Overpromise and Overdeliver (Revised Edition): How to Design and Deliver Extraordinary Customer Experiences

Introduction

What if I told you that you could attract far more new customers to your product or service than you ever imagined? And also that you could do it much faster and for less money than you ever thought possible?

I know—it sounds too good to be true, a little like one of those infamous Nigerian Internet scams, perhaps? Well, you have every right to be suspicious in our fast-paced, cacophonous, no-holds-barred world. After all, you’re really no different than your customers: They are suspicious, too, and that’s why it’s getting harder and harder for businesses to make solid connections with their customers that will allow them to build their brands into something that lasts through more than one product cycle.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Just look at Husqvarna, Patagonia, American Girl, and other breakthrough brands that you’ll read about in the pages that follow. They have swept to the top of their fields in record time and stayed there. How did these brands so quickly achieve so much while leaving their competitors shaking their heads?

I’ve spent many years studying the strategies of companies like these, and I’ve pinpointed the secret of their success. It’s a strategy that I call overpromise and overdeliver, and it offers a way to breach the barriers to uncommon achievement in today’s crowded market.

The strategy begins with an overpromise, a specific and distinctive appeal to your customers. How do you develop that overpromise? In chapters 1, 2, and 3, I’ll show you how to craft a compelling overpromise that speaks to the customers you wish to reach. And to widen your understanding, I’ll relate the experiences of several successful companies that have outstanding overpromises.

By definition, an overpromise is a pledge to deliver a product or service that is radically different and has more relevance to your targeted customers than anything your rivals are touting. So when you follow up on your already world-beating proposition by also overdelivering on it, you further multiply the distance between you and them.

How do you go about overdelivering on your brand overpromise? The secret is to get all three of your customer contact points—product, system, and human, what I call TouchPoints— aligned and focused on the goal of delivering extraordinary customer experiences.

I’ll show you exactly how to make the most of your TouchPoints in chapters 5, 6, and 7 by highlighting the experiences of exemplary companies such as Yellow Freight, Progressive, and the Container Store, while also calling out the lessons they have to offer.

But to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, let’s assume that your overpromise is all about ease of use. Your espresso maker, let’s say, will do the job it is designed to do with no fuss or bother, without you having to resort to flipping through a manual, changing a brew setting, grinding beans, measuring and tamping the grind, and cleaning up spills and drips after the coffee is extracted. The Product TouchPoint that specifically delivers that overpromise is your prepackaged coffee pod. All a customer has to do is pop in the coffee packet, push the switch, and—presto—steaming espresso flows into the cup.

The espresso maker may be a huge hit with your customers, but if you want the kudos to keep on coming and your competitors to keep on lagging, you must align your System and Human TouchPoints to deliver the same level of great experience customers get from your Product TouchPoints. That means you must make sure that users of your machine can easily obtain the prepackaged coffee that supports the overpromise. If the packets must be ordered by phone or via the Internet (a System TouchPoint), you’d better see to it that the ordering system is accessible 24/7 and that it’s fast, efficient, accurate, and easy to navigate. If you use live operators (a Human TouchPoint), they must be quick to answer a call, patient, pleasant, and well trained in taking mistake-free orders.

The first time a customer can’t use your machine because an order of the prepackaged coffee packets is lost or delayed, your long-term success is endangered. Next thing you know, that espresso maker will end up on a basement shelf alongside a raft of other once-wonderful gadgets and appliances. In other words, if either your System or Human TouchPoints prevent you from overdelivering, your overpromise loses its punch.

Whether your company is big or small, the rules for overdelivering on your overpromise are the same: You must have an unwavering willingness to lift up your brand by polishing your TouchPoints to perfection and infusing them with the same surpassing qualities that define your overpromise.

In the pages ahead, you’ll see that any organization, no matter its size or its mission, has the power to overpromise and overdeliver.

PART ONE

Overpromise

Welcome to Overpromise and Overdeliver, the approach that turns also-rans into winners, and it all starts with a compelling promise—indeed, an overpromise. This section shows you how to craft your own unique overpromise based on a complete understanding of your market.

CHAPTER 1

Overachievers Overpromise

Hard times provide an opportunity to create amazing successes. Despite all the talk today of industry consolidation, menacing imports, dwindling credit, inflation, stagflation, and shrinking margins, a few remarkable businesses have discovered how to win more and more customers. How? More to the point, how can you apply what they’ve learned to your company?

After studying these thriving enterprises, these contrarians, I’ve identified their key strength—a new approach to branding that beats the competition because it’s infinitely faster and less expensive than any of the traditional methods. For reasons that will soon become clear, I call this approach overpromising and overdelivering. While reading the following cases, try to uncover what they have in common. (Just so you know, the answers will be provided before the chapter concludes.)

• How do you turn a struggling start-up into a $100 million business in five years?

The picture wasn’t pretty. Robin Chase, chief executive officer and cofounder, had created a company providing a new twist on an old service. She had given it a snappy name, Zipcar, and established fleets in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. Her idea—to rent vehicles by the hour rather than the day—was gaining traction. But in 2003, four years after she began, Zipcar’s board dismissed her. The company, awash in red ink, needed a new leader. Installed in her place was Scott Griffith. With a BS in engineering from Carnegie Mellon and an MBA from the University of Chicago, he had held posts with Boeing and Hughes Aircraft. More important, he had twice rescued stalled start-ups.

