Stan Phelp's Blog

The Goldfish Chronicles

Sharing insights on customer experience, employee engagement, and brand strategy.

YETI versus the SHITI

YETI versus the SHITI. YETI is a premium brand specializing in coolers, drinkware, and related accessories. YETI has lopsided the engineering of their products. It turns out that engineering doesn’t come cheap. Some may even accuse YETI of being ridiculously overpriced.

Enter SHITI. In 2016, Austin and Trevor Zacny became sensitive to the popularity of overpriced coolers. Nostalgic about their old reliable cooler, they began to realize that a cooler meant much more than how long it held ice. As a joke, Trevor placed a napkin over his older Coleman [Image above].

He shared a Snapchat,

“Who needs a YETI, when you got a SHITI.”

Soon after, the youngest Zacny brother Luke designed the logo. Stickers were ordered and a business was launched. SHITI Coolers was founded with a basic mission:

“To keep using that same damn cooler with the rusted lid and squeaky hinges in the hope there were more people just like us. A simple SHITI sticker was enough to represent the lifestyle in which we’ve been living for years. We don’t care if your cooler can withstand a grizzly bear or hold ice for 3 weeks. We care about coolers that have been passed down through generations with a story behind them.”

A line has been drawn in the ice. Are you on TEAM YETI or TEAM SHITI?

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Stan Phelps walks the walk. He stands out in the sea of sameness by modeling his own Differentiated Experience (DX) message: Differentiation isn’t just about what you say, it’s about what you do and, more importantly, how and why you do it. Stan leverages his unique collection of 5,000+ case studies on customer, employee, and brand experience to engage audiences with informative learning-based experiences. He believes purposeful DX wins the hearts of employees and customers, and differentiation ultimately boosts loyalty, retention, referrals, and results.

Find Stan’s in-person and virtual keynotes, workshops, and Goldfish tank programs at StanPhelps.com.

Remembering Kobe Bryant

Remembering Kobe. “Everything negative — pressure, challenges — is all an opportunity for me to rise.” This quote by the late Kobe Bryant is a tribute to his approach to life.

I never met Kobe, but admired him from a short distance. I was in grad school at Villanova University while Kobe attended Lower Merion High School. I joined adidas in 1996, the same year he signed an endorsement agreement with the brand. The admiration was from Kobe’s work ethic and killer determination.

In the last year I picked up the book “Alter Ego” by Todd Herman. Herman shares the power of secret identities to transform your approach to life. He reveals the science behind alter egos and how they help us perform better.

Kobe’s alter ego was the Black Mamba. Not familiar with the snake? It the longest + fastest venomous snake in Africa. It was his mentality that nothing was going to get in his way on the court.

Fox reporter Laura Okmin once asked Kobe, “100 years from now a father and his child will walk by Staples and a statue of you & the child will say, daddy, who is that? What do you hope the dad will say?”

Okmin shared that Kobe paused and broke out into a huge grin, “That was the Black Mamba”

R.I.P. Mamba

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Find Stan’s in-person and virtual keynotes, workshops, and Goldfish tank programs at StanPhelps.com.

7 takeaways from The 2021 Customer Experience Outlook

7 takeaways from The 2021 Customer Experience Outlook. I was honored to be one of eight contributors to a free eBook spearheaded by Kerry Bodine of Bodine & Co. Grab your free copy of the report here.

If TL;DR is your go-to phrase or if you want a preview of what’s inside, here’s 7 takeaways:

1. “COVID: Opportunity Within Crisis” by Don Peppers
Takeaway: Digital innovations and change forced by the pandemic are here to stay.

2. “Creating Better Experiences With A Growth Mindset” by Kerry Bodine
Takeaway: Shed the fixed mindset. Stay green and growing.

3. “Developing and Maintaining a Customer-Centric Culture” by Annette Franz
Takeaway: Culture = Values + Behavior. Know’em and live’em.

4. “Transform or Fail — Business Transformation is No Longer Optional!” by Ian Golding
Takeaway: Continuous customer-focused change is the only survival strategy.

5. “Let Goodness in Business Prevail” by Jeanne Bliss
Takeaway: Demonstrate kindness, deliver grace, and build trust.

6. “Six CX Trends You Cannot Ignore” by Shep Hyken
Takeaway: Empathy matters. Put the personal back into the personalized experience.

7. “The Value of Customers and The Impact on A Business’s Financial Status” by Dr. Natalie Petouhoff
Takeaway: Customer value trumps financial performance.

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Find Stan’s in-person and virtual keynotes, workshops, and Goldfish tank programs at StanPhelps.com.

