ReThinking CX 1

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Rethinking CX, hosted by Simon Fraser & Simon Hedaux, where customer experience meets productivity at the intersection of emerging technology, operational strategy, and consumer behavior. In this episode, the hosts unpack the key macro forces shaping the modern business landscape—exploring how AI agents are transforming retail, why climate change is becoming an operational imperative, and how brands can avoid the trap of experience homogenization.

Key Topics Covered:

Moving Beyond Pure CX Metrics: Why organizations need to look past rigid NPS and employee experience (EX) scores to focus on genuine brand identity, employee behavior, and understanding the root "why" behind customer actions.

From SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Understanding the consumer shift toward generative AI tools (Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot) for recommendations, and why brands must provide deep product data and crawlable site infrastructure to enable frictionless, agentic AI transactions.

The Operational Impact of Climate & Weather: How rising temperatures and prolonged heatwaves affect labor productivity, supply chains, transport infrastructure, and store-level operations—and why resilient infrastructure investment is becoming essential for business continuity.

The Threat of Brand "Same-ness": Analyzing the risk of experience homogenization caused by over-reliance on algorithms, shared playbooks, and trend-chasing—drawing parallels from sports analytics, consumer goods, and entertainment.

Adam Mastroianni. The Decline of Deviance links:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance-2

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Transcript

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Simon 0:05

Welcome to our new podcast Rethink in CX with my co-host, who I'm sure you'll know from previous episodes of the Rethink Productivity podcast, Simon Fraser. Hello, Simon. How are you? Good. We should have just called this the Simon, shouldn't we? But um we we got there with a name. So we're gonna focus on that blend of productivity, customer experience, which is where your expertise is and talk about relevant relevant topics and things that are top of mind. So I will hand over to you to start us off on the first episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Brilliant, thanks, Simon. Um, first of all, we're saying that uh as I left home this morning, my wife said to me, Um, this isn't you're not on camera for this, are you? So no, we're not we're not at that world of of podcasts yet. We can't. No, no, I think that's let's leave ourselves to the imagination of the of the listeners. So um, yeah, one of the things I I love doing in in my role is to think about and talk about changes in the sort of macro forces, the environment that businesses and customers are operating in. And so we're going to look back a little bit on the summer that we've just had and two topics that have almost been inescapable. So one around agentic shopping, and the other one around, well, wasn't that a really nice summer that we've had sunshine-wise? But actually, what are the implications further on down the line for business and operations? And then we're gonna end with a broader conversation um about the risk of sameness in experience. And I want to say homogenous, and I've managed to say that word properly. So we'll get there. Yep. So the first one let's say I want to talk about this whole switch from SEO through to GEO, and there's been lots of conferences, lots of GEO, just explain it for people. Sorry, yeah, generative engine optimization in comparison to search engine optimization. So the fact that actually more and more of us are using um Gen AI, your your your Gemini's, your chat GPTs, your copilots, in order to get recommendations as to where to shop, where to eat, um, and and and all the rest. So increasingly more and more search traffic is coming from those sort of AI searches rather than traditional sort of Google and things like that. Um, now one of the implications of that is that businesses and brands are having to really think about how they can shape the experiences and their visibility in a way that AI and agents like. So there's two areas in particular that drive your likelihood to be called out early or you know sooner in terms of those recommendations. So one being relevance, so relevance in terms of the sorts of experience that people are looking for, but also trust. So we've come sort of full circle where experiences, which is what I've been mainly working in for the last 15 years, and reviews and forums and all those sorts of things, like feedback, are now being used in order to build up trust and again be more likely that the system is going to choose you. So managing those signals becomes really important. But actually, the focus is now moving away from just filtering of recommendations and the way that most people are using it through to the whole agentic side of AI.

Simon 3:38

Does that drive false behaviours though? So we've all heard about false Google reviews and people spamming it so you get five stars, and that must then trigger the algorithm to pick that up and say, Well, this one always gets five stars local to you, it's great when actually it's not a true reflection of what happens.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Yeah, I mean the mix of things which are going into the algorithm, uh yes, reviews is part of that. And yes, there will always be some gamification, but I would say that is still on the edges. Yep. I don't think I think we have to have some back to trust that actually the recommendations are are valid. And I would say, and I don't know about your experiences, Simon, nine times out of ten, it is making the right choices for me in a way that I don't think search engine optimization or purely using Google reviews does.

