Managing Marketing: CX Customer Experience

Adam Washington is the CEO of the full-service customer experience agency CX Lavender and joins us to unpick the world of customer and user experience. The marketing industry is well known for its TLAs – Three Letter Acronyms such as RTB, CPM, B2B, SEO and more. 

But there is a class of TLAs, the two-letter acronyms that have increasingly populated the marketing vernacular like UX, UI and CX. McKinsey says CX encapsulates everything a business or an organisation does to put customers first, manage their journeys and serve their needs. Adam helps to demystify the meaning of CX and explains the roles of Customer Journey Mapping, Voice of the Customer, Service Design and more.

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I think for most businesses, if you were going to keep it really simple, is just have a clear view of your single customer view. Understand how you’re actually profiling across all of your sub-brands or your products.

Transcription

Darren:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, Founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy. And welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

Now, the marketing industry is well known for its TLAs. That’s three-letter acronyms: RTB, CPM, B2B, SEO, and more. But there is a class of TLA, the two-letter acronyms that have increasingly populated the marketing vernacular like UX, UI, and CX.

Now, McKinsey says, “CX encapsulates everything a business or an organization does to put customers first, managing their journey and servicing their needs.”

But my guest today is going to take a binary approach to unpick the world of customer and user experience. Please welcome to Managing Marketing, the CEO of the full-service customer experience agency, CX Lavender, Adam Washington. Welcome, Adam.

Adam:

Good day, Darren. It’s great to be with you.

Darren:

Look, it is really confusing because I’ve found a lot of people seem to use UX, CX and even throwing UI as if they’re interchangeable. Can you give me a sort of shorthand way of being able to differentiate the three?

Adam:

Yeah, it’s a great question and I think maybe that’s also happened because they’ve all been kind of zeitgeisty in the industry at various different times and people have tried to jump on those bandwagons. But you’re right that they can be a bit interchangeably used, but they’re very distinct.

I mean, customer experience really is the whole experience of engaging with a product or a brand right the way through offline, online, can even touch parts of pricing strategy, all the way through to product design.

User experience is generally speaking, the front end of the digital experience, the mobile app or the website, and user interface design is the creative end of that skin, what does it actually look like as a user would say.

So, if I was going to give you a simple example from a piece of work that I’ve done with HOYTS in a previous world — our customer experience work with HOYTS was really working out what the cinema consideration process was like, all the way through to ticketing online.

When you go through the candy bar, what your check-in process is like, how you’d feel sitting in the seats, where the rubbish bins are, what the toilets are like on the way out, all the way through. Really, that’s the whole customer experience piece.

But the user experience piece is really what does the app look like and what does the website look like as you’re using it? And the user interface design is obviously the beautiful skin on top. So, I could give you probably 15 more two letter acronyms to go along with those three. But maybe that’s a good kind of demystification of it for the folks listening.

Darren:

So, CX is much more holistic, isn’t it? Like as you said, it’s from every interaction that people have with a company or organization. And yet it’s interesting because from personal experience, I find service industries are often the worst at actually providing user experience or customer experience.

Adam:

From an agency point of view?

Darren:

No, no, from a personal point of view. I think one of the problems is that services industries or service-based organizations, possibly have so many touchpoints that can possibly go wrong compared to a product.

Because basically, the manufacturer makes the product, pans it to usually some intermediary, unless they’re selling it through their own website, but there’s usually a retailer and then it goes from there.

Adam:

Well, I think part of that challenge is often just that the concept of CX isn’t generally centralized in client team structures. Or often it’s not, anyway. Perhaps increasingly it will be. But is it the responsibility of marketing or the product team or the customer service team?

And so often, going through that process in the research phase, it’s as much about trying to wrangle that stakeholder environment and provide some cohesion in terms of its reporting and measurement and accountability as it is about actually coming up with these great ideas that solve unmet needs or that make experiences better.

And I think that it goes a lot to the way that CX is measured inside of client organizations too. That evolution in the way that we look at kind of not just marketing metrics or our kind of revenue metrics, but we’re actually really measuring customer sentiment and satisfaction. That journey is probably changing the way that customer experience is deployed too.

Darren:

Well, because I was going to say CX, when I first came across the term, was definitely more of the consulting world. The consulting world, we’re talking particularly around product distribution, all the Ps of marketing that are actually in this day and age, not part of marketing anymore. Because marketing in a lot of organizations just ends up with promotion, aren’t they?

