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4. Purchase your own product or service – or at least pretend to. Then ask yourself, 'Was that fast, good and cheap at the price?'

5. Ask a handful of your team members, the more senior the better, to think about potential changes in the demands of your customers and staff over the coming years. What challenges will these changes present your business? Remind everyone that what is good enough, fast enough and cheap enough today won't be tomorrow. Give them a few days to mull over it privately, then conduct a roundtable discussion.

Companies have to do more to win customers than offer a dependable, good quality, reasonably priced product or service. Lots of ordinary companies do that. The extraordinary companies do something else. So do extraordinary career-minded professionals. These flipstars do the little things. They realise that in an oversupplied market, competitive advantage will increasingly be built on elements once considered superficial. You know, the small stuff. Flipstars sweat the small stuff. Big time!

FAST, GOOD, CHEAP, X-FACTOR – PICK 4

Doing the little things right is all about figuring out how to fulfil customer wants, not just satisfy customer needs. Customer satisfaction sucks; it is fleeting at best.You could invest your time and energy into meeting customer expectations only to have those expectations rise before you get there. Even if you met the expectations before they increased, it would not give you an advantage in the marketplace. The money is not in satisfying customer needs. And remember that customer may be your boss. The money will be in giving customers what they want, even when they don't yet know what that is.

People need fast, good and cheap. Faced with the four forces of change, people want things to be simpler, easier and more beautiful, among other qualities, and they will want to feel good about the products, services and experiences they consume.

It sounds a little ridiculous to say that fast, good, cheap is a need. It is! The ability of the market to turn features and standards that were once a luxury into a necessity in the competitive landscape is nothing short of fascinating. Remember the research discussed in chapter 1, which shows that 29 per cent of Americans today consider fast broadband a necessity. And 5 per cent said the same of flat-screen televisions.

In that survey 4 per cent of American consumers said an iPod is a necessity. This is their reality and over the coming years the percentage of people who feel that an iPod is a need not a want will increase markedly. Ask yourself, what feature or standard of service do you currently offer that was previously an added luxury that may have become commoditised without you even realising? I can think of keyless entry for automobiles, as also discussed in chapter 1. Or what about same-day service from a courier company? Internet banking for some. The ability to pay with a credit card. Or maybe you are a little spoilt and it is your home delivery and pick-up dry cleaning service.

Purchasing decisions are rarely based on rational thought processes. Time and time again customer research has shown that emotions drive our decisions and behaviour.According to the
Advertising Research Journal
in the US, research has found that emotions are twice as important as any other consideration in customers' decisions about what to purchase. And not just purchasing decisions but all decisions we make in life. Only after making the decision emotionally do we call upon our cognitive processes to rationalise our behaviour.

It is amazing how powerful our minds are when it comes to rationalising some of the objectively insane decisions we make. Whether to explain our actions to other people or to ourselves, we
automatically
rationalise everything we do. Psychologists and marketers refer to the cognitive bias we demonstrate after buying something as 'post-purchase rationalisation' – the willing self-delusion about the quality of a recent purchase. Even when we know we've made a terrible decision, we can convince ourselves it was worth it.

It will often be the smallest things that we grab onto to rationalise our emotionally driven behaviour. This is why 'Superficial is Anything But', and why even with regard to utilitarian products and services:

• style is substance
  
• fashion is function
  
• feelings are the most important facts
  
• the soft stuff is the hardest stuff, and the hardest stuff to get right.
  

Later in this chapter we'll look at these factors in terms of what I call the 'total ownership experience'. For now let's continue the discussion of 'Fast, Good, Cheap PLUS X-factor – Pick 4' by looking at some of the most powerful X-factor positions you can take to market.

FGC + GREEN

The X-factor could be any number of things. Popular right now is being green. Innovating far ahead of the competition, Toyota has staked its new millennium play on being fast, good, cheap and green, an increasingly attractive combination for companies and customers throughout the business world as environmental issues become ever more urgent. Starting with the Prius and then extending its hybrid technology through the rest of the Toyota and Lexus range, Toyota has offered time-stressed, upwardly mobile, increasingly affluent customers the opportunity to control their personal contribution to the world's pollution as a normal part of their daily routine. At the same time it relieved them of guilt as conspicuous consumers, decreasing their sense of stress in that way as well. Toyota is not merely satisfying needs here. It is fulfilling wants.