Simon 4:32

It's back to probably yeah, I think it's back to what you classes experience for you, though, isn't it? So, like all these things, if you give it a good prompt, you'll get a good answer. So, is your experience based on speed? Is it based on price? Is it based on comfort? Is it based on atmosphere? Is it based on quality? Yeah, exactly. Um, where the the place is. Um, as you know, we've kind of opened Spubros Express in Swindon as part of the catch-and-co business. That's a really interesting case study because it's a really tricky mix of experience, speed, quality, um, and we don't have any seats, so you go and eat you go and eat in the food hall. So the the atmosphere is what you see in that four or five minutes because it's viral, you queue to get there. So it's a really tricky dichotomy of people are queuing for 40 minutes because that's just the virality of it. You get there from a business point of view, we want to move them through quickly because we want the queues to go and people not to wait as long. But from an experience point of view, you want them to experience the team, experience the product, go through the process of picking your top in, seeing it go on, asking a few questions about stuff, having a photo on the way out, which is what they do. So it's a tricky one to put in a search engine or an a genetic engine.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

So that is again the context and the back to the relevance piece that the search annual DA or the GEO needs to understand what is the experience that Spud Brothers offers.

Simon 6:06

But we'll we'll get reviews that say food great long way.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Yeah.

Simon 6:10

And it's kind of the weight is because it's viral at this moment. Um, and we'll get others that say the whole thing was great. So some of it is your expectation as you go. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

And and again, back to whatever someone is putting into those uh large language models in terms of what exactly is that they're looking for. You're obviously not going to come up if you say, I'm after a romantic meal with my partner and candlelight and stuff like that. You're not gonna send you.

Simon 6:38

It's probably not your choice at that moment. Maybe you're just comfortable. Send the kids there while you go, but yeah, that's fine.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Um, so so that whole piece around um visibility in the the engines is really important. But where we're seeing, and I I would say this is still early adopters or first movers, is the fact that people are using the whole agentic flow to go all the way through to transactions. So stepping out and allowing the machine to complete the loop rather than you having to, oh well, I've got that, now I'm gonna do the next thing.

Simon 7:15

You can actually go all the way through. It'll based on again what you put in, it'll find it, stress test it with you, then maybe book it the reservation, say it's anniversary, it's wedding, it's birthday, it's a special night out. I suppose, will it do the review at the end? Would you be able to feed it and say it was a really good experience write the review, or is that a step too far? I it's a really good question.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Will they complete a survey on your behalf? Um I just hope not. Although, I mean, you might talk about it. The the voice of the agent might be the future. I imagine it will stay in that more sort of user-testing UX piece. But as always, with those pieces, you you often need a survey or some other research to understand well actually why did they feel that way and why did they behave? So maybe, maybe voice of the agent is uh is the next landmark for us all. Um we'll see. Yeah, so so what we're seeing, a bit like the Spud Brothers piece, that we're seeing that brands and businesses are recognising the fact that they need to provide a lot more product detail in order to help with those transactions. There was a big splash, I imagine, um, sponsored by the Cotswold company over over the summer in terms of how they're sort of leading the category in terms of how they're thinking about AI. But they are sort of sharing and pushing through their product details into these large language models. So things like where it was sourced, where the material's from, how it was shipped, yes, every that whole potential way that that could be asked um um in in terms of making sure that it appears to be relevant. You've got to cover all bases. So we're seeing a lot of that. If you look at the North Face, like their website is I can see that if you look in the jackets, it says sort of man-male. So we almost are going to cover both bases there, but it will also talk about that these shoes are good for hiking in rainy conditions. So again, if someone is putting in, hey, I'm going hiking in Snowdon, it's likely to rain, then it is more likely to come up.