Adam:

Yeah.

Darren:

But it has evolved.

Adam:

Yeah, definitely. And I think the reality is that not many agencies and probably not many consultancies are equipped to execute all the way through. We’re certainly not. We are not a shopper agency. We don’t do really detailed offline product or venturing and modeling.

That kind of stuff tends to be the remit of specialist providers. But the people who start the upfront part of that customer experience journey in really, really deep research and analysis and understanding, that is us and it’s many other contemporaries in the agency and consulting worlds.

It’s just then making sure we’ve got the right partners around us to go execute in those more specific channels where we execute heavily in creative, digital, many other kind of contemporary agencies, talking about CX would execute in comms channels, consulting sort of sometimes goes all the way through or partners with product specialists.

So, yeah, it’s definitely a changing space and I think lots of people are running to the middle of this space because ultimately, it’s where accountability is. If you can prove great growth, great increased revenue through great customer satisfaction, a lot of the money’s moving here as opposed to just straight media investments.

Darren:

Yeah. Do you think its technology in the way consumers now consume with so much of it being done either research or consideration being done online that has moved a lot more of this CX work into the realm of the communications part?

Adam:

Yeah. Perhaps, perhaps also just that the visibility of poor customer experience is so quickly socialized too. That didn’t used to be the case. Word of mouth still matters in both the positive and the negative context.

I mean, I think if you think about the kinds of experiences that you’ve had that are negative or a bit irritating, being kind of spammed with overly aggressive irrelevant retargeting or needing to get to a piece of content where you’re artificially clicking through too many stages for more AdWords impressions to get to that content, irrelevant upsell messages — all of that stuff is often kind of grounded in briefs that are starting with metrics.

Like, well, increase the average revenue per user, look at the daily active user account, all the vanity metrics around kind of likes and shares and comments and follows and stuff. And I suppose it’s partly moving into our world more and certainly we see an opportunity to be more effective addressing it for clients by really starting with value creation, not the value extraction piece.

And agencies have historically been pretty good at value creation. That’s real unmet or latent needs, addressing that utility, being more genuinely helpful, creating real entertainment making education that’s really valuable in those experiences, not starting with those more vanity led metrics. I think that’s a lot of what’s shifting some of the emphasis into our world.

We recently repositioned CX Lavender last year on our 25th birthday. And as part of that process, we talked about putting people first being the key to growing business fundamentally. So, we make stuff for people. And I think that’s something that’s really simple to say, but if you’re in a non-agency context might be more difficult to kind of live up to.

Darren:

Look, I think that’s really interesting because one of the keys to great customer experience is actually being able to respond and be in the customer’s shoes and see the way the experience occurs for them.

And that also requires a significant amount of empathy because I think when you’re working within an organization, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of being factory out. But an actual design of the customer experience, you have to constantly be able to have that empathy and that insight to put yourself outside and look in.

Adam:

Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s one of the reasons that research is such a huge part of some of the pivot that we’re making in the agency today, to really embrace beyond kind of quant and quant, really embrace great ethnography and the way that we’re approaching research, and to not just have it be siloed in a research part of our strategy team, but to have it be really ingrained through training in all of business management.

I mean, materially, we are kind of customer-focused strategy creative in technology agencies. So, we make great communications, we make great ads, we make great platforms and apps, and websites. But all of that has to start with the best research that we can possibly master around this stuff because the wrong …

My sort of analogy (the team will know too well) is that you can have the best driver of the world, but if you put the wrong address in Google Maps, you’ll end up in the wrong place. And for us, that’s just making real sure we’ve got the right address in Google Maps at the start of those projects.

Darren:

Well, look, and that makes me think of another thing which is often related to CX (to customer experience), and that is this idea of data analytics and personalization.

And I know there’s been a lot of talk and a lot of people saying personalization was the future, but then very few organizations have either had the data to do it well. Or they’ve had some massive fails, to your point, putting the wrong address into Google Maps, and coming up with the wrong location or the wrong person, or treating the customer — in some ways, making assumptions about them without permission to make those assumptions about them is one way of putting it.

Do you see with AI, and I know it’s the hot topic, but do you think AI is going to help this and help us be less clumsy about being able to use data to create a more, if not personalized, more customized experience for the individuals?