Are you customer interested or customer-obsessed?

Are you customer interested or customer-obsessed? Steve Towers recently shared a LinkedIn article with me on the difference. He defines obsession as requiring:

“an unending exploration and understanding of customer needs (even when customers themselves may not be aware of them) and an ability to act on those needs.”

To understand obsession, it’s important to understand how it differs from mere focus. Towers shares an excellent set of comparisons from former Netflix exec Gibson Biddle:

Focus – Understand customer wants and needs
Obsession – Invent and deliver on unanticipated future needs

Focus – Concentrate on customer satisfaction
Obsession – Aspire to long-term customer delight

Focus – Provide better product/service than the competition
Obsession – Pioneer new frontiers, with less competition

Focus – balance customer satisfaction and margin
Obsession – “Double down” on hard to copy delight and higher-margin follows

Obsession is about proactively defying normal. As David Rendall share in the book “Pink Goldfish,” it’s ruthlessly doing MORE of what makes you different and having the courage to do unapologetically LESS of what others considered normal.

Takeaway – Are you merely customer interested or are you customer-obsessed?

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Find Stan’s in-person and virtual keynotes, workshops, and Goldfish tank programs at StanPhelps.com.

Vineet Nayar’s employee-first culture

What’s the most important measurement in customer experience? It’s the last two feet of a transaction—the space between the employee and the customer.

Vineet Nayar, former CEO for HCL Technologies, refers to these 24 inches the “value zone.” Nayar came to realize that HCL’s frontline workers were the true custodians of the brand and drivers of customer loyalty.

Nayar shifted the focus of HCL from the “WHAT” to the “HOW” of delivering value. He decided to turn conventional management upside down by placing frontline employees first. This wasn’t just lip service.

Nayar knew he needed actions, not words.

Vineet engaged in a number of changes that reinforced the new direction. He referred to them as “droplets.” They are beacons along the voyage that I describe as #GreenGoldfish. They help drive employee engagement and reinforce culture.

Nayar drew his inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi and his famous Dandi March. Mahatma walked to the sea to make salt as a protest to the British government about their monopoly on salt production in India. This small action ignited change, becoming a catalyst that led to a large-scale uprising.

TAKEAWAY – Culture trumps strategy and principles beat rules. Employee experience should be a priority for leadership.

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Find Stan’s in-person and virtual keynotes, workshops, and Goldfish tank programs at StanPhelps.com.

Deliberate differentiation, intentional imperfection

Deliberate differentiation, intentional imperfection. Ray Bartkus is a street artist in New York. He created a unique mural in Marijampole, Lithuania on the Sesup River, by painting everything upside-down. It’s called Floating World. See the picture courtesy of Boring Panda.

But that’s not the whole story. Because he painted the mural upside-down, when you look directly at the painting, it’s upside-down, but when you look at it’s reflection in the river, it’s right-side-up.

The swimmers, swans, boats, and divers look out of place on the side of the building, but they make perfect sense on the surface of the water. Intentional imperfection. Deliberate differentiation.

Another fun example comes from Harvard. Imagine that you are a professor and want to offer a new course to help students communicate more effectively.

What do you call it? Alison Wood Brooks called it “How to Talk Gooder in Business and in Life.” What?! Gooder isn’t even a real word. A class at a prestigious university about how to speak well has a deliberate grammatical error in the title.

Did anyone sign up for the brand-new class with an incorrect title. Yes. So many students, nearly 1000, signed up.

got imperfect?

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Find Stan’s in-person and virtual keynotes, workshops, and Goldfish tank programs at StanPhelps.com.

“The number of companies who are truly able to achieve competitive separation is depressingly small.” – Youngme Moon

In her book Different – Escaping the Competitive Herd, Harvard Business School marketing professor Youngme Moon argues that “the ability to compete is dependent upon the ability to differentiate from competitors.” However, she goes on to say, “The number of companies who are truly able to achieve competitive separation is depressingly small.”

Why so small?

This is because companies tend to define their strengths and weaknesses using the same measurements and standards as their competitors. This leads to homogeneity, not differentiation. When everyone is trying to build on the same strengths and eliminate the same weaknesses, all companies start to look the same.

So how can you create one of the few organizations that become extraordinary? How can you succeed where most organizations fail? You can follow the Pink Goldfish concept of becoming F.L.A.W.S.O.M. This is the idea of embracing inherent or intentional flaws. You can succeed because of your flaws, not despite them. F.L.A.W.S.O.M. is an acronym for the seven types of Pink Goldfish: Flaunting, Lopsiding, Antagonizing, Withholding, Swerving, Opposing, and Microweirding.