Simon 9:26

Does that make it does that almost drive the behaviour then that you can get a better experience shopping online because you've got more information than in a store? Now I get in a store for North Face Jackets for example, you want to try it on, get your size. If you've had one before, you might know. But the colleagues probably aren't armed with that information at hand, they'll have it because the company will give it, but maybe you're more equipped, which probably is controversial thing to say, shopping online.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

It could be more curated, yeah, definitely. Um, and that will be a challenge for physical only retailers, although there are very few of them left. I mean, even Prime Markets now.

Simon 10:05

And North Face is a good example, great brand, obviously part of VF, are they? Yeah, yeah. Few physical locations in the UK. I can probably think of the one just off Oxford Circus coupling outlets and stuff. So they're targeting big cities, prime footfall. So I suspect a lot of their sales are online anyway. The absolutely all through all three partners, all three partners, yeah, yeah, like JD Sports or other people.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We could talk about North Face. But we won't because I think that's an interesting case study. Um, there's also the piece around the fact that you might have all the product details, but you've then got to make your websites more crawlable for these AI pieces. There was a good story um, again on LinkedIn, that um someone was using the on-running websites and it got through to almost the point of transaction, but the agent couldn't find a way to click on the buy button, so the site had not been set up for these sort of modern conditions of how these agents might want to work. There was another story around the fact that ASOS has built an agent, like a stylist, onto onto their site, and at some point during the transaction, um the customer or the agent started asking about fragrances, and ASOS doesn't sell fragrances, so it was actually ushered the customer off the ASOS website to the Tom Ford website in order to go and buy date that yeah, although ASOS currently having a few problems with the recent hack of the pop-up, but check your details, yeah. Absolutely. So I think this is really interesting. I it is an early mover piece here. There will be businesses that will get this right and will get the benefits of it. There were others that are not going to get this right and are going to no doubt learn. I would say it's is similar to that whole move towards social commerce. So the likes of John Lewis now making themselves available on TikTok shop. Um, and I like this phrase that sort of you're now having to meet customers in the apps that they're already using. So you have to go to them, you can't expect them to come back to you. So I think it's an interesting area. I would like to think in a future rethink and um CX, we might get someone on from a digital expertise background who can talk more about this. So that would be a great session.

Simon 12:34

Yeah, the the website's more crawlable. Again, it's something at Rethink, our marketing team are looking at, and there's a whole world that I don't understand about it, but yeah, it's the next gen on from SEO. It needs to be optimized now for AI because obviously, when people are typing something in related to productivity, we want it to reference us and link to the website and all that stuff. So just yeah, the the next generation on, and once we've done that, there'll be the next next generation on that uh yeah, and they can go onto your website, Simon, and and click yes, commission.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

I'm buying that project, and I'm happy to do it.

Simon 13:08

I'm happy with that. I'm happy with that. So let's move into the next topic, which is as we I suppose heading towards um autumn, a bit of a reflection on the nice summer we've had. So it was lovely for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

I I don't think anybody woke up and went, Oh no, another dry, sunny day. Um, I heard on the radio yesterday it was the first day for a hundred days in the UK that there wasn't a single part of the country above 20 degrees. Yeah. So we've had a hundred days of that in the dry summer.

Simon 13:42

I'm sure we'll pay the price with a harsh winter or wet. Wet winter, windy winter, snow, snow seems to be the thing that's gone missing. It's yeah, wet, wet and windy then into tonight, which is not a bad, not a bad compromise.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Yes, as long as it's a bit of sunshine, a bit of sunshine every so often. So um, in before I went into CX, I worked in in FMCG, our CPG, the Nielsen company, and we would often look at or be asked about the impact of weather on consumer and customer choices, and always come back to the same three stories that um we will be more likely to eat biscuits or buy biscuits when it's rainy. So our biscuit consumption rockets. Um because it's a comfort food, and you're feeling a bit crappy about the world, so you'll go and reach for a Bourbon or maybe something nicer, hobnob.