Adam:

Yeah, it’s really interesting because I think I’d put it in two buckets. I would classify one half of the kind of opportunity space we play in as the stuff you’re talking about. So, getting better at personalization, better at relevance, better at kind of behavioral modeling, predictive content that we might be serving people.

But there’s a whole category of what we do that’s addressing latent or unmet needs and identifying those and addressing them. I mean, I couldn’t use a more cliched example, but Henry Ford, if I ask my customers what they wanted, and it-

Darren:

Faster horses.

Adam:

Faster horses, and perhaps we will get to a place where GPT-4, which Microsoft’s about to unveil next week, will be so extraordinary at synthesizing all the information on the internet that it can predict latent needs. We might just get to a point where it’s a pure fortune teller, who knows?

But I think at the moment, today, yes, a huge role that AI can continue playing in terms of content personalization, marketing automation, increased relevance, playing on the margins of that stuff. But those moonshot opportunities that you get out of really great customer experience research and understanding.

And I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about empathy because it really is about great EQ being able to synthesize all the EQ, but then also contextualize it. At the moment, those unmet needs, those bigger opportunities that can really be massive revenue drivers for clients, I think that’s still something that agencies have a pretty manual role to claim.

Darren:

The other issue is consistency. Because you see organizations do a big move into focusing on customer experience, only to consistently drop the ball because it’s not actually integrated into the organization. It does have to become sort of culture, doesn’t it? And it needs to be woven into … to use the fabric, I guess, of the organization in everything you do.

Adam:

Yeah. Absolutely, from two points. From a KPI and reporting point of view and from a technology and operational point of view. I mean, from a KPI point of view, I’ve sat in quite a few meetings recently talking about how we unify CX measurement reporting across organizations with wildly different stakeholder objectives.

And even kind of bonus KPI structures according to different departments. No alignment on customer satisfaction or customer effort score, or NPS being consistent metrics that we’re measuring.

If you really get customer experience work right, it should be truly cross-functional. It’s pretty tough to have it be owned by department. And so, the alignment of those KPIs is really pretty critical. But over and above that, then you’ve got the MarTech stack, which is actually going to go run this thing.

And increasingly, our MarTech stacks are just very complicated and very expensive. And the legacy of people who’ve been in organizations previously and have left, and people feel variously disgruntled about what’s there still.

So, making sure that when you’re thinking about what it takes to actually go and support this stuff, it’s not so complex. It’s not too clever by half that it’s so much so that it’s unsustainable. And I guess that’s where we help play a pretty big role too, is unpicking that and making the complex simple and hopefully sustainable on the tech and on the measurement side of it.

Darren:

So, it was once explained to me and I can’t remember the conversation exactly, but that the first step in customer experience or great customer service, I think they actually called it, was actually getting the culture right. Getting the people to people, to your point earlier.

And that technology is not the thing that does that. It’s actually the enabler that allows you to scale and be responsive. And I think it’s really interesting because so many times you hear conversations, and I have to say, particularly when we’ve been involved with consulting firms where they’re talking about the tech stack first before they’ve even got their head around, well, what’s the cultural change for the organization to be able to become a customer-centric business.

Adam:

Yeah, totally. I mean, I think the biggest kind of imperative I think for most businesses, if you were going to keep it really simple, is just have a clear view of your single customer view. Understand how you’re actually profiling across all of your sub-brands or your products, so that’s a view of someone that you can approach kind of consistently and recurrently.

But yeah, you’re right, that the technical debt that a lot of organizations carry, and often not through any fault of their own. Often, it’s as a result of acquisitions or mergers or whatever.

Darren:

Legacy systems.

Adam:

Yeah, and that is generally some of the hardest stuff to unpick. I think if we took a brief from a startup who’s just got a bunch of VC and they want to go and make the best thing in the world, it’s a much easier brief a lot of the time because you’re not having to unpick that technical debt.

Darren:

I just thought of a three-letter acronym. It’s not necessarily marketing, but it occurs in marketing: API. The ability for platforms to get plug and play. I don’t think I’ve ever discovered or heard of an API that just ever plugged and played.

Adam:

They do always take a bit of custom work, don’t they?

Darren:

A bit. I know of an organization that does nothing but map APIs so that they can plug and play. And they said that it’s almost impossible. That it never happens.

Adam:

I mean, there’s an element of keep it simple stupid, which is easy to say for smaller size clients. For large organizations, that obviously gets more complicated. But yeah, we don’t need to unnecessarily complicate the technology. And I think we’ve all been variously guilty of that in the past.

