I hope you’ve had the chance to do the same.

The complaint of the big IT departments: “We can’t keep up your release cycles. Slow down your innovation, if you please.”

What’s going on here? It’s a fundamental struggle – don’t we love fundamental struggles? – between Control and Innovation. Firefox is doing the innovating – making their tool faster, more adaptable, and more secure with every release (at least, we hope they are). Corporate IT departments want to keep control of the tools they use. They’ve established what Firefox calls “effort-intensive certification policies.” You can’t control something when it changes every week, and you’re not notified till it’s a fait accompli.

The IT guys can’t keep up with Firefox, which is doing its job trying to keep up with the market. I’m with Firefox here. If a corporation’s culture can’t adapt to others’ innovation, how’s it going to keep up with the increasing demands for rapid innovation from its customers? These companies are hobbling their employees with old tools.

It’s time for them to adopt a new model, including a new take on certification. And its time that we expeted our IT departments to get ahead of the innovation curve instead of dragging it down.

Says who? Not hoteliers. According to a new study, satisfaction across the hospitality industry is rising, but sales aren’t. That’s because customer loyalty is sliding.

How can satisfaction be up and loyalty down? Because the pickings are too good. Hotels have been promoting low-price deals. Instead of choosing their favorite hotel, consumers know they can always search for something cheaper. So yes, they’re satisfied. At those prices, who can complain? The study’s author calls this “Price-induced satisfaction.”

Hoteliers have found a way to increase satisfaction while deep-sixing loyalty. Nice work, guys.

What’s really going on? Well, customers are getting more value these days. But you can increase value two ways: offer more for the same money, or charge less for the same product.

Charging less for equivalent products creates tangible, monetary value. But creating delightful experiences defines intangible value – and that’s where loyalty lies. The intangibles – a hotel’s reliability, friendliness, efficiency, the extra effort they put in to know you personally – these are what spur loyalty. They give customers a sense of belonging. When people feel they belong to something, you can deepen the relationship. When people feel they’ve made a great bargain, that’s all they get.

In sum: manipulating your tangible value can undermine your intangible value. You’re commoditizing your customer relationship – essentially, you’re buying customers.

Creating intangible value is harder than creating tangible value. You need to understand in what areas your strengths lie, and excel in those. It can be a long, hard road.

But it has rewards. People are not only loyal to products with intangible value; they pay a premium for them.

Customer Experience Crossroads has been exploring the idea of customer relationships lately:

…most relationship marketing strategies are hollow at the core, and are really a pretty label for direct marketing tactics. Which is fine, but don’t call it a relationship.

Exactly. One relationship that’s not hollow, if you can achieve it, is that of trusted advisor. This is not a brokered relationship – exchange is not the point. When you are a trusted advisor, you’re giving your prospects and customers, without any immediate recompense, information that helps them do their job.

If you’re advising via media such as white papers, your content should be of value to your audience. That sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many companies just throw any old stuff that’s lying around onto their site and call it a “resource center.” What your customers want is content conceived from their perspective, that will make them smarter and more capable.

It won’t work if your intention isn’t the welfare of your prospects. After all, you can probably smell a phony a mile away; do you think your prospects can’t? If you promise 5 Ways to Improve your Bottom Line and you give them five product descriptions, you’re a phony. Pure and simple.

If you put out resources that you feel are truly helpful, you’re on your way to building a relationship that will benefit both of you.

Belonging is in our DNA. The instinct to congeal into tribes and villages is powerful. But it’s not unconquerable: post-war American society did a great job quashing it. For generations we were told that happiness equals stuff rather than happiness equals belonging. We moved to suburbs where we could set ourselves apart, with lots of room for our possessions. It didn’t really work out.

Now belonging is back. Open source aligns programmers and users in a shared purpose. The Internet and social media allow disparate people to form communities despite boundaries that would have kept them in different universes a couple of decades ago. People share information, opinions, and ideas. And sharing is the basis of open innovation, and the basis of community.

What’s the implication? How can we build communities in ways that help us build our business?

We need to realize that the old marketing model, by which I try to persuade you to think the way I want you to think, is on the wane. In the new model, we empower and share. We have knowledge, and we want to share it, to make you smarter and more able to do your job.

When we market, we need to be conscious of the community we’re creating. When you share knowledge and empower people, you build trust. And trust is the basis of community – and business success.

