecting with them emotionally.

At CultureSparq, we believe in giving the same level of care and attention when dealing with customers that we would hope to receive. This seems straightforward enough, but many of us fall into common foils of customer care. 

Customer service can make or break a relationship. For many companies, they have a build it and they will come attitude. You may have a fantastic product, but if your customer service is unhelpful, unreliable, or just plain hard to get in touch with, people will hear about it, and you’ll lose customers over it. That’s one big reason why investing in customer service is key to long-term business success. 

What is a remarkable customer experiences?

Remarkable customer experience means making absolutely certain no one can find a substitute for what your company offers. When there is no substitute for what you offer, you cannot be commoditized. When you cannot be commoditized, then growth, loyal customers and profits are yours for the taking.  It’s part of your differentiation.

The process of creating Remarkable Experiences is about breaking rules and creating your on best practices that includes ingredients like valuing customers’ time, having a pleasant attitude, and providing knowledgeable and skillful resources, who can take things a step further to exceed — rather than just meet — expectations throughout the customer journey.

Know your and understand your Customer Identity because most of the efforts by businesses seeking to provide amazing experiences is that they often forget that it is the customer, not the business who decides what is remarkable and what isn’t. You have to remember, too, that what is remarkable for one company, may not be remarkable for you. So know your CustomerDNA offer experiences that are unique.

Yeah I know, easier said than done, Right?

One way to get started in ensuring that every customer has a remarkable experience with your company is by making the customer experience, pricing and product a priority followed with a hyper focus on three areas to create a remarkable experience and they are:

1. Create a compelling customer experience vision:  

   Your strategy should have a clear customer-focused vision that you can communicate with your organization. The easiest way to define this vision is to create a set of aspirational statements that act as guiding principles.

2. Know your CustomersDNA:

   Understand who your customers are. If your organization is going to really understand customer needs and wants, then they need to be able to make deep connects and empathize with the situations that your customers face.

3. Create an emotional connection with your customers:

   Some of the best customer experiences are achieved when a member of your team creates an emotional connection with a customer. This is what also known as Emotional Quotient (EQ) — it’s the ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of somebody else and in this case, the customer.

REMEMBER

Great customer service happens when everyone from the CEO to product development, the sales team and customer service reps understand their purpose in the business.  One good customer service experience can change the entire perception a customer holds toward an organization. 

At CultureSparq, we continue to work at this for our customers. We are always trying to exceed expectations.

SCHEDULE some time with us to learn our process.

WE BUILD THE CULTURE!

Long Live Data

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Data.  The Heartbeat of eCommerce

How fast does your business filter and pump usable information (data) into your system?

Take our hearts for example.  The heartbeat is the contraction of your heart to pump blood to your lungs and the rest of your body. Your heart's electrical system determines how fast your heart beats.  This is exactly how we view the flow of Data in your eCommerce. 

So let’s imagine for purpose of this post that Data mining is the heartbeat in your eCommerce because its goal is to pump information to help you stay alive.

Purpose of data in your business

Your data should pump information (oxygen) into to your business and other important insights (nutrients) to all the connecting points in your business (organs) in order to stay healthy and to work properly. Your Data is your organizations muscle, and its job is to pump information throughout your organization (circulatory) system.

Data mining in eCommerce

Data mining is a form of business intelligence and data analysis.  It’s the process of taking raw data, finding anomalies, patterns and correlations within large data sets to predict outcomes that we call “Triggers”. Using a broad range of techniques, you can use this information to increase revenues, lower costs, improve customer relationships, reduce risks and create new markets. 

Data Science Practice

You may need a Data Science practice if you are in eCommerce.  Retailing integrates both brick-and-mortar and multiple e-commerce sales channels to provide consumers a flexible retail shopping experience. Global retail sales were projected to amount to around 26.7 trillion U.S. dollars by 2022, up from approximately 24.8 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019.

Similar to other industries, there has been a growing interest in leveraging data science and related techniques in retail and e-commerce (Unified Commerce) to provide a more efficient, convenient and personalized shopping experiences to increase customer foot traffic and spend. 

With the introduction of ML/AI, there is a great opportunity to bring awareness of a Unified Commerce strategy across the industry and tackle problems which can have a wide impact in this industry.   

There are plenty of opportunities to apply data science in the customer retail journey ranging from pre-purchasing, purchasing, post-purchasing, product search and recommendations plus inventory management, warehouse operations automation, delivery prediction and customer post-care experiences. The Data that businesses collect about customers and their transactions are the greatest assets of that business.