Darren:

So, Adam, you are very good at giving a sort of view of UX, UI and CX. There’s some other language around CX that I wouldn’t mind getting you to help demystify in a way, or just give a perspective. And the first one is one of my favorites because at a point in time, about three years ago, four years ago, every agency said they could do this. And that’s customer journey mapping.

Darren:

What is it? And why do they always look so neat? Because I know my personal customer journey is like this, I’m all over the place. So, why do they look like, you do this, then you do this, then you do this, then you … and then you make the purchase …?

Adam:

It’s often trying to bring order to chaos, isn’t it? Trying to get the current state map so we can understand where the opportunity is. But you’re right. Look, I think it’s a bit the same as if you go back to audience profiling and segmentation years ago. We all used to live and die by the persona.

I mean, these things are never an exact science. But through great research, I guess really the point is to be able to sometimes just quite visually identify where the gaps and opportunities are to improve customer experience or to innovate. Because a huge part of this is about innovation.

And if I took, well, that HOYTS example, I’ll go back to it for the sake of simplicity. Part of that work we did in a previous life was mapping the whole user journey across every step of going to the movies.

And when you see it all laid out on a piece of paper, the side of it, the three sheet, the size of the three sheet, you can actually kind of start to see that bit’s really empty. And that bit is a bit lax. Actually, there’s a huge disconnect between step A and step B.

And oftentimes, in that whole process, there might be five or six different internal departments with different moments where they’re handing the baton back and forth, and they don’t have that bird’s eye view of that whole ecosystem.

So, sometimes it is just about visibility, but really, it’s about spotting those opportunities for improvement and innovation. And to then return to them as well once we’ve made those improvements and make sure that they’re …

Darren:

So, it’s not pretending to actually map it, it’s more identifying the possible touchpoints or points of experience.

Adam:

Well, it should be mapped as a result of great research. So, if you’ve done enough kind of user interviews and a bit of generic research, and if you’ve understood the customer journey well enough, it should be a reflection of all you know generally grouped by audience types. So, yeah.

Darren:

Okay. Voice of customer programs. Is this all the complaints and all the positive reviews? Or what is the voice of customer? And how’s it become a program?

Adam:

Well, I guess it’s just making sure the organization has a consistent measure of how its customers are feeling.

I mean, I think most of us running agencies would do this with our own clients. We’d have customer satisfaction service surveys, client set surveys. We’d run quarterly and we’d all feel a little bit alarmed if our clients start scoring us under an eight and run around and try and make sure those relationships are improved, so they don’t call you Darren.

Darren:

Only to fix it.

Adam:

Only to fix it, of course. So, really, I guess it’s the same thing. It’s just making sure that it’s scale in a client organization that they’re institutionalizing that process. Which could be for some clients, really simple. Everyone just rallies around that promoter score and just says, how likely is someone to recommend this business or this service to another?

There’s various discussion about whether or not NPS is a bit of a blunt instrument because it isn’t intrinsically reflecting your experience of a product. It’s totally about how willing you are to go promote it to other people and gives nuance and that motivation, they can be different.

But other measures could be things like your customer effort score, how hard it is to get something done, your customer satisfaction score, those kind of things. So, it’s just making sure you’ve got a regular beat on that and you’re tracking it over time.

Darren:

Again, from a personal experience, Adam, it’s when I buy something online and I’ve just finished the transaction. I haven’t even got the product and then they send me an NPS. And I go, “I don’t care about that, I bought the product. It was okay.”

Adam:

Yeah. They should they should send it to you on your third or your fourth product purchase so that you’re invested enough to fill it out.

Darren:

Exactly. Service design. Because we’ve heard there’s human-centered design and there’s design thinking. Service design, where’s this fit in?

Adam:

Well, service design is part of what we do. I think you’d think of it less in terms of a marketing metric, more in terms of how you might go spin up a part of your client’s business.

So, whether it’s a new revenue model or an ancillary revenue model, or an additional product, we’re basically trying to take the sum total of all that we’ve learned through all of our customer research and understanding overlaid with the opportunities either in a customer journey map that exists today, or by identifying unmet or latent needs that aren’t being addressed at all.

And then saying, “Hey, how do we go make money out of that thing?” So, often that might be led by the client, or in some cases, if we’re lucky or we’ve got really deep relationships, that kind of might move beyond our CMO, then we’ve got an opportunity to go talk about how we turn it into a product.