Simon 14:38

Hognop, chocolate hobnob. No, no.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

Let's let's get back. Um soft drinks. Um, so as the temperature rises above 21 degrees, you're more likely to reach for a smaller format in a chiller rather than a two-litre bottle in an ambient. So that again triggers different behaviours and even grosser choice. So um Sainsbury's used to talk about the fact that they knew they would that they could forecast a good weekend if the weather was going to be sunny, because customers have an image of freshness about Sainsbury's and it drives more traffic into their stores onto their website when the weather is better. So that is kind of well known. But we're now starting to see and needing to look at weather or climate from the perspective of employees, but also from an infrastructure point of view. So um, you know, this change in the weather, as much as we can predict, looks like it is our new reality. It's not just a one-off, you know, like three years ago when we had 40 degrees, we got quite close to that again. Yeah, and it seems like this is likely to continue to be. So this is not just an environmental issue anymore, it's an operation, it's uh it's a business one. So, yeah, so the summer we've just enjoyed, but imagine temperature continues to rise and it's every summer, and it's not so much a sort of one-off sort of dreamy moment, but it becomes a bit relentless.

Simon 16:10

Start an air conditioning business. That's the kick. I was speaking to a guy who we do some work within the States earlier this week, and he's never been to the UK, and I was saying, you know, it's been we're in October at the time recording. I've been in London in a t-shirt for you know five days, and he was saying, Oh, you you must how do you find that? I said, Well, we don't have AC like you do, because there pretty much every house has got it. Obviously, um, restaurants can be really chilly if you've ever been, and you kind of take a jumper because it's that cold, and he could absolutely not get his head around why, as a country, we didn't have that as almost baseline infrastructure, and it's then I kind of have to say, because we don't really get historically warm weather for a sustainable period of time.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I mean, as a it's a double-edged sword introducing more air conditioning as well, but yeah, again, we probably won't go there. But to your point, our infrastructure just wasn't built to cope with the sort of summers that that we're likely to have. And obviously, we talked at the beginning that we're wanting to look here at the intersection with CX and productivity, and I think weather is one of those areas. So if you think back to those hot nights of the summer, you're likely to become more disruptive in terms of your sleep patterns, you may even become sleep deprived if you haven't got air conditioning. But then, if you're going to try to get somewhere, it's likely that public transport has failed. So, lots of stories, particularly in the southeast, around the fact that the ground beneath the tracks are dry to such an extent that the metal had buckled. So things like that. Um, and generally, if you're working outdoors, that become became almost impossible to do. So the knock-on effect that is reduced hours, reduced effort, which is going to impact economic growth. So it is likely that we are going to have to make some adjustments going forward. So we're going to have to plan differently, and we're going to have to have some flexibility in our in our models.

Simon 18:09

Yeah, I think the government have obviously talked about maximum working temperatures, which from an employee point of view, I get having run stores, um, certainly those big sheds in retail parks 25 years ago, they become a greenhouse. You've got a metal roof with minimal ventilation and the sun's beating down on it. So from an employee point of view, yes. From a consumer point of view, we need to be careful what we wish for because if there's not people in the shops, we can't go to the shops.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

Yeah.

Simon 18:40

Um, if they need more staff, then prices go up. So economically, it that's a really difficult thing to um to square off. Interestingly, when we do our study work at Rethink, there's allowances for working at cold temperatures. So if you're working at Chile, there are also allowances for working at high tenant heat, so it's inherent in um the modelling of labour, but in this country we don't particularly use the working at heat because we never had to. If you're in a supermarket working at a chiller, you need more time to do it because guess what, it's more difficult to work in. So that there are provisions for it to allow people to model that through. Um, but again, it becomes a challenge to shop, and the other thing, thinking back to that time, it's not nice for customers either. No, so you can do all you can for colleagues working at heat, the customers are still walking around in the same temperature as the colleagues, so there's a wide a wider infrastructure challenge.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

I mean, I I haven't got the data to prove it, but I'd love to know if stores which are south facing get more or less traffic into them. Do people actually walk on the shady side of the street and you're more likely to go in there? That'd be an interesting thing perhaps to look at. But yeah, you're right. So there's no statutory maximum working temperature. We have a lower end where we don't, it's very British.