Here are some areas to think about when making your Unified Commerce data healthy:

• Data cleaning

• Data normalization

• Classification

• Clustering

• Predictive Analytics 

• Optimization techniques and ranking

We propose these as advantages for using data mining techniques for Retail and eCommerce, as a way to apply practical applications and system innovations to extract value towards new opportunities.

REMEMBER

Running your data at rate to create a differentiation in the market is what we do at CultureSparq — it starts with a strategy and execution plan of how the data is entered, filtered and flows throughout the organization.

We offer our a Data workshop to expose your unexplored high impact problems in e-commerce, but also help grow your customer community by attracting new from the broader retail and e-commerce space.

Schedule some time with me so we can show you how we keep your business healthy with good flowing data.

WE BUILD THE CULTURE

CEO Challenges for 2021: Being Fearless And Unapologetically Bold

As CEOs plan for 2021, they will face some challenges both in terms of strategy and execution.  In the face of our new reality, many businesses remain closed or operate under restrictions. CEOs are thinking strategically about how they can keep their companies moving forward in the current environment while planning for the future. 

As we begin 2021 we understand the decisions leaders make now will define long-term success both for their businesses and employees.

As we look ahead, we wanted to shed some light on CEOs biggest challenges for 2021. We’ve gathered five areas to help CEOs ponder while preparing for the year ahead.

Let’s Dive in. 

Here are some challenges CEOs must overcome in 2021:

1. Uncertainty is at the core of 2021 and CEOs will have to figure out how to execute strategies in the unknown that will help them stay ahead of the curve.

2. Being a Fearless & Unapologetically Bold CEO is using new ways to stress-test, shape and elevate the mindset of their leadership teams to meet the demand of future customers and create new markets.

3. CEOs will need to Optimize Operations to maximize efficiency and engagement.

4. Develop Deep Relationships with highly intelligent leaders who can Sparq innovative ideas and cause CEOs to reconsider how to do business in a different way.

5. Managing Remote Work. 97% of CEOs will allow remote work to some degree moving forward. CEOs will need to embrace telecommuting as part of their long-term strategy. Part of this will have to be retraining/up-skill micro-managers that is unable to make this shift.

Remember

Since Markets are constantly in flux with varying economic outlooks and complications arising on a regular basis, it can be very challenging for leaders.  You will have to forge ahead by being fearless and unapologetically bold at tackling your challenges to get the progress you want.

We look forward to helping you implement new, positive initiatives in your company. SCHEDULE some time with me to learn more about Sparq Worldwide business offering.

We Build The Culture!

Popup Talk with Chris Campbell - Let's Talk Strategy!

RACING ON THE MOON

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture!

In 2021, we will get to see the first remote-controlled Car-Race on the Moon.

OMG!  I can’t wait to see this.  We will get to see an extremely odd project hold a remote-controlled car race on the lunar surface in October 2021— on the surface of the Moon. What's more, the two race cars will be partially designed by a group of talented students, and a McLaren P1 designer.

Why, to capture the world's imagination and do something different that allows us to be the best.  

We love this and is part of the reason for us sharing this message with you today, because as a leader we want you to reflect on how the creation of your strategy is different enough to make you stand out from the crowd noise in your market.  

At CULTURESPARQ we take this seriously, for example, we begin and end each meeting with the question: Did you come today with an idea or strategy that’s bold and creative enough to make us history? 

• It’s our attitude, mindset and more importantly our culture. 

Let’s take a deeper look at identifying how this Car Racing project on the Moon can help us be better at what we do as Strategist and leaders..

A Little Background

According the article via Design Boom, “it’s a project that sounds too good to be true, but moon mark is proposing to host the first-ever race on the moon’s surface with remote-controlled cars designed by high school students and Motorsport designers.  The will design, build, land and race two autonomous lunar vehicles in 2021.”

Moon Mark stated, the remote-controlled cars will race around a "track" that's yet to be determined, at speeds that are yet to be determined, controlled via a Wi-Fi link back to the lander module that will communicate with race drivers on Earth in “near-real time” - now that’s really cool!

 The first part of the project was initiated earlier in 2020, when moon mark launched the ‘lunar race car design challenge’ to high school students across the world.  And this open call asked students to design a vehicle that can withstand the moon’s harsh climate, which is hot during the day and extremely cold at night.  The racers can weigh no more than 11 pounds (5 kg) and have to be equipped with a WiFi module, a compact battery, an IU solar panel, a UHF radio, and a single board computer. 