And for us, that’s super exciting because I mean, from a personal point of view, I grew up in digital agencies over the last 15 odd years. moved into full service creative businesses to close those gaps because I always had a chip on my shoulder about being in the digital table, waiting for the full service brief.

But we’ve all had this problem trying to fight through how do we get past just a marketing lens and the great work we’re doing. And it is one benefit of great CX-led agencies like CX Lavender. There’s a few of us that we can move beyond that office and actually talk about change within a client organization that’s broader than a marketing program.

And I think we were talking earlier about consultancy. That’s something that consultancy does very easily because it often has those relationships beyond the CMO. Service design is really us putting a toe into that water a lot of the time.

Darren:

Yeah. But there is something about marketing, particularly marketing that is very customer-focused, because good marketing should be customer-focused. You want to understand your current customers so you can work out how to acquire more, and how to keep the ones that you’ve already got pending more.

So, there is something about that being the portal of the organization that is most likely going to be able to see the service from the customer’s perspective, isn’t there?

Adam:

Yeah, absolutely. And then there’s all these other facets. I mean, so many of our insights come from the cold face of customer service and I mean, like we go and sit in call centers sometimes.

Which is not the kind of thing you’d think we’d be doing, but that’s sometimes where some of the best insight comes from really, really getting close to that. And I think it’s a client C-suite that ignores that kind of feedback at its peril because that’s really where it’s coming from.

Darren:

Yeah, I did a podcast with someone that’s a call center specialist. They said the best thing a CMO can do is get a recording of all of the highlights of the calls from the previous day, because that’ll tell you exactly what your customers are thinking.

Adam:

Couldn’t agree more.

Darren:

Absolutely. Fantastic. Customer segmentation, now, Adam, a little earlier you said there was a time where personas were all the rage. And we’ve got Professor Byron Sharpe saying don’t segment from an awareness point of view or mental availability — target everyone. But where does customer segmentation sit in CX? Is it mainly around behavior or is it psychology or is it demographic, or all of those?

Adam:

Well, I think the attitudinal part of it’s obviously super important. I mean, we’re not buying media. So, there’s a sort of a socio demo part of it that’s probably slightly less relevant if you think about the … if I talk about owned channels, channels that we fully control as opposed to earned channels or bought channels.

So, if you’re within an owned channel, then I suppose in some respects, particularly if you’re an existing customer, part of that demo would be less relevant than the behavioral and the attitudinal stuff.

The attitudinal segmentation piece is still critical, really critical. Overlaid with obviously sort of life stage or anything that’s custom specifically depending on a client and their product, it has a role, absolutely.

But I think to your point about hyper-personalization, you can go so far that you almost you end up segmenting to your own peril at some point because you’re trying to get too clever by half. But it has a role, of course.

I think, I mean, when we talk about service design in particular when we think about how we design new products and services or new revenue opportunities with our clients, then it’s very relevant because we’re talking about market sizing. But yeah, look, it’s not gone, but maybe we don’t just have geo and socio briefs that we used to.

Darren:

Because one of the things I love about human beings is that it’s that scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian: You’re all different” and they all shout, “We’re all different.”

That human beings do fit very neatly into tribes or personas, that there are commonalities for groups of people. That means that you can operate on that level, and it allows you to scale if you can identify where the person, the individual sits within one of those tribes.

Adam:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and for sure, there’s a role, absolutely. I mean, it’s a big part of the way that we approach product design and experience design. But I guess we’re not using it in a media context, so.

Darren:

Yeah. And look, media’s still struggling with how to make their audience available. I mean, certainly digital medias and the wall gardens, the platforms are saying that you can target specifically, but I think any market or in anyone in media knows that it’s still a bit hit and miss.

Adam:

Yeah. Well, the role that we do play here, and this is super important, increasingly. I mean, we’ve been talking about the death of the cookie for a very long time and Google keeps delaying this. And so, one day we’ll have the real conversation, 2024, I think, at the moment.

But what we need really to combat that for any organization at scale is first party data. And if you think about what we do, well, we make great websites, we make great apps, we make great ecosystems, all born out of great customer experience insight.

We actually are in the very lucky position that we get to control that first party data ecosystem in so much as we architect it and implement it. We configure the customer data platforms. That’s another three-letter acronym, CDP, that all the data’s stored in and-

Darren:

And a hot one at the moment. Everyone’s investing.