Simon 20:02

It just has to be reasonable. Yeah. And and reasonable could be going get yourself a glass of water and be back in two minutes. It's very low.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Don't stand outside for a minute and then I'll want you back. But I mean it made me think: do we do we foresee a future where our shops operate more like than the continent where you go along at one o'clock and there's a sign saying back at three to be shopped later, do we shop earlier and things like that?

Simon 20:26

I think it's probably a tricky one. We're we're slightly archaic still aren't we've got Sunday trading laws which don't particularly have a relevance anymore. So change in shopping habits and trading is something we're not great at as a nation. Um and and hopefully it'll change as economic pressure becomes greater to be open longer to take more money. I think for me it's back to that probably air conditioning debate with the the colleague in um in the States. We've not had to think about how we condition our stores, layouts, high streets for heat. Yeah, and and you're seeing that in footfall data. Yeah, the stuff we we do with um with Dye um from Rendal Intelligence. If you've listened to the podcast we did with DAI, when it gets hot, people tend to go to nice places, seaside historic places for an ice cream, a walk around, a bit of lunch. They also migrate to regional shopping centres, so your Trafford Centres, your Westfield, Stratfords, your White Cities, your Meadow Halls, because it's nice, it's cool, it's air conditioned, it's free parking, and you've got everything you want from shopping, food, um, you've also got bowling alleys, cinemas, etc. Now, so it's all in one roof and it's cool while you're in there. So you see that transition, um, but they also benefit when it's raining because it's all under one roof, it's cool, you've got everything there. So they're they're the places that see the the benefit of these, but they've got the infrastructure.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Yeah, so if you're I don't know, Runcorn, that may be a bad choice, you know, somewhere with a big shopping centre near you, but not necessarily a historic beautiful town like Shrewsbury, yeah. You you you you're probably gonna get it squeezed. Um so I know you like talking. About data. I'm going to hit you with some data here. So Oxford Economics, they talk about the fact that a four-day heat wave can reduce quarterly labour productivity growth by one and a half percentage points. That's even higher in Europe. So we're looking at more up 2%. Another study showed that productivity losses intensify sharply above that 30 degrees threshold, which is likely to be that maximum statutory that we might talk about, which isn't that high. No, 30, 30 is not. You look at how many days you're above 30 this year. Exactly. So if it was set there, then then we're in trouble. And at the same time, we're seeing productivity losses. We're also seeing the cost of energy. So if we were to put more air conditioning in all things like that, that is going to cost money. And we saw over the summer the how challenging it was for grocers to keep their freezer departments, their chillers. I remember the Sainsbury's delivery turning up, and they said, I'm sorry, you have read your email. What? No, I never look at that. Yeah, we've got no no fresh or frozen goods for you. So that was a big problem over the summer.