Other companies that are defining themselves as fast, good, cheap and green include Siemens, L'Oréal, and even what you might think of as old industry Alcoa, which has staked out a position as the cleanest and highest value-added company in the metals business, with large revenues coming from high-premium alloys and packaging and fastener expertise that extends from aluminium soda cans to plastics. In a highly publicised speech made in May 2007, Rupert Murdoch, a real flipstar, declared that News Corporation will go green.

One of the most widely reported examples is Wal-Mart. Undoubtedly one of the most successful companies of the last twenty years, Wal-Mart grew to enormous size by being the best combination of fast, good, cheap that customers in retail had ever seen. But having made fast, good, cheap the price of entry in their industry and spawned copycat behaviour from a host of competitors, and with same store sales down in 2006 for the first time in the company's history,Wal-Mart has had to look for something new to sustain growth.

At first the super-sized retailer tried to be fast, good, cheap and hip. But Wal-Mart has had trouble convincing customers that they should look to its stores not only for the cheapest deal, but for designer clothing and high-margin products like flat-screen televisions. In December 2006,Wal-Mart seemed to lose its nerve for this effort, firing the cutting-edge marketers that it had hired with fanfare only a year earlier. Where it has not lost its nerve is in a determined effort to be green.

Long criticised for low wages, inadequate health care coverage (the US is the only industrialised nation to depend on employer-provided health insurance, and more than half of Wal-Mart's employees have no health insurance), gender discrimination and a devastating impact on small local businesses, Wal-Mart regularly faces a negative public relations picture. A number of communities in the US have lobbied successfully to keep Wal-Mart from opening a store in their vicinity. CEO Lee Scott admitted that when Wal-Mart began to explore an environmental sustainability agenda in 2004, it was simply 'a defensive strategy'.

Since then Wal-Mart has embraced sustainability with a passion, and Scott told
Fortune
magazine, 'What I thought was going to be a defensive strategy is turning out to be precisely the opposite.'Wal-Mart's environmental goals include a 25 per cent increase in the efficiency of its truck fleet within three years and a 100 per cent increase within ten years, a 30 per cent decrease in store energy use and a 25 per cent reduction in solid waste.Wal-Mart now sees sustainability not only as good public relations but as good for Wal-Mart, both in terms of millions of dollars saved in lower energy, packaging and other costs and in terms of heightened morale and productivity on the part of employees, who have a new reason to be proud of where they work.

Wal-Mart is such a big company – 2006 turnover was US$312 billion, there are 1.8 million direct Wal-Mart employees, and 176 million unique customers visit its 6600 stores every week – that its decisions have a huge ripple effect. With a supply chain network of 60,000 suppliers around the world, Wal-Mart can shift many markets towards greater sustainability. For example, it has made a commitment to sell salmon only from sustainable fisheries, and Wal-Mart now has fourteen 'sustainable value [supplier] networks' for everything from chemicals to food and paper products. One of its biggest recent successes with customers, organic cotton clothing, has helped to grow global organic cotton production by over 20 per cent since 2001.Wal-Mart's flip into a green brand identity is now being emulated by North America's second largest retailer, the Home Depot, which is branding thousands of the products it sells with an 'Eco Options' label.
¹

Green is cool. People want to be seen as green, and they want to work for and buy from companies that they see as green too. This has led to a whole host of companies leveraging their environmentally friendly practices to attract and inspire staff, and to attract and retain customers too.

One of the more interesting such companies is BP, a case study in the pros and cons of offering a 'green' alternative to the oil business as usual. In 1998 BP, otherwise known as British Petroleum, acquired the Amoco Corporation, an American business. To make the deal palatable in the US, it was presented as a merger and the company temporarily became BP Amoco. In 2001 Amoco was dropped from the name, and the company once more became BP. Only now BP no longer stood for British Petroleum, it was simply an 'initialism' that company marketing presented in advertising as standing for 'Beyond Petroleum'. Along with this came a new logo, a green and gold disk representing Helios, the Greek god of the sun.