Adam:

So, I suppose in that respect, I would say our role in the future of retargeting is actually pretty critical as the architects of our customers’ first party platforms.

Darren:

The other good thing is that even with the rise of this increased focus by government on privacy, there is still … because there’re are customers, an opportunity for permission, isn’t there?

Adam:

Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, you’ve just got to explicit opt-in or opt out, preferencing your first party data. But even beyond opt-in or opt-out, there’s an ability to communicate on a service messaging basis.

And I think, if you think about the history of our business. For anyone who doesn’t know, CX Lavender is 25-years-old. Last year was our 25th birthday. And we began all the way back in ‘97 as a DM agency. Through those years, grew up into digital and evolved into full service.

And so, our heritage is in direct communications many moons ago. And I think ironically, for all the tech innovation in the world, the prevalence of first party data and segmentation’s going to mean that direct comms, they still have a super important role to play for all of us. And they’re well into the future, so.

Darren:

No, direct marketing is still alive and well, and it’s actually the best way of using the technology. I say this all the time, Lester Wunderman, when he wrote about direct marketing, he was dealing with typing pools and typists typing personalized letters and self-addressed envelopes and things like that.

All the technology’s done because human beings are largely the same, but that responsiveness now, at scale, has been allowed for by technology. The actual process hasn’t really changed.

Adam:

And the great irony is I still open more unsolicited mail from people offering to do my plumbing with magnets for my fridge than just about any other piece of communication because it’s the only thing in my letter box. So, not that we get a lot of them these days, but hey, sometimes it’s the old channels that work.

Darren:

When it turns up, it’s a novelty. So, you mentioned that you’ve had two decades of working in digital agencies and creative agencies. What was it that drew you, first of all, to digital and technology, and then finally here to CX as CEO of CX Lavender?

Adam:

Yeah, look, I could take you around the houses here because it’s a bit of a long one, but my background was originally video games and video games publishing way back in the Wiley days of the nineties when I had to convince my mum.

Darren:

Oh, last millennium?

Adam:

Yeah. Convincing my mom that I wasn’t selling drugs, I was in fact selling media space when the checks arrived. And I always remember taking a call from MH asking me for a media plan and googling what that was and working it out and sending them one and manually uploading HTML files to the website.

So, going all the way back to the Wiley days where we were sending server logs to track impressions. But from there, I think I’ve always had a great love of interactive entertainment and of technology, and of the ability to tell great stories in the games industry.

In the agency that somebody has in that context makes the way a story lands so much more compelling than if it’s a static medium. Even all the way back to cave paintings or music or TV, books, stone tablets, it’s always been a one-way communication medium.

And being able to go in both directions with games, that little bit of agency, it just allows you to play around with emotion and different opportunity in storytelling in a way traditional media doesn’t.

So, I’ve always loved tech. I’ve always loved interactive media. And I guess as I came out of the games publishing business, came back to Australia after a stint in London, I just got into the flip side of the business I knew, which was selling the ads and started making them. And then the rest, as they say in agency world, has been history.

But I’ve had a lot of experience in creative and in straight digital, and the way all of those agency opportunities are variously challenged, I think CX has the front door to all that great work. Just allows us really to elevate the conversation further up the C-suite chain to talk more fundamentally about the health of the business and the opportunity and the customer relationships and the product. And I guess that’s why I’ve ended up here as opposed to a straight creative over the years, so-

Darren:

Very, very interesting. And I think because of that sort of diversity of experience from gaming to digital to creative agency, you’ve been fantastic at sort of breaking down the overall CX and I think giving people a more accessible idea of what it’s all about. It’s not just a whole stack of two letter acronyms.

Adam:

No. And hopefully, everyone can call BS the next time someone’s using CX interchangeably too.

Darren:

Well, let’s hope so. Adam, look, it’s been a fantastic conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. It’d be interesting actually to catch up again sometime and we could have a great conversation around gaming. Because I think it’s probably one of the least or underutilized marketing opportunities around.

Adam:

I would love to do that. It is a deeply held passion of mine and something I’ll go back to one day. So, just let me know and then we’ll build on.

Darren:

Oh, well Adam Washington, CEO of CX Lavender, thank you for joining us on Managing Marketing.

Adam:

Sure. Thanks so much, Darren. That was great fun.

Darren:

I do have a question before you go and it’s a gaming question: what’s your current favorite game?