CultureSparq is delighted to see the project leaders develop and mobilize a culture of innovators of the future, allowing them to dream big and realize that nothing is impossible. 

This insight reminded us that, creating any type of innovation can be a fascinating process but how do you actually explore untapped ideas as a CEO, a Digital Strategist or Designer? 

We decided to go a little deeper and pull out some strategies and sharing some of our knowledge on how we believe this innovative project has some key areas for creating and disrupting new markets.

The Big Lesson: Your Imagination Can Make Your Strategy Create A Massive Brand Explosion

You ask what does this has to do with CultureSparq?  We have a practice around doing just that. Take myself for example, having backed across 30+ countries, learning and making connections to mobilize a winning culture of talented leaders so we can design and build micro startups at speed — I continue to look for ways to achieve the impossible mission of Strategically reinventing businesses to have massive brand explosion in new markets.  

One of the most exciting things about our Strategy is the Design thinking process is it allows us to inject a creativity by looking for patterns in the way to help companies create new markets and re-create existing ones. 

This is just a glimpse on how we innovate by looking across and beyond everyday boundaries, and so happen to have found six basic approaches in this remote controlled car race on the moon to help you gain a new perspective as well.

1. Form Diverse Teams

2. Have A Relentless Mindset

3. Establish A High Demand For Innovation

4. Create Unpredictable Situations

5. Adopt Innovative Technologies

6. Be Data-Driven

Remember 

All Strategy and Design thinking requires you to look at familiar data to achieve the impossible.

Creating new market space requires different people and mindsets who has a pattern of strategic thinking. Instead of looking within the accepted boundaries that define how we compete, managers can look systematically across and beyond them. By doing so, they can find unoccupied territory even on the Moon that represents a real breakthrough in value.

Let’s connect, please SCHEDULE some time with us so we can take you on this journey. 

We Build The Culture!

How These Tools Can Track Your Strategy

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture

The Power of Enterprise Tools

Digital Transformation is the process of transforming your organization to meet customer needs more efficiently through technological innovation and data.  One way to do it, is by powering up your organization with the use of the right leaders who can evaluate and implement the best enterprise tool to manage your work.

In order to deliver business value in the digital age, you will need to require your leaders to broaden not only their skills, capabilities, and understanding, but also their enterprise portfolio management solutions.

Part of their efforts will require them to evaluate and implement an enterprise workflow platform that’s built for scaling your core capabilities practices.

We’ve evaluated and put together a quick recommendation of three Enterprise Management tools that have the capabilities to help your organization get started on your Digital Transformation journey.  With this purpose in mind we took a look at some tools we’ve used that can help your digital strategy get tracked quickly. 

These Enterprise Management tools are focused around helping your organization manage all types of work.  They are designed to cover most digital product initiatives and support most team sizes. The right tool can keep your culture aligned across the organization with the ability to track, measure and show management the impact of their work. 

It’s not only about being on time or on budget, but also about business outcomes so these software tools can get you setup to start doing just that.

BENEFITS

As a CEO you will have a window into the guts of your company with Top-to-bottom transparency.  Whether you decided to consolidate your entire value stream by linking strategy to execution across teams, you will get that rolled up visibility of multiple programs.  This allows your leaders to drive business outcomes with collaborative and digitized processes.

These 3 Tools include but not limited to: 

1. ATLASSIAN/JIRA

2. VersionONE

3. Rally

These tools can help you reap the benefits of your digital transformation by bringing predictability into focus, removing silos and making your business rich in data currency so you can make it easier to spot and resolve problems at speed: 

Let’s take a closer look at some key areas you will need to know before moving on.  Here are some areas they can help you manage your work projects across your portfolios.

Connect work to meaningful outcomes

In order to make faster and smarter decisions, your development work needs to align to your company's most important business objectives. These tools can help you align daily work to strategy and leverage data to steer your business towards an outcomes-driven culture.

Align teams and empower them to innovate

These tool can serve as a central hub for teams to collaboratively plan, prioritize and track work on a synchronized cadence. Teams can visualize their work in the form of lists, boards or timeline views, and more importantly—they can understand how their day-to-day work aligns to the greater goals of the business.

Plan the right work, measure the right results

Stop struggling to manage dependencies and risks across multiple teams or delivery groups. These tools provide a comprehensive rolling-up of the progress, dependencies, alignment and plan health—so teams and groups can make intentional decisions and stay relentlessly focused on value.