TAKEAWAY: Do more of what makes you inherently weird and intentionally less of what others consider normal in business.

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Find Stan’s in-person and virtual keynotes, workshops, and Goldfish tank programs at StanPhelps.com.

What does Amanda Gorman have in common with both Joe Biden and Maya Angelou?

What does National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman have in common with both Joe Biden and Maya Angelou?

They all had to work to overcome speech impediments. Poetry and the spoken word became the tool to address the challenge.

As a child, President Biden was mocked mercilessly by his older siblings and schoolmates. Joe has shared that he would stand in front of a mirror and recite poems for hours.

Maya Angelou experienced an anxiety disorder that causes a child to not speak due to trauma. During these five years, Maya’s listening, observing, and memorizing skills were heightened and her love of books expanded.

Gorman struggled with R’s. She’d recite the lyrics of the musical Hamilton to help. Thank you Aaron Burr, Sir.

Two days ago, Amanda shared “The Hill We Climb” during the inauguration. She nailed it. Here is one of my favorite parts:

“Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious
Not because we will never again know defeat
but because we will never again sow division.”

Gorman, Angelou, and Biden turned a stigma into a strength. They leaned into what made them weird and it made them wonderful.

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Find Stan’s in-person and virtual keynotes, workshops, and Goldfish tank programs at StanPhelps.com.

Got a 1-Star review? Flaunt it.

“Too Advanced” and “Disappointed.” These are two 1-Star (★☆☆☆☆ ) reviews that were part of a genius marketing campaign by Snowbird. The Utah resort knows that they are not for every skier and snowboarder. The trails at the mountain are difficult. Some may see that as a flaw or weakness, but it’s a badge they wear with pride.

In a brilliant move of Flaunting (the cornerstone of the seven FLAWSOM types from Pink Goldfish), they decided not to shy away from bad reviews. Instead of telling you about the difficulty of the terrain, they allowed the 1-star reviews to do the talking:

★☆☆☆☆ NO EASY RUNS
“We felt like our lives were in our own hands.”
– Jeremiah, Manchester NH

★☆☆☆☆ DISAPPOINTED
“Are the people who operate the grooming equipment on strike or something? Was hoping for a little more corduroy to my skis into.”
-Elizabeth, Dallas TX

★☆☆☆☆ TOO ADVANCED
“I heard Snowbird is a tough mountain, but this is ridiculous. It felt like every trail was a steep chute or littered with tree wells. How is anyone supposed to ride that? Not fun!”
– Greg, Los Angeles, CA

TAKEAWAY: In the words of Gerald Weinberg, “If you can’t fix it, feature it.” Take pride in your unique characteristics. Emphasize them, expose them, and openly display them.

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Find Stan’s in-person and virtual keynotes, workshops, and Goldfish tank programs at StanPhelps.com.

Make Your Business Stand Out From Competitors

In business, there is not safety in numbers. Management guru Tom Peters argues that, “It is no longer safe to be the same, to be normal, to be indistinct.” Let that sink in for a minute. He is saying that the only safe move—only prudent choice, the only wise decision—is to become unusual, different, strange, and remarkable.

That message is at the heart of Pink Goldfish strategy. How can you defy normal, exploit imperfection, and captivate your customers?

Peters view isn’t just opinion. It is backed up by science. Researchers Susan T. Fiske and Shelley Taylor discovered in 1978 that attention is usually captured by salient, novel, surprising, or distinctive stimuli. This phenomenon is typically called the “Von Restorff” effect. Also called the Isolation effect, it predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is the one most likely to be recalled. Being different makes you memorable.

Takeaway: It can be dangerous to simply remain average in the sea of sameness. Take the advice of Hugh MacLeod, “Don’t try to stand out from the crowd. Avoid crowds altogether.”

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Find Stan’s keynotes and workshops at StanPhelps.com.

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Stan Phelp's Blog

The Goldfish Chronicles

YETI versus the SHITI

Remembering Kobe Bryant

7 takeaways from The 2021 Customer Experience Outlook

Are you customer interested or customer-obsessed?

Vineet Nayar’s employee-first culture

Deliberate differentiation, intentional imperfection

“The number of companies who are truly able to achieve competitive separation is depressingly small.” – Youngme Moon

What does Amanda Gorman have in common with both Joe Biden and Maya Angelou?

Got a 1-Star review? Flaunt it.

Make Your Business Stand Out From Competitors

Find Your Best-Match Program

Meet Your Presenter

Every time we do business together, Something amazing happens in the world!

When someone downloads a GOLDFISH eBook, we give one brick toward building school facilities in Cambodia