Valentine’s Day gives me an excuse to comment (as so many others have) on Chipotle’s “Back to the Start”. This two-minute ad has been steadily accumulating YouTube views since August but inspired a frenzy of social commentary when it aired nationally during the Grammys.

The connection between pigs and Valentine’s Day? Passion, of course.

It’s Chipotle’s passion for “food with integrity” that so impresses me. Most brands assume consumers aren’t interested in or shouldn’t know about the supply-chain: where ingredients come from, how they’re made and what their social impact may be. (Indeed Fast Company has pointed out how unusual this is in the fast food space.)

Chipotle’s passion for their ingredients and where they come from is in a class of its own. They’ve orchestrated a shift in the conversation around ingredients that some said stole the spotlight during the Grammys (a big feat given the competition between animated pigs and, say, Adele).

It may be off-putting to some (I dunno, people who don’t like cute farm animals?) but I’d hazard that it will inspire intense loyalty in its customers (it certainly does in me) as well as ever-increasing awareness and market share for the brand. 

A new study by Accenture (http://bit.ly/xHldfD) shows that brand love isn’t enough to keep customers loyal and focused on your brand. It’s a perfect parellel to relationships (a nod to Valentine’s Day tomorrow). An enduring feeling of loyalty isn’t enough to keep the spark alive - you have to constantly be putting effort into making the experience something worth coming back for. 

And expectations go UP over time, short wait times and talking to one person to resolve your issue are now just the table stakes of customer service. 

What does this mean for brands? They have to be diligent about providing a great customer experience ALL the time. And to do that, they have to start measuring each experience on its own to truly understand where the breaks occur. 

Without feedback you can’t understand the true positives and negatives of your customer experience. Without measurement, you can’t improve.  And without constant improvement, customers will start to look elsewhere, brand love and all. 

It all comes back to the experience. It’s why customers come, it’s why they stay, it’s why they love a brand. And when it’s not up to par…it’s why they leave.

(Source: adage.com)

Corporate conferences are a centrifuge of rich data. Just think about it—attendees provide personal information, register for sessions, exchange business cards, present knowledge, send tweets, write blog posts, and (let’s face it) there were probably a few photos taken at the post-conference happy hour too.  

But what happens to that river of data after most conferences? Maybe an email list is assembled and used to market the event the following year. But for all intents and purposes, it just floats away. Chuck Hollis, VP Global Marketing CTO at EMC Corporation, recently blogged about the fact that big data analytics are “the next big thing in creating value from information.” It’s true. Increasingly, we as marketing professionals have to become data scientists—specialists who can make use of big data to significantly improve the quality of the work we do as a company. 

At Jack, we’re in the business of creating brand experiences that reach the people that matter most to organizations, which requires brands to show that they know their consumers. So ask your company this:

1. What if brand experiences got smarter every time they happened?
2. What if no two annual events were ever the same, because every year, they’re more personal and personalized?
3. What if you were at EMC World next year and the person at the information kiosk already knew which session you were looking to get to next and that you might be interested in them making a dinner reservation at a Thai restaurant that night?

These are the questions we spend our days pondering… how can we make your brand experience work harder for you and your customers?

There’s a terrific article in the WSJ on high-end garages in Miami, designed by world-famous “starchitects,” that are being used as spaces for over-the-top events and experiences. Check out their slideshow and video.

This rendering shows what the interior of Zaha Hadid’s 23rd Street garage might look like:

Here are interior and exterior shots of Enrique Norten’s perforated Park@420: 

With almost two months to go in 2011 it’s a bit premature to be calling the year, but at the risk of being premature, here are 3 brand lessons that stick out for me:

#1: The best brands are experience brands. 

 Jack Morton is about to release our first “Best Experience Brands” study (email me to learn more). We learned that consumers really do prefer brands that offer unique experiences. When we asked what brands they think are experience brands, Apple was by far the top choice—as I said, the best brands are experience brands.

#2: Brands that deliver an inconsistent experience will suffer. 

 Netflix: the problem wasn’t that the experience was bad so much as that the experience Netflix customers were promised wasn’t the one they got. 

#3: Standing for something is part of experience.

Starbucks will never win over my foodie friends, but it remains a brand that outperforms competitors based on providing a superior experience—and increasingly, that experience has included taking a stand, sometimes on touchy matters like political contributions and gridlock. My favorite: Create Jobs for USA, developed by GOOD Projects. 

Another cool experience from Warby Parker: thanks to my colleague Patty for telling me about this guerilla fashion event, pulled off in the main reading room of the New York Public Library during New York’s Fashion Week. Models quietly entered, sat down, and simultaneously revealed the branding behind their books; normally voluble fashion editors silently mingled amidst befuddled readers and unsuspecting literary types.

Read about it on the Warby Parker blog: http://blog.warbyparker.com/post/9956515144/we-kicked-off-nyfw-yesterday-with-a-guerilla

(I looked over the cubicle today and saw my colleague Bruna sporting her new Warby Parker specs.)