From The Head Of Zeus Jones

When we sat down to start Zeus Jones, along with talk of offerings, business structures, skill-sets etc, we also spent a lot of time talking about values, beliefs and culture. In the past few weeks one of our initial values has featured heavily in recent meetings.

We articulated it as always wanting to be better than you think I am on 43things. It’s something that I think we always try to take very seriously, but it’s something that we often remember at the start of a project or interaction but tend to forget towards the end.

I think this is partly human nature and partly due to how projects happen. At the beginning it’s essential to start off well. It’s usually the part of our projects where we’re presenting ideas and strategies. We want these to be impressive, we’re working hard to ensure that they’re better than you expected. As the chart above shows, the degree of difficulty here is high but the potential return is low. That’s because clients start off with high expectations of their own and so the room above those expectations is limited.

As projects progress, expectations are lowered because the deliverables are much more defined. Future meetings become more progress checks than presentations. Everyone moves into a mode of “are we getting it done?” This trend continues to the end of the project.

As the yellow bars show, the risk – value of missing expectations – also decreases as relationships extend. I think this is one reason why people tend to ease off towards and, as I’ve witnessed in the agency world, people can get lackadaisical about things right at the end. However, as the green bar shows, the value of smashing expectations at this point is extremely high.

It is exactly when people aren’t expecting the best that delivering it can create magic.

In our world this happened by re-imagining what was expected into something better. However, I think this insight isn’t limited to our relationships with clients, it’s also a truism of brands’ relationships with their customers. The value of beating expectations increases with the length of relationship and the cost to do so decreases.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 11:47 am and is filed under expectations, value. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.