REMEMBER

Using tools across your organization involves tracking the effectiveness of your strategy and then iterating where needed. These tools are all about tracking, analytics and iteration!  CultureSparq is serious about creating an amazing tool adoption for all teams.

Want to know more? SCHEDULE some time with us to learn how we will evaluate and implement the right enterprise tools in your business to keep your strategy aligned and visible.

We Build The Culture 

Do You Have Social Currency?

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture

Let’s level set. What is Social Currency?

Social currency is the ability of brands to fit into how consumers manage their social lives in today's digital and mobile age. Social currency (or social capital) applies to the relationship between your business and consumers.

Brands get built through experiences, through people accepting them and making them part of the fabric of their lives. This process of building strong brands is very personal and also very social. Today, one of the most important strengths of a brand is its social currency, the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand with others as part of their everyday social lives.

Social currency strategies are arguably the most critical point of leverage for a marketer and is giving their brands a boost in revenues. From health care to fashion, growing number of companies have come to embrace the concept of “social currency,” allowing consumers to pay via tweet and other social media posts.

Companies that are cultivating an exceptional portfolio of brands like @Inditex and @LVMH will need to have a social currency strategy so they can discover new high-paying customers that feel connected to their company values and mission.

To achieve and maintain a leadership position, partnering with CultureSparq is beneficial because we help companies nurture and preserve their brand’s distinctive identity and purpose. At the same time, we leverage our global experiences, creative resources and operational expertise that is tailored to fit a brand uniqueness. 

If you haven’t dominated your digital presence already - your brand need to build and nurture social currency.

Here’s 3 quick areas to get you started with your Social Currency strategy.

1. SHARE

   Establish a way to which people share the brand as part of their everyday social lives. For example:  Create your brands' own channel and upload videos relevant to your business.  Utilize influencers to open your content to a much broader (but well-targeted) audience. Or create videos to showcase your business behind the scenes or in-the-moment content - for example: marketing can show how your items are made from concept-to-cash in a interactive way by going live on IG or where your customers are.

2. UNBOXING

   Creating the Perfect Unboxing Experience. Use branded boxes that are uniquely designed and manufactured. Plus, to create a successful unboxing experience, the box can't simply be an ordinary box. Use unique packing material. Think about product presentation. Consider giving a free sample or reward for being a loyal customer. Add a touch of personalization. Include important inserts that give insights and opportunities for the customer to consider right away .

3. CREATE CHANNELS WITH COMMUNITIES

   Test new marketing channels by creating community-building opportunities so your brand becomes an integral part of your customer daily lives by enabling them to connect, interact, and benefit from your brand at all points of the customer journey.  You can achieve this by creating pop-up Digital Stores or Boutiques within those channels and personalized them based on that community profile and mission.  You can even make communities a popular destination because people can experience a personalized and cool interaction with your products because it meets their community charter from being able to make fun videos with products giveaways to help them achieve a social impact.

REMEMBER

Social currency is your influence on social networks, online and offline communities, and the degree by which your business is shared by others.  It’s not just about conversation, buzz, or community. It is all this and much more. 

Are you doing anything that stands out from the competition? Do people look to you for a specific product or service? If so, you have social currency. 

If not, SCHEDULE some time with us to learn how we can help create and execute your e-commerce strategies.

WE BUILD THE CULTURE

The Future of E-Commerce

Culturesparq.com | We Build The Culture!

3 eCommerce Trends  To Consider in 2021

What will your eCommerce look like in 2021?

With retail closures at an all time high—consumers are forced to do their shopping online. This has created a massive consumer migration of newcomers seeking a world-class and personalized customer experience.

As we head into the new year, a variety of trends are gaining momentum that will shape retail and eCommerce forever.

To become a major competitor, your eCommerce platform must be developed quicker than Amazon can deliver, and this mean you will have to invest smart and go big at being all in. The shift has been made and consumers are now seeking virtually store fronts to be able to order from their computer at home, mobile phones or anywhere without stepping a foot inside a store.

At CultureSparq, we know cool way your brand can stand out in a crowded eCommerce space is through automated shipping and fulfillment. Orders must have fast, free, and sustainable shipping. This includes branding the packaging to give a personalized experience when customer are unboxing it.  This type of fulfillment can make an additional remarkable experience when combined.  