Simon 23:15

And I think it was a a probably a moment in time for lots of them. There's some that have invested in the infrastructure recently, and we won't name names, but lots of theirs weren't down. Um some the bigger chains maybe that are on the retail parks haven't. I think the thing I didn't understand is that a lot a lot of the infrastructure's on the roof. Yeah. So the fans, the venting, the compressors, um, so they just get baked. So it's not the fridge in the shop that's the problem, it's the infrastructure on the roof that's the problem that stops working, that then means the temperatures can't be sustained, that then means they need to take the food out. If the food's below temperature, it has to get thrown away and written off. There's a cost. You've still got stock coming in that you've ordered that you then can't put out, so that probably gets thrown away, that's a cost. And then you've got all the upward supply chain that's ordered weeks in advance that's piling in that nobody's selling, plus you're losing sales. So it's again a real dichotomy of if you're on a board with one of these companies now, are you thinking, you know, they'll all be talking about AI, cyber, should how we keep prevent our stores or keep our stores operating in high temperatures be on the agenda. There'll be a big cost to do that to stand still, but it's gonna come if the temperatures carry on and we maintain anywhere near what we've had. Um not sexy, not gonna make you any money, it's more about preventing lost sales, preventing waste. Um, and again, if you don't do it now, you'll probably end up doing it two, three, four, five years anyway, and it'll probably cost you more. So I get it, um from a productivity point of view, awful because you've ordered the stock, you've paid for the stock, you've put the stock out, you've then taken the stock off, you've then spent the time to write it off, you've then thrown it in the bin. So a complete waste of of making an end-to-end process from a customer experience point of view. How many people went to the supermarket this summer thinking, oh, we'll get some ice cream for the kids, um, we'll get a couple, we'll put them in the fridge because it's hot, we'll get um, I don't know, something from the chiller, and and you couldn't. Yeah. So do you just then I think a couple of times we went and we just didn't bother buying anything in the end. It was like, actually, we'll come back tomorrow or we'll go somewhere else. So there's a cost to it, a high cost, but as ever with these things, there's a big infrastructure investment to do it. Yeah, but you've wind that forward, and why wouldn't you have solar panels on the roof to make you more eco-friendly and to drive more energy efficiency if energy's going up? So yeah, it it unravels quickly, but at a significant cost when you've got a scale of large shops across the UK. So it's easier for new builds and stores of the future, much harder to match with and there's loads in store of the future. I've been around the Green King pub of the future, which is really good. Um, I'm gonna go see the BM one, which is which is good, uh, which will be good. Morrisons are doing some cool stuff with automated trolleys, but all this is about tech. It's not this is the most sustainable store we've ever built. Because typically it's just we've taken a store and took some stuff out and put some stuff in. It's not, it's got solar panels. I don't know, we're we're saving all the water for the sprinkler systems, we've got heat pumps, so we generate our own. You know, this store is carbon neutral and can operate in extreme hot and extreme cold. That's probably not part of the thinking because it's not as tangible. But the lost sales missed opportunities on the week on the week those happen, and everybody's kind of thinking, oh, maybe we should have invested in that.

SPEAKER_01 26:45

Well, that's I mean, it's not something that we look forward to necessarily, but but you know, of those future summers, then it is probably a permanent challenge now that does need to be addressed, it does need to be taken seriously, and um, we have to move beyond the fact that it was a one-off.

Simon 27:03

Yeah, well, next year was gonna tell us, isn't it? It is, and then all of a sudden it's a trend.

SPEAKER_01 27:08

Yes, love a trend. So the third and final piece for us to talk about is um homogenous experiences, so it's the risk of everything broadly becoming the same, and uh takes us back to where we began when we're talking about AI. The everything risks moving towards the average, towards the mean, towards the most successful strategies. If we're all attempting to do the same things and we're all using the same emerging rule book, then there is now there will be some businesses who do this better, and we'll talk a little bit about football and sport here as we go through. Yeah, you know, your Brightons and your Brentfords clearly do something better than your Manchester United. So some people will do it better than than others. But given that environment where Heshware are becoming more and more likely due to the algorithm to be operating in in the same way, there is the sort of broader context to be thinking about, and I'm going to come to an article, and I don't know if you can post links on on the podcast. Excellent. So there's someone called um who writes in Substack called Adam Mastriani, and I first read his his first article um on this topic was the the decline of deviance in 2025, and he's come back this year and and done the second one. But the broad, and it's it's it's a gr they're both great articles. I love the fact there's data and there's stories, and it's quite funny. But a general summary of it would be that people are just generally less weird than we used to be. We are much more conventional. So he talks about things such as um, you know, we are less likely to smoke, yeah, we're less likely to drink. Yeah, we see that. We are, and I'm not encouraging this, we're less likely to be using heroin, we are less likely to suffer from serial killers. So we're generally the weirdos on the outskirts of society, we are seeing less of that. And then we're seeing the fact that people are less likely to leave home, etc. etc. Our lives are generally more conventional, but it's some of that driven by information, because if you think smoking's a classic one and drinking, it's much harder to drink underage now.

Simon 29:21

It is so there's that's one thing. Um there's much more around the consequence of drinking a lot, and the cost of drinking is much more. So there's kind of some and and then you get to smoking. So in my day, your day slightly as well, probably. It was for this, isn't the sexist comment. I think there was lots of girls at school that smoked that thought it was cool, yeah, probably more so than boys. Now they're locked up. I've no idea how much a packet of cigarettes is 18, 20 quid is probably my guess. Um and when you do see them, they've got horrific pictures of lung disease on the front.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

Yeah.