What Zipcar had done, Griffith acknowledged, was both impressive and appealing. It had placed dozens of vehicles in parking lots or gas stations in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., the three cities in which it operated. To reserve a car, members logged onto Zipcar.com, chose their pickup time and car model, then walked to the closest lot. A wave of their Zipcard across the windshield unlocked the car; the ignition key was inside. Then off they drove, with everything covered—including insurance and gas—by a low hourly fee and mileage charge.

If customers needed a car for just an hour or three—say, to go shopping or meet a client in the suburbs—Zipcar was more convenient and less expensive than its rivals Avis or Hertz. For many of its four thousand members, Zipcar made it possible to forgo car ownership entirely. Also, customers applauded the company-promoted, planet-friendly benefits of having fewer vehicles on the road.

The big question for Griffith: Was Zipcar scalable? He was a numbers man, a true believer in systems engineering and performance measurement. Before he could calculate how big Zipcar could grow, he would have to closely examine the fundamentals of the business: the demographics, the dollars and cents, the technology. In the end he concluded the opportunity was enormous: Zipcar could be a billion-dollar business, but only if big changes were made.

To begin, Griffith divided each city into zones instead of treating them as individual markets. Each had its own needs, its own personality, and he aimed to accommodate them. Once a zone was identified—Boston’s Back Bay or Cambridge’s Harvard Square, for example—and parking locations secured, he packed them with a dozen or so cars, up from the one or two vehicles per lot that had been the standard of previous years. That way, customers would find the specific model of car they ordered when they arrived. In an upscale residential zone, the Zipcars might be BMWs and used for weekend trips to second homes; near colleges would be Mini Coopers and Priuses, which were seldom driven outside the city. Marketing and advertising were narrowly focused on the individual zones with an effort to have Zipcar viewed as just another neighborhood business—like the coffee shop or the dry cleaner, Griffith said.

Since Griffith’s arrival, Zipcar has grown at an incredible pace: from 150 cars in three cities to 5,500 cars in fifty cities; from 4,000 members to 225,000; from revenues of $2 million to more than $100 million. And the company continues to grow at a double-digit rate each year. After all this, Zipcar has been in the black for four years.

That’s a phenomenal achievement. But what was the key to Griffith’s success?

• How do you sell fourteen million dolls with a conspicuous lack of national advertising?

Ask American Girl. This company was started as a small direct-mail business in Middleton, Wisconsin, in 1986. Today, sales of its dolls exceed all others except Barbie. Its first retail store near Chicago’s Magnificent Mile grosses more than its mighty neighbors, including Ralph Lauren. And it has been joined by sister stores in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York, with Boston and Minneapolis set to open next. Some fifty million people receive company catalogs, fifty-one million more visit Americangirl.com, and, altogether, American Girl sales top $400 million annually. For girls ages seven to twelve and their families, the company has become an irresistible source of entertainment and education, a brand that has achieved nationwide notoriety and approval.

American Girl doesn’t simply sell attractive eighteen-inch dolls. It offers the whole world, as the company puts it, for each of its fictional characters: their clothing, furniture, all sorts of accessories, a series of books for each doll that tells her life story and recounts her adventures. The company also sells a selection of preteen clothes that match those worn by the characters. The Margaret Kit Kittredge doll, for example, is a nine-year-old from Cincinnati growing up during the Great Depression. Her books describe the hardships she and her friends endure, the courageous way they solve their problems, and how Americans opened their hearts to help one another survive those difficult times. Other dolls include Kaya, an eighteenth-century Native American, and Samantha, from the Victorian era. To sign up a child for the entire Samantha package—doll, books, furniture, and clothing—costs nearly $1,000. And if a girl wants her doll to have a new hairstyle? The price for this service at the Chicago store is a not-so-cheap $20.

Despite the expense, American Girl has sold more than 14 million dolls and in excess of 120 million books since it was started. And it has done so without offering the dolls at other retailers and with little advertising other than its catalog, which is sent out regularly to customers. How is that possible? Founder Pleasant Rowland tapped into a long ignored but obviously rich vein among preteen girls and their mothers by grounding the enterprise on the premise of wholesome innocence. A onetime teacher by training, Rowland was convinced that girls grow up too fast these days, that they need an antidote to poor female role models. She wanted her Pleasant Company and its dolls to teach and inspire, to impart both strength and resourcefulness through the dolls’ stories, which Rowland calls the heart of American Girl. (In 1998, Rowland sold her company to Mattel, the maker of Barbie. It operates as an independent subsidiary, although Rowland is no longer with the company.)

The books are carefully researched and elegantly written. The story of the doll Addy, for example, was authored by respected novelist Connie Porter. Set in 1864, it is the tale of an African-American girl who was born into slavery and later emancipated. From the beginning, the line struck a chord with its intended audience, and the marketing—almost entirely online, by catalog, and word of mouth—has been amazingly successful. In 2008 a new twist was added with the release of the independently produced film Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, starring the Academy Award-nominated actress Abigail Breslin. It earned $15 million in its first six weeks alone and introduced the brand to thousands of potential customers.

The retail stores have drawn more than twenty-three million visits from girls and their mothers from a host of countries around the world. All the stores are enormous, lavishly appointed, and beckoning girl places, appealing to all ages. They feature attractively decorated restaurants offering classic teas and luncheons, comfortable restrooms, and sleek marble floors. Lush red velvet couches invite mothers and daughters to read a book or simply share a quiet moment.

Girls and their moms flock to the stores for A Day at American Girl Place that begins with cucumber sandwiches, cinnamon buns, and chocolate mousse. Next is a fashion show featuring preteen models. Then they go downstairs to the 150-seat theater for a musical production that includes both modern characters and figures from the historical dolls’ stories. The performers sing and dance and highlight the American Girl themes of resourceful heroines behaving