No longer trading as 'British Petroleum' was useful because it sidestepped longstanding criticism of corporate colonialism in BP's traditional market strongholds in ex- British colonies in Africa and elsewhere. But no doubt more important, especially in markets such as the UK, US and Australia, was the desire to appeal to public concern about the environment.

In this regard, BP's CEO at the time, John Browne, aka Baron Browne of Madingley, showed remarkable prescience. In 1997, the company withdrew from the Global Climate Coalition, an oil industry organisation dedicated to promoting climate change scepticism, with Lord Browne commenting that 'the time to consider [global warming] is not when the link between greenhouse gases and climate change has been conclusively proven, but when the possibility cannot be discounted and is taken seriously by the society of which we are a part. We in BP have reached that point.' This was the first time an oil industry executive had spoken out in support of doing something about the climate. Oil company or not, BP deserved some kudos for this.

In 2002, Browne gave a high-profile speech saying global warming was 'real and required urgent action', and he was one of the most vocal industry advocates of signing the so-called Kyoto accords on international action to combat global warming. In 2004, BP started making low-sulfur diesel fuel, and it is creating a network of hydrogen fuelling stations in California. In 2000, BP purchased Solarex and became a leading producer of solar panels. BP Solar, to be renamed BP Alternative Energy, accounts for 20 per cent of world photovoltaic (solar panel) production.

All this was to the benefit of the company's image and its bottom line, and I am sure it is a viable strategy for the long term. But BP will face increasing pressure to make its operations as green in fact as its marketing is in spirit. This task will fall to Andy Hayward, the designated successor to John Browne, who in 2007 was forced into a lucrative early retirement – his golden parachute of £22 million in a lump sum and a million pounds a year more for life provoked outrage all on its own – in large part because of the company's environmental missteps under his leadership. Browne dictated so much cost cutting that essential maintenance on BP's Prudhoe Bay, Alaska pipeline and basic safety measures at its huge Texas City refinery were not adequately funded. The pipeline had to be shut down in 2006 when it leaked along its swathe of northern Alaskan wilderness. The refinery had to be shut down when an explosion killed fifteen people. They were a public relations gift to critics who accused BP of greenwashing, which is defined as 'disinformation disseminated by an organisation so as to present an environmentally responsible public image'.

At the same time, BP's 'Beyond Petroleum' play remains a great strategy, if future reality matches present marketing. The marketing has been so successful that I believe it has won the company significant leeway with customers to get things right. In seminars on employment branding I flash a slide with the logos of the biggest oil companies in the world, and it is BP that gets the most favourable response. It is mixed of course, with some very cynical, but all in all the BP campaign has been successful. Almost unanimously audiences say that all other things being equal, they would accept a job at BP first. Some people even insist that 'Beyond Petroleum' is actually BP's legal name.

One of BP's billboard and print ads reads, 'BP: Solar, natural gas, hydrogen, wind. And oh yes, oil. It's a start.' I agree. Now BP must execute and finish the job of 'greenin?' itself, or a competitor will hijack the strategy and the customer goodwill that it has temporarily won.

An article titled 'Green is Good' in the
Bulletin
cited the following examples of companies doing good in the green space:

• Continental Airlines spent US$16 billion to upgrade the efficiency of its aircraft, including fuel-saving winglets that have led to a 5 per cent reduction in emissions.
  
• British Airways will sell customers offsets for their share of the carbon emissions generated by the flights they take. Sadly only one in 200 consumers have stuck their hands in their own pockets for carbon offsets, but the trend is growing among affluent, socially conscious consumers. Even if the big impact from carbon offset trading will no doubt be on the part of multinational companies driven by regulatory pressure and general public sentiment, this offer effectively brands British Airways as green among a much wider customer demographic than the relatively small group who buy a per-flight carbon offset.
  
• Tesco in the UK has bio-diesel delivery trucks and offers merchandise discounts to customers who bring in their own shopping bags.
  
• HP will take back any of its own machines from customers for recycling and has started to audit its suppliers for their recycling practices.