Simon 30:00

So there's a whole bunch of reasons, there's three for each of why it's probably not cool anymore.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

Well, they're interesting enough, like images of smoking have actually increased. Okay. So we are not smoking as much, but actually, there's a sort of move back to Instagram type images of movie stars smoking. But are you also touching on a topic which is important is that we also feel much more um under surveillance. So anybody can take a photo. Imagine young Simon, age 16, so apparently kids are not dancing anymore because the risk of dancing and that going viral and you're making a fool of yourself approaching that girl who's gonna say no, Simon. Um, you know, these things the wrong time. I'm talking to myself. So we in general, his his sort of moral is that we've lost something along the way because everything has become more standardized, more safe. And you can see this in some Airbnbs or the colours of cars, or or or maybe even the design and structure of coffee shops.

Simon 31:08

And we'll we'll get without getting too deep, but is that because of the fear of, like you said, somebody something going viral on social that you become you know, those people on that Kiss Cam at Coldplay never gonna live that down, are they? They can probably make a lot of money off the back of it, but it the consequence of that going viral has you know killed their relationships and and a whole bunch of other stuff.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

Yes, no, the the consequences of of being caught doing the wrong thing, but that's also being felt in business as well. So again, as costs rise, the risks become greater, and yes, the world increasingly feels, looks, and sounds the same. So we see this in music, we see this in in stores, for example, and in some ways that's really good because what you don't want to do is for both your employees or your customers to provide something that they just don't recognise, they don't know how it functions, they can't get it to work. You you wouldn't get Pablo Picasso in to retrofit your store, for example, because everybody would go mad. So there is a lot of sense in that, but this sort of risk around saying this so has been around for a little while. So in 2007, there was uh an internal Starbucks memoirs that went viral, that got leaked, which was called the Commoditisation of the Starbucks experience. So, in that memo, he was telling to his employees about the fact that automation streamlining had risked and had made Starbucks forgettable. The Starbucks experience had generally been watered down. Now, back into sport, that's a topic we both like talking about. I don't think there is a podcast in it, but we'll see. Um, you know, we are seeing that there is data proving that if you were to go back 10-15 years ago, where people took a chance at a shot to score a hope in in basketball, people have stopped doing that now. Everybody is going to exactly the same place. I think last season in the Premier League was the season with the fewest long-range goals.

Simon 33:18

But that's all based on this um XG and your probability of yeah, Pep Guardiola passes to death because he wants to get the ball in the box. So you look at Jack Greelish. He knows that's going to be successful. He doesn't want Jack Grealish running up the wing and tearing it apart because he knows that he'll nine out of ten times lose the ball. He wants him to go stop, move back, keep possession. Safety first. Yeah, safety, possession, control, dangerous possession in the box because you're more likely to get a mistake, get a deflection, than you hit it from 30 yards and one in a hundred screams in the top corner.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

Yeah, and I'm not saying football is less interesting, but there are fewer characters. There are probably fewer, I don't know, drop your sandwich moments. There's fewer clever, there's fewer memorable games. Exactly. It's exciting, but there's there's probably the same model. I mean, look at last season where suddenly throw-ins, someone disrupted the algorithm, they had suddenly had to cope with something that they hadn't coped with, and so something will come to disrupt, but then that's been solved for now.

Simon 34:17

Yeah, everybody can solve it. And it depends on the update, doesn't it? Is that seen as a good thing or it's anti-football? Yeah, the teams that will will stick on football slightly, but there's teams that will all of a sudden go with two strikers and play long ball and it'll be anti-football, but it'll disrupt because defenders aren't used to to marking two centre fours, they're not used to somebody flicking it onto the guy who puts it in the you know, and it all becomes cyclical because then everybody starts to do it, and then somebody will then move back to passing it around the back again. It's um it's trends, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 34:49