To help you better compete with marketplaces and retail giants, we recommend brands invest in richer, more personalized experiences. To drive that deeper connection.  Humanizing your brand aids in customer retention, now a top priority as acquisition costs rise, along with uncertainty in digital advertising.

To help you prepare your business for the next step in the eCommerce journey, here are 3 trends to consider in 2021:

1. Create Deeper Connections: Solidify your customer loyalty by knowing how to connect with them.  Try creating Memories of having more convenience and affordable cost options as the top reason for increasing your brand trust. But don’t miss the fact that consumers also want to connect with brands on a deeper level like how the product or company is linked to a social impact/cause.

2. Make Your Fulfillment Competitive:  Fulfillment will be your key differentiator especially now that consumers gravitate to brands offering fast, free, and sustainable shipping. Try to establish a fulfillment competitive advantage by placing inventory closer to customers, automating returns, and offering flexible options like curbside pickup.

3. Make Subscription The New Normal:  One-time buyers and single-time orders can be huge obstacles to scaling your business rapidly.  Try to capture a lion’s share of the market by adapting a subscription model that will benefit both your customers and business. Something easy as Monthly payment options for larger purchases will help customers and entice them to subscribe to you.

Remember

Online shopping is the reality and retail is becoming increasingly digital and internet-driven. Store fronts like bricks and mortar have adopted elements of the online experience to encourage us all to visit them by playing to the strengths that in-person experiences can offer, such as more personal levels of service.

The Consumers have made it clear about what they want from the shopping experience – are you listening?

If you need help strategizing and delivering your 2021 roadmap, please SCHEDULE some time with us and we will do an eCommerce deep dive with your team towards an unified connected commerce experience.

We Build The Culture

Workflow Automation

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture

What is Workflow Automation?

Workflow Automation refers to the design, execution, and automation of processes based on workflow rules where human tasks, data or files are routed between people or systems based on pre-defined business rules. By leveraging self-operating processes that run manual tasks, workflow automation can help your business save time and money, diminish errors, and boost productivity.

Why Why Workflow Automation

At CultureSparq, we believe in automating workflows, especially those processes that are primarily handled manually by employees — significant improvements can be made in efficiency, productivity and even accountability.

The Benefits

Workflow automation provides several benefits over manual processes from Policy compliance adherence, Improved visibility, Improved employee satisfaction, Continual process improvement, Better workload management to Reduced errors.  These are just a few areas digital leaders will have to think about automating as part of their digital transformation strategy.

Almost every department in your business can benefit from workflow automation. Whether it’s marketing, human resources, or finance — automating your workflows will help you work smarter, not harder.

Here are FIVE examples to help you on your transformation journey towards automating a specific workflow or function:

MARKETING

Reach customers no matter where they are in their journey.  By automating some of your Marketing’s most repetitive tasks, such as sending emails, creating campaigns and posting to social media you can reach customers faster and convert customers into lifelong brand advocates.

Human Resources 

From performance reviews to employee onboarding, off-boarding and request for time off.  Decrease the time of having to manually enter all your new hires’ personal information, like addresses, social security numbers, and other employee information into payroll, expense, and insurance systems, by automation your HR systems.

FINANCE

You can streamline your CapEx Approval Process and improve Compliance by allowing users to easily define, build, and publish customized capital expenditure request processes. Automation your finance processes so you can streamline all your travel requests, reimbursements, and budget approvals to quickly learn how to maximize revenues.

IT 

You can replace repeatable processes and reduce manual intervention by automation your IT systems and software. Areas like Cloud automation and DevOps Automation can increase IT productivity and efficiency – and reduce human errors. Recently the focus on IT automation has shifted to enhanced business productivity, greater innovation and faster speed to market.

REPORTING & DATA ANALYTICS

Today’s digital marketing landscape often involves dealing with many different data sources on a daily basis. When it comes to measuring success, it’s important to have an accurate estimation by Tracking, Documenting and Measuring the key outcomes of your deliverables.  Automating your reporting process will help you gain faster operational insights and business insights that give you the necessary talking points needed to bridge the gap from the operational level to the business level so you can keep the company informed at speed.

Remember

With any technology-enabled initiative, you must have a strong change management strategy in place so that the workers impacted as a result of automation will adjust to the new workflow rather than rejecting the changes.

If you need some help with your Automation strategy and execution, SCHEDULE some time with us so we can streamline your workflow, so you can focus on delivering ore value and increase your income velocity. 

We Build The Culture!