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Amitava Chattopadhyay


Amitava Chattopadhyay
Emerging Market Multinationals - Amitava Chattopadhyay


Customer Service

When building a brand it’s the experience that matters

Experience matters. We live in an experience age and brands can no longer build strong positions by providing clear functional benefits. In research I undertook  with a former colleague, Professor Peter Darke at York University, and then student and now professor at Queens University, Laurence Ashworth, we showed that exposing consumers to irrelevant experiential cues, e.g., asking consumers to listen to music genres they liked versus disliked on a given portable CD player influenced their choice of portable CD players. Consumers chose CD players that were objectively inferior on functional benefits like battery life and weight, two important characteristics of portable CD players, when they listened to disliked music genres on them, even though the music experience was irrelevant to choice. Consumers would, after all, never listen to a disliked genre of music on the CD player once they took it home!

When Persistence Backfires

Pushy customer service representatives trying to drastically alter the decisions of consumers can end up being a costly headache.

When Ryan Block, a product manager at AOL, tried to cancel his personal Comcast internet service, he hadn’t banked on a 20-minute verbal wrestling match with a customer service rep hell-bent on retaining him.

Refusing to accept his request to disconnect, the rep repeatedly asked, “Help me understand why you don’t want faster internet,” insisting that “I’m trying to help you. You’re not letting me help you.” Getting tired of the uphill struggle, Block recorded the final eight minutes of the call and shared the audio file with his 83,000 Twitter followers. The audio file went viral, being played 4 million times in the next two days.


Recent Tweets



Sat, 14 Dec @ 01:08 am

Completely moronic request by a moron who has been given power by still another moron who was elrcted by??? "Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine"

Thu, 21 Nov @ 01:13 am

Uh Oh! Will #PMMODI throw #GAUTAMADANI under the bus? US too important to mess with. "Gautam Adani charged in US over alleged $250mn bribery scheme" via @FT

Fri, 18 Oct @ 03:39 am

Hello #Modi, what now? Not so easy when US gets into the game! "U.S. Charges Indian Official in New York Assassination Plot"

Sun, 22 Sep @ 04:05 pm

Brought down a peg or two, ey, #ElonMusk? "Elon Musk complies with Brazilian court’s legal demands for X" via @FT

Wed, 18 Sep @ 02:39 am

Two of a kind. Sadly, no surprise. "Live news: Donald Trump says he will meet India’s Narendra Modi next week" via @FT

Sat, 14 Sep @ 08:14 pm

#SkyTeamLounge at Vancouver. The sheer incompetence of screening this morning left me flabbergasted! 10 minutes of fiddling with each passenger's boarding card to check them in. Seriously, this is 2024! Should be smooth and automated. Given long queue, we never made it!


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