…effective email marketing is based on relationships. These relationships hinge on expectations, promises, and trust.

In truth, third party email lists are a piece of the puzzle, and they’re sometimes appropriate. But the core of marketing is establishing trusted relationships. Which is why, most of the time, you’re better off investing in your own database.

When you do use a third party list, the hardest nut to crack is profiling. A lot of marketers profile based on description (“he’s an engineer, works for a 8 billion dollar company”). Instead, you need to profile their persona – find out the problem they want to solve. Knowing their company’s annual revenue won’t get you closer to a sale.

With the right persona, you can gradually increase the relevance of your communications to the people on the third party lists, until they begin to trust you.

Until then, they’re just another name on a list.

It’s your company, after all. You know the product its features. Why is putting it all into a sentence that will make people want to pick up the phone so flippin’ hard?

In our work with B2B companies we delve deeply into our clients’ value propositions. Usually we’re given a list of features and benefits to start with. Over the years we’ve come to understand that features and benefits are not in themselves compelling. In fact, getting to the VP from the features can be an excruciating process – it’s like doing dental work from the back of the head instead of the mouth.

So what do you need? You need a promise.

If you really look at things with your customer’s eyes, the first thing you see is that they’re under pressure. That pressure creates pain, and the pain is tied in with the feeling that they’ve lost control.

Let me repeat: ultimately, pain in business comes from a feeling of being out of control.

Your task, then, is to relieve that feeling of being out of control. It’s not giving them more of this, a better that, or faster something else. It’s removing this horrible, scary feeling of not being in control.

Perhaps they’re losing control of their sales results, their customer satisfaction, their employee morale, their reputation, or a hundred other things. Your job is to promise to give them control.

So what’s the value proposition? It’s your way of articulating how you will relieve their pain.

So don’t start with product features. Start with your audience. What’s pressing on them? Who’s beating them up? Your value proposition beings with, “Would it relieve that pressure if you had a way to [insert what your nifty product does here]?”

Give your customer a reason to think you can help them get back in control, and your phone will ring.

Perhaps it’s been there so long, it’s become part of the landscape. Or maybe passersby figure it’s someone else’s responsibility to remove it. Whatever the case, the result is the same: a 37 foot eyesore remains on an otherwise pristine beach month after month.

I see this problem when I help companies create a culture of listening. Some people prefer not to listen to customers, because then they’ve got to solve the problems they discover.

That’s the dilemma – listening means responsibility. Sure, listening can be empowering – it’s how companies discover a shared purpose – but it also defines a shared responsibility to do something.

Again and again I encounter executives who really don’t want to know which department is really letting them down, or where the kinks are in their acquisition process. That’s because they’re worried that they’ll be stuck getting the boat off the beach.

So they avoid the shared responsibility. And the boat just sits there.

It’s too bad. Because the reality is, once you’ve defined shared responsibility, you’ve also defined the beginning of a solution: a group of people that can share ideas and make the work of problem solving lighter.

Coffee has two roles in innovation. The obvious one is in keeping people awake so they can think of new ideas. The mathematician Alfréd Rényi called a mathematician a “device for turning coffee into theorems.”

But it also has a historical role. By the late 17th Century coffee had taken hold of Europe, and with it came the coffee house: a place where people of different backgrounds get together and talk, argue, exchange ideas, and pass the sugar. When Hobbes, Voltaire, Madison, Paley broke the intellectual ice with their startling new ideas, coffee houses were the perfect place to spread and refine them. The British called coffee houses “penny universities,” since you could rub shoulders with prominent people for the price of a nonfat caramel macchiato.

I’m not sure what Nietzsche’s drink was, but he proposed that truth was relative – what is true depends on a person’s perspective. Different people bring different perspectives. What the coffee house did was bring those perspectives together.

The power of open source is that it brings people with different perspectives together. Sure, Eric Raymond said that with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. But it’s not the numbers, it’s the perspective – a million identical eyeballs won’t make a dent in a problem – they need to contribute from their own context.

The moral – when you’re innovating, bring in not just more people but ones with different perspectives. And don’t forget the coffee.

If we can lower the barriers to farming, building, manufacturing, then we can unleash massive amounts of human potential that’s not only in the developing world.

When you start creating open business models, you increase vastly the potential for addressing problems – including pressing ones like feeding our planet.