It is trend, but operating in the same way until someone disrupts. So, and there's it's also successful football, so there's little incentive to change, everybody's making quite a bit of money. So there's also the fact that we can often see that if something is recycled or repeated, the less culturally relevant it becomes. And there's a great article by Stephanie Winkler about the run club effect. So, first of all, some brands decided to offer a run club associated or sponsoring a run club, and then everybody started doing something about run clubs, and then it just became boring. And there's always a risk with that. Mark Ritson talks about the same thing for films. So we've had all these franchises, we've had these sequels, because that is where the big film uh players, you know, that's where they're going to put their best bets. So, yes, you'll get a Spider-Man over the summer, um, but you'll also get an Odyssey, and you'll also, even more interestingly, get an obsession or a backrooms. Although I was a bit iffy about backrooms, I have to say, this is not a Digger's the one they're all talking about now.

Simon 35:53

It's the biggest failure. It's had a one-star and a five-star in the same week.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Oh, right, okay. So I'd you could work that out. Maybe some people will like it, I'm not sure. Ritson also talks about the fact that we're looking for something different, so something on the edges. He talks about soft drinks, which is where we began that yes, Coke and Pepsi are super successful, but Gen Z are moving towards brands that perhaps their parents' generation didn't use. I was talking to a gaming company recently, and there's the risk with them that it is something that their parents did. It's like Facebook, it's not for them. So, again, thinking of the new angle and keeping things fresh. So, as everything becomes kind of the same, so what can businesses or brands do? Maybe Swap Brothers is a really good example of this. So, so what keeps you distinct, and often it is the brand itself, it's the principles, it's the values, it's the identity of the brands. So that becomes more and more important in this sort of homogeneous experience world. Part of that is how do you show that you care for your customers, but also your employees. So, how do you speak to them? How do you speak to them about their lives for your customers? Do you represent who your customers want themselves to be, let alone what they want you to be?

Simon 37:15

It's tricky, it's tricky because if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it, wouldn't they? And I I back to the kind of social thing about smoking, and there's that whole Instagram of perception is reality, so it could could be great, but isn't perceived to be great, or it might not be that great, but it is perceived to be so you can't please all the people all the time, can you? That that's the challenge. But a couple of bad reviews has a significant impact if it goes viral, a couple of good reviews has a significant impact if it goes viral. Um I think the big problem is hey, you keep that relevancy going forward. So if you do something slightly different and it works, it's really tricky to find the next thing to do slightly different because everyone starts copying and cloning it. Al Dee and Little are great examples, aren't they? How many of their brands are really close in terms of the they really step on the edges of probably copyright infringement for the way things look, what they're called? They do a beer that's very, very similar to a brew dog one. There's lots of packaging that would be very similar to they do th they do packaging of sausages that are very similar to premium brands of sausages, so they're just following that trend and are very good at doing it very quickly and just enough different to it to be not end up in court all the time.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

But there's also with Aldi, it's an interesting case study, the the whole magic aisle piece is something which is different for them, and no one's really attempted to adopt that, but they haven't stood still on it. I don't know if you saw in the summer that they've launched these sort of mystery boxes and bags. So you buy this thing and you don't know what's inside of it, okay, which is quite cool. So again, I think that they're early adopters in thinking, well, people like the mystery of what the hell is gonna be then, you know, scuba diving equipment and chainsaw, and then they're gonna put it in a bag, and the customer doesn't know what is in there, it could be you know the own brand um baked beans. So I think with all of these, I'm gonna wrap up. Yeah, um, of all of these, the obviously my my world is is research and surveys, and I'm not here to say that's a bad thing. Research and surveys is really important, but we've kind of lost the ability to think about how something feels. Yeah, everything is boiled down to being a metric that we can track, and it is probably the wrong way around. If I was talking to any business, I'd be thinking about talking to them about the fact that it's the actions and behaviors of the employees and the customers that's really important, it's not the EX score or or the MPS of customers, and it's the resulting economic outcomes of those movements. And research needs to move back into the why something is happening, which is why I always talk about the fact that CX does not operate in a vacuum. Yeah, you've got to be thinking about all the external factors that are impacting, and um, it's not about scores and KPIs.

Simon 40:18

Perfect. Well, that's episode one done. Um, and we'll be back in a couple of weeks with episode two. Thanks, Simon. Cheers, Simon.