Anyone remember the incident where Magnus Pyke attempted to steam a trout in his dishwasher? Some remain convinced it was Vincent Price who first did this – I’m sure it happened on the institutional BBC programme – Tomorrow’s World, but I’m still trying to track down the exact evidence…anyway, clearly an early attempt at sustainable cooking. Here’s a similar commendable effort on U Tube.
Any information leading to the identification of this TV golden moment grately appreciated.
I do have a point – It’s odd what you recall and what you forget from the past.
I recently caught up with a friend of mine from 30 years ago – thanks to the power of internet search engines – a risky meeting on the face of it, but thankfully we hit it off again and reminisced over a pint about our younger days.
Beforehand I was nervous, would we still get on? Would we have anything to chat about??…but over and above those concerns, my gut feel was he would still be someone I’d get on with and have a positive relationship with.
When we were ‘nippers’ we remembered high priority headline items - Bikes, Trees, Arcade games and forgetting you towel at the swimming pool!… but we had little interest in each others families – they just weren’t on the tree climbing, bike riding agenda that summer. Predictable in many ways, but some of the particular and more obscure detail we could remember from way back when surprised us as adults – it wasn’t what we expected, it was much better!! 
It’s very much the same with customer perceptions – as a producer, you think that the price of your product and the major product features you spent so long designing for your lovely customers would be key, but it’s often not the adult things at all that consumers care about. It could be the helpful attitude of the returns department that makes the real difference, and from our childhood days, let’s not forget the ease with which you can make a sword or a Viking helmet out of the re-used packaging! Hurrah!!
Back to the now… I’m currently working on a project to roll out a customer sat. programme called Net Promoter Score. At the heart of this is a question which all businesses are continually challenged on – would you recommend?
Part of this recommendation is ‘product’ – did the service or item do what it said it would? But in the competitive, commoditized, cut and paste world that we live in, products are easily copied. Marketers have known this for some time – technology or innovation is not a reliable barrier to entry. Sooner or later someone makes something similar and takes market share with a cheaper, lower price or lower spec product.
The bigger part of a recommendation has got to be, did you have a good relationship, even if you have forgotten all the product details, were ‘they’ (…the company) good to deal with? Did you have a good experience? – It’s also something less easy to reproduce without real understanding of your customers. You can’t ‘cut and paste’ or clone a good service experience.
When I met up with my mate from 30 years ago, we had a lot to catch up on. But in an amazing way, that was all minor – he was still ‘a laugh’ and still a friend… And it turned out we both had more than a few things in common.
Interestingly, the thing I really remembered about my friend, coming back to perceptions of organisations and Net Promoter, was my gut feeling from a people perspective – amazingly and this was ‘bang on’ after 30 years! – Just like Net Promoter Score, behind all of it is the relationship – and that’s you really base a recommendation or a friendship upon.
